by Rem Koolhaas
The tendency is toward related communities in the city—communities whose activities are confined within certain areas whose traffic does not need to travel distant streets to collect supplies and orders. It seems to me that the salvation of New York depends on the wider application of this principle.
“Every businessman in the city must have realized what an advantage it would be to live in the Building where his office is located. It is toward this ideal that real estate firms and architects should work….
“Whole industries should be united into interdependent developments with clubs, hotels, stores, apartments and even theaters. Such an arrangement would make possible great economies in time as well as diminish wear and tear on human nerves. Put the worker in a unified scheme and he need hardly put his feet on the sidewalk during the entire day….”
In Hood’s City under one Roof, all the movement that contributes to congestion—horizontally across the surface of the earth—is replaced by vertical movement inside buildings, where it causes decongestion.
Raymond Hood, “A City under a Single Roof,” model in typical midtown context (smoke added), "… founded on the principle that concentration in a metropolitan area…is a desirable condition…The Unit Building, covering three blocks of ground space, will house a whole industry and its auxiliary businesses. Only elevator shafts and stairways reach the street level. The first ten floors house stores, theaters and clubs. Above them is the industry to which the Building is devoted, Workers live on the upper floors….” Hood’s second theoretical proposal abandons the formula of the City of Towers in favor of much larger metropolitan structures that exceed the limitations of a single block and that—through their colossal size—absorb and interiorize all traffic—and thus congestion—that smaller single structures such as Hood’s Towers would generate between them.
MOUNTAINS
That same year, Hood develops his thesis of the City within a City further. In his project “Manhattan 1950”15—even more emphatic about the inviolate character of the Grid as sine qua non of Manhattan he proposes a regular, reasonable implantation of the new scale on chosen locations within the Grid. A total of 38 Mountains are positioned on the intersections of alternate avenues and the wider streets of the Grid, roughly every tenth street.
The bulk of each Mountain exceeds the size of a single block, but neither Mountain nor Grid is compromised: the Grid simply cuts through the Mountain to create a solid/void configuration. Four peaks face each other across the intersection and gradually terrace down toward the perimeter where, like the 100-story building, they connect with the remaining traces of the older urban landscape.
Secondary tentacles develop along the island: suspension bridges overloaded with apartments—streets that have become buildings. Hood’s bridges are like the drawbridges surrounding a fortress. They mark Manhattan’s gates.
The “Manhattan 1950” project proposes a specific, limited number of Mountains. That in itself is proof that a new phase of Manhattanism has begun: a knowable Manhattan.
“Manhattan 1950,” collage. “Island throws out tentacles…. Bird’s-eye view of the Manhattan of 1950 with its ranges of Skyscrapers over transportation lines and the mountain peaks of industry over each entrance. The great bridges empty into business centers….” Hood’s third “theory”—for a definitive Manhattan—is a variation on the “City under a Single Roof” theme, a proposal to break through the Congestion Barrier by the careful implantation of the new mega-scale of autonomous, man-made universes on the existing city. By this time, Hood’s success in blurring the distinction between pragmatism and idealism had his contemporaries utterly confounded. How could an allegedly straightforward accommodation of business interests—the simple extrapolation of implacable tendencies—generate such artistic images? “These visions place their emphasis upon the increasing concentration occurring in Manhattan. To the extent that they apparently follow the characteristic growth of the city they may be considered practical rather than visionary. Only in greatness of scale and boldness in employment of bridges may they be judged skeptically. Their implied acquiescence, however, to the principle of Congestion in city growth detracts considerably from their value as Utopian schemes….” (Creative Arts.)
BARRIER
The paradoxical intention to solve congestion by creating more congestion suggests the theoretical assumption that there exists a “congestion barrier” By aiming for a new order of the colossal, one would break through this barrier and suddenly emerge in a completely serene and silent world, where all the hysterical and nerve-wracking activity that used to occur outside, in the subways, etc., would now be completely absorbed within the buildings themselves. Congestion has been removed from the streets and is now swallowed by the architecture. This City is permanent; there is no reason that the buildings should ever be replaced. The eerie calm of their exteriors is ensured through the Great Lobotomy. But inside, where the Vertical Schism accommodates all possible change, life is in a continuous state of frenzy. Manhattan is now a quiet metropolitan plain marked by the self-contained universes of the Mountains, the concept of the Real definitively left behind, superseded.
The gates define a hermetic Manhattan, a Manhattan with no external escape, a Manhattan with only interior pleasures.
After the Manhattan of Change, a Manhattan of Permanence.
These Mountains are, finally, the realization of the 1916 Zoning Law: the Mega-Village, the definitive Manhattan on the other side of the congestion barrier.
All the Rockefeller Centers
Americans are the Materialists of the abstract.
