Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan

by Rem Koolhaas

  PROJECT #2

  The 0 level of the present Rockefeller Center, dominated by the RCA lobby and Radio City Music Hall, is a drastically reduced version of much more daring alternatives that were projected and even almost built. When plans for the new Metropolitan Opera are discarded, the Associated Architects continue to consider theaters. They design versions of a fantastic ground floor entirely occupied by more and more theaters: a three-block ocean of red velvet chairs, acres of stage and backstage, square miles of projection screens—a field for performance where seven or eight spectacles can unfold at the same time, however contradictory their messages may be.

  An enormous suspended lobby—three blocks wide—bridging 49th and 50th streets will connect all these theaters, reinforcing the simultaneity of clashing performances. This metropolitan lounge will turn the separate audiences into a single fantasy-consuming body, a temporarily hypnotized community.

  The antecedents of this theatrical carpet are Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland. It is exactly within the megalomaniac ambition of the definitive Manhattan to want to provide this kind of escape—a metropolitan resort—within its territory.

  In the process of realization, the size of the carpet is reduced; Radio City. Music Hall is its last bastion, a measure of its ambition.

  From the early thirties, a series of postcards recorded each step in Radio City’s design—almost before it occurred. These images reflect an unbearable suspense on the part of the metropolitan public about its final appearance—a collective impatience for these speculative shapes to become tangible. In Manhattan, postcards acted as a populist semaphore about architecture, a medium that nourished Ferriss’ “populace warmly appreciating and applauding” the architects of the “New Athens.”

  “Phantom” scheme, imagined entirely by postcard publisher.

  First “official Radio City” presented to the public.

  Official perspective from Fifth Avenue with “hanging gardens” joined by Venetian bridges.

  Bird’s-eye view of definitive scheme, based on John Wenrich rendering.

  PROJECT #3

  The third project of Rockefeller Center is the ten-story extrusion of the site in the early Skyscraper tradition of sheer multiplication of surface. It is a volume unpenetrated by daylight, artificially lit and ventilated and filled with public and semipublic spaces.

  This entire artificial domain is planned for nonexistent clients in anticipation of straightforward applications of the Great Lobotomy; it finds its perfect occupant when the Radio Corporation of America and its subsidiary NBC sign up as tenants of the Center. RCA takes the slab, NBC the block.

  “The National Broadcasting Company will occupy…twenty-six broadcasting studios in this building… supplemented by six audition rooms. One studio, the largest in the world, will be more than three stories high…. All the studios will be electrically shielded and provided with suitable lighting facilities for Television. Many of them will have observation galleries for visitors.

  “Four studios grouped around a central control room will be used for complicated dramatic productions. The actors will be in one studio, the orchestra in a second, crowd scenes will be staged in a third and the fourth will be used for sound effects. This plan for grouping several studios around a central control room is admirably adaptable, also, to the presentation of television programs.”24

  In anticipation of the imminent application of TV technology, NBC conceives of the entire block (insofar as it is not punctured by RCA’s columns) as a single electronic arena that can transmit itself via airwaves into the home of every citizen of the world—the nerve center of an electronic community that would congregate at Rockefeller Center without actually being there. Rockefeller Center is the first architecture that can be broadcast.

  This part of the Center is an anti–Dream Factory; radio and TV, the new instruments of pervasive culture, will simply broadcast life, “realism,” as it is organized at the NBC studios.

  By absorbing radio and TV, Rockefeller Center adds to its levels of congestion electronics—the very medium that denies the need for congestion as condition for desirable human interaction.

  Project #4: “hanging gardens on the roof…landscaped roofs will tower above the area formerly devoted to the Elgin Botanical Gardens,” plan (John Wenrich, rendering). Bridges connect the parks on each of the three blocks; public and entertainment facilities are scattered through the parks. Pale areas are high-rise towers; orange squares within them, elevators. The two Skyscrapers nearest Fifth Avenue were supposed to bridge the private street, forming porches to Rockefeller Plaza. Babylonian “hanging gardens” connected by Manhattan’s last “Venetian” bridges: a triumph of mixed metaphor.

  PROJECT #4

  The fourth project is the resuscitation of the original, virgin state of the site now occupied by the Center, on the roofs of the lower blocks. In 1801 Dr. Davis Hosack, a botanist, established the Elgin Botanic Garden, a scientific horticultural enclave with an experimental greenhouse. He filled the garden “with plants from all parts of the world, including 2,000 duplicate plants from the laboratorium of Linnaeus, renowned Swedish botanist….”

  Only 130 years later Hood convinces Todd—with one of his most seductive pragmatic fairy tales, about the higher rent that can be charged for the privileged windows that would look down on one of the Wonders of the World—finally to install the hanging gardens of a contemporary Babylon.

  Only the negligible surfaces of the Center’s high-rise elements—the RCA slab, RKO tower, International Building, etc.—subtract “from the landscaped roofs which will tower above the area formerly devoted to the Elgin Botanic Garden.”25 Under any other doctrine of ,urbanism, Rockefeller Center’s past would be suppressed and forgotten; under Manhattanism the past can coexist with the architectural permutations it has given rise to. The park extends over the three blocks. A greenhouse for scientific experimentation is a reminder of Hosack. The roofs are to be connected by Venetian bridges that create a continuous park with a marionette theater, a permanent sculpture exhibition, an open-air flower exhibit, music stands, restaurants, elaborate formal gardens, tea garden, etc.

