by Rem Koolhaas
New York is not white. New York is all round; New York is vivid red. “New York is a round pyramid!"
MONUMENT
Dalí’s Paranoid-Critical conquest of Manhattan is a model of economy, especially when, with one final gesture, he turns the whole city into a spectacle, performed for his sole pleasure.
“Each evening the skyscrapers of New York assume the anthropomorphic shapes of multiple gigantic Millet’s Angéluses… motionless, and ready to perform the sexual act and to devour one another….
It is the sanguinary desire that illuminates them and makes all the central heating and the central poetry circulate within their ferruginous bone structure….”
For a moment, his interpretation suspends all other functions of the city. It is there for him alone.
“New York: why, why did you erect my statue long ago, long before I was born, higher than another, more desperate than another?"24
ARRIVAL 2
Also in 1935-12 years pregnant with the Radiant City, glass slipper spurned by worldwide consensus—Le Corbusier sails for New York with the accumulated bitterness of an unwed mother, threatening, after the failure of all attempts to arrange an adoption, to lay the phantom foundling on the doorstep of its natural father and instigate a paternity suit. For him no reporters.
“‘Jacobs,’ said Le Corbusier [to the interpreter engaged for him by MoMA, sponsor of his crossing, in its campaign to impose real Modernism on the USA],‘ where are the photographers?' Jacobs…found that the press cameramen on board were busy taking pictures of other celebrities. He slipped a newspaperman five dollars and implored him to take a picture of Le Corbusier.‘ I’ve used up all my film,' said the photographer, returning the money. Being an obliging fellow, however, he snapped his empty camera at Le Corbusier who looked mollified….” PC activity records facts that do not exist. Le Corbusier exists but cannot be recorded. As if under a curse, Le Corbusier is as invisible in New York as Dalí’s bread.
“‘Jacobs,’ he said several times, as he riffled through the newspapers,…‘ where is the picture they took of me on the boat?"25
SHOCK 2
At a press conference in Rockefeller Center a few hours after his arrival, Le Corbusier stuns New York’s hard-boiled reporters with his Parisian diagnosis and remedy, which have survived the first confrontation with Manhattan intact.
“After a cursory inspection of the New Babylon, he gave a simple recipe for its improvement.
The trouble with New York is that its skyscrapers are too small. And there are too many of them.” Or, as New York’s tabloids headline in disbelief, he finds “CITY ALL RIGHT AS FAR AS IT GOES…but it is utterly lacking in order and harmony and the comforts of the spirit which must surround humanity. The skyscrapers are little needles all crowded together. They should be great obelisks, far apart, so that the city would have space and light and air and order….
“These are the things that my town of Happy Light will have!
“I believe within myself that the ideas I bring here and that I present under the phrase Radiant City will find in this country their natural ground….”26
“Le Corbusier Looks, Critically….” Shock waves of the architect’s arrival as recorded in New York’s press. “Too small?—Yes, Says Le Corbusier; Too Narrow for Free, Efficient Circulation….” (New York Times Magazine, November 3, 1935.)
INDIANS 2
But that natural ground has to be fertilized by more Paranoid-Critical tautology.
“To reconstruct American cities and especially Manhattan, it is first necessary to know a place where the reconstruction can take place. It is Manhattan, which is large enough to hold six million people….“27 Manhattan itself is now one of the last remaining areas of the globe not yet exposed to Le Corbusier’s Cartesian hard sell.
It is his last candidate.
But beyond this opportunistic urgency, there is a second, still more desperate motive: the real Manhattan confronts Le Corbusier—like the real America Columbus—with the fragility of his lifelong speculations. To secure the Paranoid-Critical reinforcements underlying his urbanism and prevent the collapse of his “system;' he is forced (in spite of his almost irrepressible admiration) to persist in his earlier casting of the American Skyscrapers as innocent, even childish natives and of his own horizontal Cartesian towers as the true settlers of the machine civilization.