—Gertrude Stein
PARADOX
At the heart of Rockefeller Center—the first installment of that final, definitive Manhattan—is a double paradox that only Manhattanism could transcend:
The Center must combine the maximum of congestion with the maximum of light and space,” and
All planning…should be based upon ‘a commercial center as beautiful as possible consistent with a maximum income that should be developed.’”16
The program of Rockefeller Center is to reconcile these incompatibles. An unprecedented coalition of talents works on this enterprise, unusual in both numbers and composition. As Raymond Hood describes it “It would be impossible to estimate the number of official minds that have engaged in untangling the complexities of the problem; and certainly the number of unofficial minds that have pondered over it is even a more meaningless guess. Architects, builders, engineers, real estate experts, financiers, lawyers—all have contributed something from their experience and even from their imagination.”17
Rockefeller Center is a masterpiece without a genius.
Since no single creative mind is responsible for its definitive form, the conception, birth and reality of Rockefeller Center have been interpreted—in the traditional measuring system of architectural judgment—as an elaborate compromise, an example of “architecture by committee.”
But Manhattan’s architecture cannot be measured with conventional instruments; they give absurd readings: to see Rockefeller Center as a compromise is to be blind.
The essence and strength of Manhattan is that all its architecture is “by committee” and that the committee is Manhattan’s inhabitants themselves.
Scenes from the campaign of specification: “Corbett’s Move,” or “Design by Committee.” Associated Architects and developers playing with miniature Centers. “Standing: J. O. Brown, Webster Todd, Henry Hofmeister, Hugh S. Robertson. Seated: Harvey Wiley Corbett, Raymond Hood, John R. Todd, Andrew Reinhard, Dr. J. M. Todd.”
SEED
The seed of Rockefeller Center is a search, begun in 1926, for new accommodation for the Metropolitan Opera.
In an architectural odyssey, the theoretical container of the new Opera wanders across the Grid in a quest for an appropriate location.
Its architect-
to-be, Benjamin Wistar Morris, is subjected to a fundamental Manhattan paradox: it has become literally impossible to be conventional in the Manhattan of the late twenties, even if determined to be so: Morris’ Opera can only exist on its own, as a dignified object, in the most undesirable areas of the Grid. At better locations, the ground becomes so expensive that additional commercial functions are needed to make the enterprise financially feasible.
The better the site, the more the theoretical Opera is in danger of being overwhelmed—physically and symbolically—by these commercial superimpositions, to a point where the original concept collapses under their weight.
The Opera’s trajectory is from a site on 57th Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues, where it can exist on its own in a slum, to a location on Columbus Circle where it is already incorporated into a Skyscraper. Finally, sometime in 1928, Morris discovers a three-block site, owned by Columbia University, between Fifth and Sixth avenues and between 48th and 52nd streets.
There he designs a final scheme, stubborn in his Beaux-Arts determination to make the Opera a freestanding symbolic object at the end of a symmetrical vista. The center of his site is now a plaza where he locates the cube of the Opera. A ceremonial approach flanked by two Skyscrapers leads to it from Fifth Avenue. Opera and plaza are surrounded by a ten-story wall of deep loft space; on Sixth Avenue two more Skyscrapers—a hotel and an apartment building—flank the Opera.
Benjamin Wistar Morris, proposal for Metropolitan Square, 1928, on site of present Rockefeller Center. From Fifth Avenue a central axis leads to plaza in front of the Metropolitan Opera. 49th and 50th streets continue through the twofrontal Towers. The dilemma of cultural facility vs. fund-raising commercial structures is resolved by shaping the offices into the protective walls of a “forbidden city” and using the four Skyscrapers as monumental totems that define a bastion of high culture. Apart from the central plaza, many other features that recur in later schemes by other architects are already present here: an intimation of roof gardens, and bridges across 49th and 50th streets that connect a network of elevated arcades and walkways on the second-floor level, in the manner of Corbett’s so-called anti-congestion proposals.
RIVET
When this scheme is officially unveiled at the Metropolitan Club, whose members have sponsored its design, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., begins to take an interest.
The Opera does not have the means to construct its own new headquarters, let alone finance the surrounding mountain range of what is to be the largest building operation ever conceived in Manhattan. Rockefeller offers to take responsibility for the further planning and actual execution of the entire operation.
Feeling unequipped, as a nonexpert, to lead such a colossal real-estate operation, Rockefeller delegates the logistical responsibilities to a friend, John R. Todd, a businessman, contractor and real-estate developer.
On December 6, 1928, the Metropolitan Square Corporation is founded as the vehicle for the enterprise.
Rockefeller himself remains responsible for preserving the idealistic dimensions of the project.
He is obsessed with the process of building. “I suspect he always had a suppressed desire to drive a rivet,”18 is how Nelson Rockefeller diagnoses his father’s condition.
Through the late twenties, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., has been chairman of the building committee of Riverside Church—emphatic graft of the spiritual onto the Grid to counter the commercial frenzy everywhere else—and involved himself in all its architectural details.