  The garden is only a more advanced variation of the synthetic Arcadian Carpet of Central Park, nature “reinforced” to deal with the demands of the Culture of Congestion.

  Collage of spectral Radio City in midtown.

  PROJECT #5

  Project #5, the final project, is “a Garden City aloft.”26

  But the garden is a double image: two projects at the same time. It can be read as the roof of the lower blocks but also as the ground floor of the towers.

  During the design and building of Rockefeller Center, the impact of European Modernism on American architectural practice can no longer be ignored. But Hood and the Associated Architects are representatives of Manhattanism first, and Modernism second.

  Hood’s projects before. Rockefeller Center may be seen as a more or less erratic “conversion” from eclecticism toward Modernism; but his production can also be read as a consistent enterprise to salvage Manhattanism, to develop, clarify and refine it. In the face of the Modernist Blitzkrieg of the thirties, Hood always defends the hedonistic Urbanism of Congestion against the puritanical Urbanism of Good Intentions.

  In this light, the roof gardens of the Center are an attempt of the Manhattan sensibility to ingest the Modernist Radiant City of “happy” light, air and grass, by reducing it to one layer among many. In this way, the Center will be both metropolitan and antiurban.

  Implanted in the synthetic vegetal past of their airborne site, standing on the fabricated meadows of a New Babylon, amid the pink flamingos of the Japanese Garden and imported ruins donated by Mussolini, stand five towers, co-opted totems of the European avant-garde coexisting for the first and the last time with all the other “layers” their Modernism intends to destroy.


  The roof of Rockefeller Center is both a flashback and a flash-forward: ghost of the Elgin Garden and Ville Radieuse, masterstroke of architectural cannibalism.

  The Center is the apotheosis of the Vertical Schism: Rockefeller Center = Beaux-Arts + Dreamland + the electronic future + the Reconstructed

  Past + the European Future, “the maximum of congestion” combined with “the maximum of light and space,” “as beautiful as possible consistent with the maximum income that should be developed.”

  “General airview seen from above 47th Street looking NE over roof gardens and RCA Building complete with bridges over City Streets” (John Wenrich, rendering). The “restored” virgin territory of the Center as synthetic Arcadia on the roof. Foreground right: the “Botanical Conservatory,” retroactive homage to Hosack; waterfall leads to sculpture garden.

  FULFILLMENT

  Rockefeller Center is the fulfillment of the promise of Manhattan. All paradoxes have been resolved.

  From now on the Metropolis is perfect.

  “Beauty, utility, dignity and service are to be combined in the completed project. Rockefeller Center is not Greek, but it suggests the balance of Greek architecture. It is not Babylonian, but it retains the flavor of Babylon’s magnificence. It is not Roman, yet it has Rome’s enduring qualities of, mass and strength. Nor is it the Taj Mahal, which it resembles in mass-composition, though in it has been caught the spirit of the Taj—aloof, generous in space, quieting in its serenity.

  “The Taj Mahal lies in solitary grandeur on the shimmering bank of the Jumna River. Rockefeller Center will stand in the mid-stream rush of New York. The Taj is like an oasis in the jungle, its whiteness tense against the gloomy greenness of the forest. Rockefeller Center will be a beautiful entity in the swirling life of a great metropolis—its cool heights standing out against the agitated man-made skyline. And yet the two, far apart in site and surroundings, are akin in spirit.

  “The Taj, in tribute to pure beauty, was designed as a temple, a shrine. Rockefeller Center, conceived in the same spirit of aesthetic devotion, is designed to satisfy, in pattern and in service, the many-sided spirit of our civilization. By solving its own varied problems, by bringing beauty and business into closer companionship, it promises a significant contribution to the city planning of an unfolding future.”27

  Radio City Music Hall: The Fun Never Sets

  In Radio City Music Hall the fun never sets.

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  DREAM

  “I didn’t conceive of the idea, I dreamed it. I believe in creative dreams. The picture of Radio City Music Hall was complete and practically perfect in my mind before architects and artists put pen on the drawing paper….”28

  In the congestion of hyperbole that is Manhattan, it is relatively reasonable for Roxy, the animator of Radio City Music Hall, to claim a crypto-religious revelation as inspiration for his amazing theater.

  EXPERT

  Roxy—real name Samuel Lionel Rothafel of Stillwater, Minnesota—is the most brilliant showbiz expert in the hysterical New York of the twenties. After abandoning the ideal of the new Metropolitan Opera as cultural epicenter of his complex, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., buys Roxy away from Paramount and gives him carte blanche to create instead a “Showplace of the Nation” at the Center.

  NEW YORK—MOSCOW

  In this venture—“the greatest theatrical adventure the World has ever known”—Roxy cannot expect much enthusiasm from the Center’s Associated Architects, who want to be sober and modern; they even convince Roxy to join them on a study tour of Europe, where they want him to see with his own eyes the advances modern architecture has made in theater construction.