Manhattan’s Skyscrapers are Le Corbusier’s Indians.
By substituting his anti-Manhattan for the real Manhattan, Le Corbusier would not only assure himself of an inexhaustible supply of work, but destroy in the process all remaining evidence of his Paranoid-Critical transformations—wipe out, once and for all, the traces of: his conceptual forgeries; he could finally become Manhattan’s inventor.
The intransigence of this double motivation prepares the ground for a reenactment—architectural this time—of the New World’s primordial tragedy, the massacre of the Indians. Le Corbusier’s urbanism unleashes “exterminating principles which, with constantly augmenting force, would never cease to act until the whole aboriginal race”—the Skyscrapers—“should be extirpated and their memory… be almost blotted out from under heaven.”
When Le Corbusier ominously condescends to his American audiences that “you are strong, we have reflected,”28 he warns them in effect that, once again, “North American barbarism” will “give place to European refinement.”
In his ongoing surgery to separate the Siamese twins, Manhattan/ Ville Radieuse, Le Corbusier is now ready for the final solution: to kill the firstborn.
So obsessed was Le Corbusier with the “exterminating principles” of his urbanism and its object, the massacre of the Indians/Skyscrapers, that even the Christmas cards he sends from New York show a grotesque Radiant City on Manhattan, with no traces left of any previous culture/architecture.
REDESIGN 2
Dalí’s “discovery” of an antimodern Manhattan has been strictly verbal, its conquest therefore complete. Without tampering with its physique, he has recast the Metropolis as an antifunctional accumulation of atavistic monuments engaged in a process of continuous poetic reproduction. Cerebral as this project is, it immediately takes its rightful place as one of the “layers” that constitute Manhattan. Le Corbusier too acts under the influence of Manhattan’s speculative delirium. “Night or day, at each step in New
York I find pretexts for reflection, for mental construction, for dreams of extraordinary, cheering tomorrows near at hand….”29 But his design for New York is literal, architectural and therefore more implausible than Dalí’s; the Grid—“perfect…in the age of the horse”—is to be scraped off the surface of the island and replaced by grass and a much wider network of elevated highways;
Central Park—“too large”—is to be shrunk, “its verdure distributed and multiplied throughout Manhattan”; the Skyscrapers—“too small”—are to be razed and superseded by about a hundred identical Cartesian settlers implanted in grass and framed by the new highways.
So redesigned, Manhattan will be fit for six million inhabitants; Le Corbusier “will restore an immense area of ground… pay for the ruined properties…give the city verdure and excellent circulation; all the ground in parks for pedestrians and cars up in the air, on elevated roads, a few roads (one way) permitting a speed of ninety miles an hour and going… simply from one skyscraper to another.”30 Le Corbusier’s “solution” drains Manhattan of its lifeblood, congestion.
“The age of the horse“ vs. “the age of the car.”
“A new efficient city on Manhattan: six million in habitants …”
Provisional timetable for the definitive Cartesian settlement.
EFFICIENCY 2
Sometimes a tourist returns from foreign lands unrecognizable. This has happened to the Skyscraper on its Paranoid-Critical transatlantic excursion.
It left as hed
onistic instrument of the Culture of Congestion; it returns from Europe brainwashed, instrument of an implacable Puritanism. Through a bizarre cross-fertilization of misunderstood rhetoric, American pragmatism and European idealism have exchanged ethos: the materialistic philistines of New York had invented and built an oneiric field devoted to the pursuit of fantasy, synthetic emotion and pleasure, its ultimate configuration both unpredictable and uncontrollable.
To the European humanist/artist this creation is only a chaos, an invitation to problem solving: Le Corbusier responds with a majestic flow of humanist non sequiturs that fails to disguise the sentimentality at the core of his vision of Modernity.
