by Rem Koolhaas
In this performance both the Manhattan Skyscraper and the jungle become unrecognizable: the Skyscraper turns into a Cartesian (= French = rational) abstraction, the jungle into a carpet of green vegetation that is supposed to hold the Cartesian Skyscrapers together.
Usually after such PC kidnappings of models from their natural contexts, the victims are forced to spend the rest of their lives in disguise. But the essence of New York’s Skyscrapers is that they already wear costumes. Before, European architects have tried to design superior costumes.
But Le Corbusier understands that the only way to make the Skyscraper unrecognizable is to undress it. (This form of forcible undress is of course also a well-known police tactic to prevent further misbehavior by a suspect.)
OVEREXPOSURE
The Cartesian Skyscraper is naked.
Top and base have been amputated from the original Manhattan model; the part in between is stripped of its “old-fashioned” stone cladding, dressed in glass and stretched to 220 meters.
It is exactly the rational Skyscraper that Manhattan’s official thinkers always pretended they wanted to realize, while in practice they steered as far away from it as possible. The make-believe of Manhattan’s architects—pragmatism, efficiency, rationality—has colonized the mind of a European.
“To say skyscraper is to say offices, that is businessmen and automobiles…”16
Le Corbusier’s Skyscraper means business only Its lack of a base
(no place for a Murray’s) and a top (no seductive claims of competing realities), the merciless overexposure to the sun implied by the thin cruciform of its plan, all preclude occupation by any of the forms of social intercourse that have begun to invade Manhattan, floor by floor. By stripping off the reassuring exterior architecture that allowed the ideological hysteria of the interior architecture to flourish, Le Corbusier even undoes the Great Lobotomy.
He introduces honesty on such a scale that it exists only at the price of total banality. (Some desirable social activity is allergic to daylight.) There is no place here for Manhattan’s Technology of the Fantastic. For Le Corbusier, use of technology as instrument and extension of the imagination equals abuse. True believer in the myth of technology from the distance of Europe, for him technology itself is fantastic. It has to remain virginal, can only be displayed in its purest form, a strictly totemic presence.
The glass walls of his Horizontal Skyscraper enclose a complete cultural void.
Presto! The Cartesian Rabbit; or, the Horizontal Skyscraper.
The Cartesian/Horizontal Skyscraper in all its splendor.
Section through the Cartesian Skyscraper: metro in the basement, surrounding park with elevated highways, 60 floors of offices and, at the top, “armored platform against aerial bombardments.” (The “best” modern architecture is that which is prepared for the “worst” catastrophe.)
NON-EVENT
Le Corbusier names the grouping of these Cartesian Skyscrapers implanted in their park—the remnants of the jungle—the Radiant City. If the Cartesian Skyscraper is the antipode of Manhattan’s primitive, infantile Towers, then the Radiant City is finally Le Corbusier’s anti-Manhattan.
No trace here of New York’s soul-destroying metropolitan wilderness. “You are under the shade of trees.
“Vast lawns spread all around you. The air is clean and pure; there is hardly any noise….
“What? You cannot see where the buildings are?
“Look through the charmingly diapered arabesques of branches out into the sky toward those widely spaced crystal towers that soar higher than any pinnacle on earth.
The secret formula of Le Corbusier’s Radian City: the “City of Panic [Manhattan] …in the jungle.”
“Those translucent prisms that seem to float in the air without anchorage to the ground, flashing in summer sunshine, softly gleaming under gray winter skies, magically glittering at nightfall, are huge blocks of offices….”17
In designing the Cartesian Skyscraper as universal accommodation for business, to the exclusion of those indefinable emotional services that have been built into the Ferrissian Mountain, Le Corbusier has been the credulous victim of the pragmatic fairy tales of Manhattan’s builders.
But his real intention in the Radiant City is even more destructive: to really solve the problems of congestion. Marooned in grass, his Cartesian convicts are lined up 400 meters apart (i.e., eight Manhattan blocks—about the distance between Hood’s super-peaks but with nothing in between). They are spaced out beyond any possible association.
Le Corbusier has correctly perceived that Manhattan has “reestablished the pedestrian, him alone.” The essence of Manhattan is exactly that it is an ultra-modern Mega-Village enlarged to the scale of a Metropolis, a collection of Super-"Houses” where traditional and mutant lifestyles are simultaneously provoked and sustained by the most fantastic infrastructure ever devised.
When he first strips, then isolates the Skyscrapers and finally connects them with a network of elevated highways so that automobiles
(= businessmen = modern) instead of pedestrians (medieval) can shuttle freely from tower to tower over a carpet of chlorophyll-producing agents, he solves the Problem but kills the Culture of Congestion.
He creates the urban non-event that New York’s own planners have always avoided (despite their lip service to it): Decongested Congestion.
Le Corbusier’s Radiant City as a pedestrian would see—or not see—it. “A Battle of Giants? No! The miracle of trees and parks reaffirms the human scale….”
Further tricks of a Paranoid-Critical magician. The Cartesian Rabbit multiplies itself to constitute the Radiant City: Le Corbusier’s anti-Manhattan unveiled.