Simultaneously with Rockefeller Center, he is preparing the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg; one enterprise is the fabrication of a past, the other—in a collapsing economy—the restoration of a future.
During the design of the Center, Rockefeller spends years “living knee deep in blueprints”19 in his Gothic office (later transplanted in its entirety to the higher regions of the RCA). He always carries a four-foot rule with him, to check the smallest details of the emerging project, occasionally insisting on the addition of spiritual details such as the Gothic decoration at the top of the RCA slab (a suggestion accepted by the architects because they know that altitude alone will make it invisible).
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., measuring plans of the future RCA Building with his four-foot rule. Office interior, originally bought in Spain, was reconstructed first in Rockefeller’s private offices, then dismantled again to be resurrected on the 56th floor of the RCA Building.
CRATER
Todd has his own architects, Reinhard and Hofmeister, both young and inexperienced.
With them, he scrutinizes Morris’ proposal in light of the paradox of maximum congestion combined with maximum beauty. The weakness of Morris’ scheme is its avoidance of the maximum zoning envelope—which by now is both financial necessity and irresistible architectural model. Compared to the Ferriss-Hood Mountain—the configuration of the definitive
Manhattan—Morris’ project, with the plaza’s emptiness as its center, is like the crater of an extinguished volcano.
In a gesture of commercial and metaphoric repair, Todd and his architects replace the crater with the peak of an office building.
This correction defines and fixes the primordial Rockefeller Center; all later versions are variations of the same architectural motif: a super-tower at the center, four smaller towers on the corners of the site. The shrunken remnants of Morris’ plaza survive only insofar as they facilitate further planning.
After the formulation of the fundamental diagram, Todd invites Hood, Corbett and Harrison—more experienced than his own architects—to become consultants.
Diagram of maximum allowable bulk on three-block Radio City site according to 1916 Zoning Law. Morris’ project sacrifices the volume of the middle block in favor of the Beaux-Arts dignity of his Opera.
CRASH
In 1929 the Great Crash shatters the assumptions on which the Center is based: from a financially reasonable enterprise it becomes commercially irrational. But this sudden suspension of financial gravity forces the committee to be, if anything, less commercial and more idealistic.
The original impetus—construction of a new Metropolitan Opera—becomes more and more implausible, while the demand for the type of office space the scheme provides also evaporates. Yet Rockefeller has signed a lease that stipulates payment of $3.3 million a year to Columbia University.
What is left after the collapse of all predictions—and of the structures that make prediction of any kind possible—is only the Center’s zoning envelope, a colossal volume that now somehow has to be made desirable for new forms of human occupancy through the originality of the architects and builders.
There is a metaphor—Ferriss’ Mountain.
There is a series of strategies—the Great Lobotomy, the Vertical Schism, real-estate calculations that have been geared, since the twenties, to prove the impossible—and there is a construction industry specialized in building it.
Finally, there is the doctrine of Manhattanism—the creation of congestion on all possible levels.
Diagram by architect Reinhard & Hofmeister for developer Todd, correcting Morris’ mistake by adding major central tower to exploit fully commercial potential of allowable bulk. Closeness of this diagram to Center as built is remarkable, but that does not make Reinhard & Hofmeister the “designer” of Rockefeller Center. These unspecified outlines correspond rather to Ferriss’ “shape that the law puts in the architect’s hands.” In the specification of this envelope—its “conquest” by architectural and programmatic detail—lies the genius of Rockefeller Center.
FACTS
Todd is committed to a tradition of relentless pragmatism and financial cold-bloodedness. But because of the financial uncertainties of the enterprise, what should have been the ultimate pragmatic operation unfolds in a complete shortage of facts. In the uncertain climate after the Crash, there simply are
no demands, no empirical necessities to be met—in short, no facts that could compromise the purity of the conception. The financial crisis guarantees the Center’s theoretical integrity.
The committee—stacked with alleged philistines—has no choice but the Ideal.
Intended as empirical, their specifications merely bring into focus the outlines of the archetype.
TEST
For Hood, Rockefeller Center is a test of the doctrine, the strategies to establish it and the individuals committed to it.
“I have, and I suppose every architect has, done things of which I was not entirely certain. On a single building operation, something may be risked for the sake of experimentation, but on a two hundred fifty million development, and one which may set a precedent for many in the future, mistakes can be so costly that they become catastrophes. It is needless to say that every man associated with Rockefeller Center knows that he is risking his professional reputation, his professional future on the success of Rockefeller City.”20 What all the men on the committee have in common is their involvement in the previous unconscious stages of Manhattan; in different degrees, they are responsible for developing Manhattan’s already existing architecture. Now they have to carve the final Manhattan archetype from the invisible rock of its zoning envelope in a campaign of specification: each invisible fragment will have to be made concrete in terms of activity, form, materials, servicing, structure, decoration, symbolism, finance.