The European’s program for the true Machine Age is the efficiency of banality: “to be able to open your eyes on a patch of sky, to live near a tree, beside a lawn,” “to go simply from one skyscraper to another.” Everyday life will regain its eternal immutability amid the “essential joys” of sun, space and vegetation. To be born, to die, with an extended period of breathing in between: in spite of the optimism of the Machine Age, the Old World vision remains tragic.
Le Corbusier has patience. As for all paranoiacs, things are going his way. “Reality, that is the lesson of America.
“It gives your boldest speculation the certainty of imminent birth….”31
EXPOSURE
Meanwhile, throughout the thirties, Dalí commutes between Europe and Manhattan. The natural affinity between the Metropolis and Surrealism is translated into astronomical fame, astronomical prices, a Time cover story. But this popularity also leads to a proliferation of fake Dalínian gestures, images, poetry.
Ever since the non-event of the french bread, Dalí has pondered a visible Surrealist performance in NIU YORK to act as a “public demonstration of the difference between the true and the false Dalí manner” and, at the same time, to celebrate and impose his own poetic redesign of Manhattan.32 When Bonwit Teller invites him to dress a’ display window on Fifth Avenue, Dalí conceives a “manifesto of elementary surrealist poetry right out in the street” that “would inevitably arrest the anguished attention of passersby with stupor when the morrow, amid so much Surrealist decorativism, lifted the curtain on an authentic Dalínian vision….”
His theme is “Day and Night.”
In “Day” a manikin “marvelously covered with several years’ dust and cobwebs” steps into a “hairy bathtub lined with astrakhan…filled with water to the edge.”
For “Night” a second figure reclines on a bed “whose canopy was a buffalo head carrying a bloody pigeon in its mouth.” The black satin sheets are burnt and the “pillow on which the manikin rested her dreamy head was composed entirely of live coals….”
If Manhattan is an archipelago of Paranoid-Critical islands insulated by the neutralizing lagoon of the Grid, then to spill their hidden contents into the objective space of the street is a subversive action: exposure of the interior hothouse tips the balance between rational and irrational domains. Manhattanism acts in self-defense to restore the integrity of its formula: when Dalí returns—the morning after its midnight completion—to test the shock value of his manifesto in broad daylight, the fiery bed has been removed altogether, the naked manikins covered, the lasciviousness of the interior hysteria suppressed.
“Everything, but absolutely everything” has been changed by the store management so that the serenity of the Great Lobotomy is restored.
For once, Salvador Dalí turns into a European puritan to defend the rights of the artist.
From inside the store, he enters the window, attempts to lift and topple the bath. “Before I could raise one side it slipped right up against the window so that at the moment when in a supreme effort I finally succeeded in turning it over it crashed into the plate glass, shattering it into a thousand pieces.”
A choice: Dalí can retreat via the interior of the store or leap “through the window bristling with the stalactites and stalagmites of my anger.”
Retreat via the interior of Bonwit Teller or leap through the window?
He jumps. The escapee from the interior prison enters no-man’s-land. A violation of Manhattan’s formula.
As he walks back to his hotel, gaped at by a silent crowd, “an extremely polite plainclothesman delicately placed his hand on my shoulder and explained apologetically that he had to arrest me….”
A Paranoid-Critical act has been “booked” in Manhattan.
New York World’s Fair, 1939, bird’s-eye view with Manhattan skyline in background: the exiled interiors of Manhattan’s Skyscrapers.
BLOBS
Deep into the thirties, the Board of Design for the 1939 World’s Fair works on the top floor of the Empire State Building. The object of its considerations is not on but near Manhattan, in Flushing Meadows, Queens.
But no matter: “A set of telescopes on the roof of the drafting room brought the grounds into clear view, and one could check what one was drawing against actual site conditions….”33
The Fair itself is conceived as an anti-Manhattan: By way of contrast with the Skyscrapers of adjacent New York, Fair Buildings consist largely of windowless, one-story structures artificially illuminated and ventilated. The barren aspect of blank surfaces was overcome through the application of sculpture, murals and shadows cast by vines and trees…. ”34
The pavilions, molluscs without shells, look like the exiled interiors of Manhattan’s Skyscrapers, a collection of architectural jellyfish beached before they could reach their distant destination: the needles.