AFTERBIRTH
Through the twenties, as Manhattan is “removing stone by stone the Alhambra, the Kremlin and the Louvre” to “build them anew on the banks of the Hudson,” Le Corbusier dismantles New York, smuggles it back to Europe, makes it unrecognizable and stores it for future reconstruction.
Both operations are pure PC processes—cities of forged fabric—but if Manhattan is a phantom pregnancy, the Radiant City is its afterbirth, a theoretical Metropolis in search of a location.
In 1925 the first attempt to graft it onto the face of the earth is made “in the name of the beauty and destiny of Paris.”18 The Plan Voisin is planned, it seems, according to the early Surrealist theorem “Le Cadavre Exquis”—adaptation of the child’s game in which a piece of paper is folded, the first participant draws a head and folds the paper, the second draws a body and folds, etc., so that a poetic hybrid is “released” from the subconscious.
As if Paris’ surface were folded, Le Corbusier draws a torso that deliberately ignores the further anatomy of the “exquisite corpse.”
The Voisin Plan imposed on Paris as if according to the Surrealist formula of “Le Cadavre Exquis,” whereby fragments are grafted onto an organism in deliberate ignorance of its further anatomy. “Since 1922 I have continued to work, in general and in detail, on the problem of Paris. Everything has been made public. The City Council has never contacted me. It called me ‘Barbarian’!…” Anti-Manhattan in the heart of Paris. “It is in the name of the beauty of Paris that you say ‘No!’” “It is in the name of the beauty and destiny of Paris that I insist ‘Yes!’”
Lower housing blocks meander around Cartesian Skyscrapers that are arranged on a plain in central Paris where all traces of history have been scraped away to be replaced by “jungle”: the so-called mobilization of the Ground, from which even the Louvre barely escapes.
In spite of Le Corbusier’s dedication to Paris’ future, this plan is clearly a pretext. The transplantation is intended to generate not a new Paris but a first anti-Manhattan.
“Our invention, from its beginnings, was directed against the purely formalist and romantic conceptions of t
he American Skyscraper….
“Against New York’s skyscraper we erect the Cartesian skyscraper, limpid, precise, elegantly shining in the sky of France….
“Against New York, turbulent clamor of the giant adolescent of the machine age—I counteract with horizontal skyscrapers. Paris, city of the straight line and the horizontal, will tame the vertical….”19
Manhattan will be destroyed in Paris.
TWINS
The Radiant City is intended as the apotheosis of an experiment in architectural alchemy—one element turned into another. But despite Le Corbusier’s frantic efforts to outdistance Manhattan, the only way to describe his new city—verbally and even visually—is in terms of its differences from Manhattan.
The only way his city can be understood is by comparison and juxtaposition of the “negative” of Manhattan and the “positive” of the Ville Radieuse.
The two are like Siamese twins that grow progressively together in spite of a surgeon’s desperate efforts to separate them.
New York/Ville Radieuse: “Opposites” that have become inseparable; illustration for the Radiant City. “The two theses face to face. New York is countered by the Cartesian City, harmonious and lyrical….”
Further steps in a campaign of denigration: Le Corbusier’s juxtaposition Paris—New York, or, birth of a Siamese Twin; illustration for the Radiant City. “Two spirits confront each other: the French tradition of the Notre Dame, the Voisin Plan (with its Horizontal Skyscrapers) and the American tradition (tumult, hair standing on end, first explosive stage of a new middle age).”
SLIPPER
The Parisian authorities do not take the Radiant proposal seriously. Their rejection forces Le Corbusier to become a Cartesian carpetbagger, peddling his horizontal glass Skyscraper like a furious prince dragging a colossal glass slipper on an Odyssey from Metropolis to Metropolis.
In the best traditions of paranoia—natural or self-induced—it is a worldwide journey.
“Last spring he pulled out a pad and drew a map of the world, shading the areas where he felt his books [i.e., his wares] would sell. The only unshaded part was a negligible strip of Africa.”20
Barcelona, Rome, Algiers, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, everywhere he offers his towers, offers the most chaotic cities the chance to be the opposite of the “pathetic paradox,”21 Manhattan.
Nobody wants even to try the slipper on.
That only reinforces his thesis.
“I am kicked out.
“Doors slam behind me.
“But deep inside me I know:
“I am right,
“I am right,
“I am right….”22
Illustration for the Radiant City: Buenos Aires, Argentina, last stopover for the Cartesian carpetbagger on his way to New York. “New York: pathetic paradox…Buenos Aires? destination of a New City!"
ARRIVAL 1
In 1935 the attraction of the New World becomes irresistible for Dalí. “Each image that came from America I would sniff, so to speak, with the voluptuousness with which one welcomes the first whiffs of the inaugural fragrances of a sensational meal of which one is about to partake.
“I want to go to America, I want to go to America….
“This was assuming the form of a childish caprice.”23
He sails for New York.
For shock effect on arrival, Dalí decides to realize—retroactively—a Surrealist project originally intended to upset Paris, the baking of “a fifteen-meter loaf of bread.”