  Summer 1931: the consummate showman Roxy, two businessmen-architects, Harrison and Reinhard, and a delegation of technical experts make the transatlantic journey.

  The mission opposes Roxy, expert in the production of illusions in sufficient quantity and density to satisfy the metropolitan masses, to the European architects, puritanical enemies of the tradition of showbiz that Roxy embodies.

  Roxy is bored in France, Belgium, Germany and Holland; his architects even force him to take the train to Moscow so that he can inspect and experience firsthand the Constructivist clubs and theaters built there since the mid-twenties.

  ANNUNCIATION

  Somewhere in mid-ocean during his return to New York, a revelation strikes a melancholy Roxy. Staring at a sunset, he receives the “Annunciation” of his theater: it is to be an incarnation of this sunset. (Fortune magazine dates the moment of this architectural visitation much later, i.e., a week before the theater’s opening. In that case Roxy’s is merely a retroactive revelation—late, but no less valid.)29 Back in New York, Roxy’s pregnancy only needs to be substantiated by his architects and decorators.

  From the beginning, Roxy insists on the literalness of his metaphor. Within the rectangular section and plan of the Hall’s external envelope, the sunset theme is established through a series of consecutive plaster semicircles that diminish toward the stage to create a vaguely uterine hemisphere whose only exit is the stage itself.

  This exit is “masked by the beautiful contour curtain”30 made of a specially developed synthetic fabric whose reflectivity makes it an acceptable substitute for the sun. The “rays” from the curtain continue along the plaster arches, reaching around the entire auditorium. The arches are covered in gold to better reflect the purple of the setting sun and the glow of the red velvet which Roxy insists on for the chairs.

  The consequence of Roxy’s dream is that, while the effect of a sunset is successfully achieved when the lights of his auditorium are dimmed, the return of electricity in the intermissions and at the end of each performance corresponds to a sunrise.

  In other words, the 24-hour cycle of day and night is repeated several times during a single performance at Radio City Music Hall. Day and night are drastically reduced, time accelerated, experience intensified, life—potentially—doubled, tripled….

  CHILL

  Roxy’s understanding of Fantastic Technology inspires a further intensification of his metaphor: questioning the conventional use of the air-conditioning system—ventilation and cooling—he realizes that this would only add chill to the sunset.

  With the same maniacal logic that characterized his earlier visions, Roxy then considers adding hallucinogenic gases to the atmosphere of his theater, so that synthetic ecstasy can reinforce the fabricated sunset.

  A small dose of laughing gas would put the 6,200 visitors in a euphoric mood, hyper-receptive to the activity on the stage.

  His lawyers dissuade him, but for a short period Roxy actually injects ozone—the therapeutic 03 molecule with its “pungent refreshing odor” and “exhilarating influence”—into the air-conditioning system of his theater.

  Combining super-time with super-health, Roxy defines the definitive formula of the metropolitan resort with his slogan, “A visit to Radio City Music Hall is as good as a month in the Country.”31

  Revelers at the Metropolitan Resort facing synthetic sunset.

  MUTATIONS

  The perfection and metaphorical stringency of Roxy’s artificial paradise—the “ultimate countryside”—sets off a chain reaction of further, unforeseen cultural mutations.

  “In grandeur of conception, in glory of planning, in perfection of fulfillment nothing like Radio City has ever been dreamed,”32 claims its creator, with justice; but the container is so perfect that it ridicules its imperfect contents.

  On the night of the official opening of Radio City, the exhausted remnants of a stale and spent vaudeville tradition—a tradition that peaked 20 years earlier in Coney Island—fall flat into Roxy’s sparkling new apparatus.

  The old histrionics do not survive the test. People sitting 200 feet from the footlights cannot follow the grimaces on the comedians’ faces as they embark on their tired rou
tines; the size of the theater alone precludes reliance on conventional use of the human voice or even the human body; the gigantic stage—wide as a city block—denies the meaning of mise en scéne, where suggested vastness can always rely on actual intimacy. On this stage, “atmosphere” is atomized.

  Under these crisis conditions, “feelings” are mercilessly exposed as both unreal and human, or worse, human, therefore unreal.

  “Much of it,” writes a critic on the first night, “seemed sadly second rate stuff, out of place amid such triumphs of architecture and mechanics.”33 Light years separate the architecture of Roxy’s theater from the activity on its stage.

  Unintentionally, Radio City represents a more radical break with the past than any consciously revolutionary theater has managed so far.

  Control booth of the Metropolitan Resort: The great stage, which he watches constantly sometimes with a pair of binoculars), is a full city block away….”

  PARTICLES

  In the early thirties only Hollywood is producing the kind of scenarios that equal Roxy’s fantastic landscape in anti-authenticity.

  Hollywood has developed a new dramatic formula—isolated human particles floating weightlessly through a magnetic field of fabricated pleasure, occasionally colliding—that can match the artificiality of Radio City Music Hall and fill it with abstracted, formalized emotions of sufficient density. The production of the Dream Factory is nowhere more at home than in Roxy’s brainchild.