PLASTER
Among these jellyfish Dalí establishes his first architectural project, a plaster pavilion that contains the Dream of Venus. Unofficially, it is named “20,000 Legs Under the Sea.”
Dalí’s Dream of Venus at 1939 World’s Fair. “The outside of the building vaguely resembles an exaggerated shellfish and is ornamented with plaster females, spikes and other oddities. All this is most interesting and amusing….” (Life, March 17, 1939.)
Essentially, it is a basin inhabited by representatives of American womanhood—lean, athletic, strong, yet feminine and seductive.
Its exterior—a relentless assemblage of the Strange—only demonstrates Manhattanism’s wisdom in isolating the unspeakable behind the facade of the common.
In trading his claim on the whole of Manhattan through words for the building of a specific fragment of actual Dalínian architecture, Dalí risks going from the sublime to the ridiculous.
PERISPHERE
The central feature of the Fair is the theme exhibit—Trylon and Perisphere—conceived by Wallace Harrison. It is a stark reappearance of the two formal poles that have defined Manhattan’s architecture: Globe and Needle. Unconsciously, the exhibit marks the end of Manhattanism: after 50 years of relative engagement, the forms are now completely separated.
The Needle of the Trylon—a triangular pylon—is empty.
The Globe is the largest ever built in the history of mankind: its diameter is 200 feet, exactly the width of a Manhattan block.
The Perisphere is nothing but the pure archetype of Manhattan’s Skyscraper: a Globe tall enough to be a Tower. “Eighteen stories high, it is as broad as a city block, its interior more than twice the size of Radio City Music Hall….”
The Perisphere’s location at the Fair, in Flushing Meadows, should be regarded as provisional, or at least displaced. It should be rolled over to Manhattan to assume its definitive position.
Unlike the Globe Tower, the Perisphere is not subdivided into floors. Its interior is hollow and contains an elaborate model of the elusive City of the Machine Age: “Democracity.”
At its center stands a single 100-story Tower, implanted not in the Grid but in a meadow. It is flanked by rows of subordinate towers—all identical—and surrounded by a “perfectly integrated ‘garden city of tommorrow,’ not a dream city but a practical suggesti
on of how we should be living today, a city of light and air and green space as it would appear from 7,000 feet… .”35 The center of the city accommodates the arts, business administration, the higher schools of learning and the amusement and sports centers. The population lives in satellite towns connected with the center by efficient public transport.
“This is not a city of canyons and gasoline fumes, it is one of simple functional buildings—most of them low—all of them surrounded by green vegetation and clean air….”
Through intermediaries, Le Corbusier has won. The city in the first and last Globe Tower is the Radiant City. From his monitoring position in Paris, he proudly claims credit. “By the way, even American architects realize that the unguided Skyscraper is a nonsens.
“For those who see far, New York is no longer the city of the Future, but of the past.
“New York, with its random, unspaced towers without sufficient air, that New York will, from 1939 onward, enter the middle ages….”36
Revelation at interior of the Perisphere: Democracity, the Metropolis of the Machine Age. This city is the result of all the research by urbanists all over the world. It consists of a single 100-story skyscraper at its center that will accommodate all the services of the future city. Vast avenues will originate from this central building toward the gardens, parks and sporting fields…."(France-Soir, August 25, 1938.) After years of relentless Modernist propaganda, orchestrated by the -Museum of Modern Art, Democracity represents the collapse of Manhattanism, the exact moment when Manhattan’s architects surrender their own version of the Skyscraper as sublime instrument of controlled irrationality—and therewith their own vision of the Metropolis as headquarters of a Culture of Congestion—to trade it for a vision of Towers in a Park inspired mostly by Le Corbusier. Only the fact that the central Skyscraper has 100 floors betrays a lingering trace of Manhattanism.