The baker on board offers to bake a version 2 1/2 meters long (the maximum capacity of the ship’s oven) with “a wood armature inside it so that it would not break in two the moment it began to dry….” But when Dalí disembarks an “utterly disconcerting thing” happens: “Not one of the reporters [of a waiting group] asked me a single question about the loaf of bread which I held conspicuously during the whole interview either in my arm or resting on the ground as if it had been a large cane….”
The disconcerter disconcerted: Dalí’s first discovery is that in Manhattan Surrealism is invisible. His Reinforced Dough is just another false fact among the multitudes.
PC activity counts for its impact on a solid background of convention. Just as the success of Robin Hood’s activity depends on the continuous supply of rich people traversing his forest, so all plots to “discredit completely the world of reality” rely on a reality that is, or seems to be, on solid ground and even in good health.
If a 2 1/2-meter loaf of French bread becomes unnoticeable, it means that, in Manhattan, there is no such scale against which its intended shock waves can register.
SHOCK 1
Dalí cannot shock New York, but New York can shock Dalí.
On his first day in Manhattan he experiences three revelations that disclose to him the essential cultural mutations that make this Metropolis fundamentally different from any other.
1. On Park Avenue “fierce anti-modernism manifested itself in the most spectacular fashion, beginning with the very facade. A crew of workers armed with implements projecting black smoke that whistled like apocalyptic dragons was in the act of patining the outer walls of the building in order to‘ age’ this excessively new skyscraper by means of that blackish smoke characteristic of the old houses of Paris.
“In Paris, on the other hand, the modern architects a /a Le Corbusier were racking their brains to find new and flashy, utterly anti-Parisian materials, so as to imitate the supposed‘ modern sparkle’ of New York….”
2. Dalí enters the Skyscraper; a second revelation occurs as he ascends in an elevator. “I was surprised by the fact that instead of electricity it was lighted by a large candle. On the wall of the elevator there was a copy of a painting by El Greco hung from heavily ornamented Spanish red velvet strips—the velvet was authentic and probably of the fifteenth century….”
3. That same night Dalí has a dream involving “eroticism and lions. After I was fully awake, I was surprised by the persistence of the lions’ roars that I had just heard in my sleep. These roars were mingled with the cries of ducks and other animals more difficult to differentiate. This was followed by complete silence. This silence, broken only by roars and savage cries, was so unlike the din that I had expected that of an immense‘ modern and mechanical’ city—that I felt completely lost….” But the lions’ roar is real.
Directly under Dalí’s window are the lions of the Central Park Zoo, Paranoid-Critical “souvenir” of a “jungle” that never existed there. Three revisions and the European myth of Manhattan disintegrates.
REDESIGN 1
To acquire the right to invent his own New York, Le Corbusier has spent 15 years proving that Manhattan is not yet modern. Dalí invents his own New York on his first day in town: a Manhattan that does not even want to be modern.
“No, New York was not a modern city.
“For having been so at the beginning, before any other city, it now… already had a horror of this….”
He maps his discovery through association and metaphor, a Paranoid-Critical redesign: New York is a field where all histories, doctrines, ideologies, once carefully separated by space and time, appear simultaneously. The linearity of history is short-circuited to celebrate a final spasm of Western culture.
“New York, you are an Egypt! But the Egypt turned inside out…She erected pyramids of slavery to death, and you erect pyramids of democracy with the vertical organ pipes of your skyscrapers all meeting at the point of infinity of liberty!
“New York…resurrection of the Atlantic Dream, Atlantis of the subconscious. New York, the stark folly of whose historical wardrobes gnaws away at the earth around the foundations and swells the inverted cupolas of your thousand new religions.
“What Piranesi invented the ornamental rites of your Roxy Theatre? And what Gustave Moreau apoplectic with Prometheus l
ighted the venomous colors that, flutter at the summit of the Chrysler Building?"
EFFICIENCY 1
In his blind rage, Le Corbusier has stripped Manhattan’s towers, expecting to find the rational core of the true Machine Age. Dalí looks only at their surface, but it is just this superficial inspection that exposes, with a jolt, the thinness of Manhattan’s pragmatic dissimulations, its mimicry of philistinism, its ambivalent pursuit of efficiency.
New York’s only efficiency is its poetic efficiency.
“The poetry of New York is not serene esthetics; it is seething biology…. The poetry of New York is organ, organ, organ…organ of calves’ lungs, organ of Babel, organ of bad taste, organ of actuality; organ of virginal and history-less abyss….
“The poetry of New York is not that of a practical concrete building that scrapes the sky; the poetry of New York is that of a giant many-piped organ of red ivory—it does not scrape the sky, it resounds in it with the compass of the systole and diastole of the visceral canticle of elementary biology….”
Dalí prepares this Manhattanist poetry as truculent antidote to the puritanical “apologists of the aseptic beauty of functionalism” who have tried to impose New York “as an example of anti-artistic virginity….” They have all made a terrible mistake. “New York is not prismatic;