by Rem Koolhaas
Cutaway of Trylon and Perisphere, showing circulation and mechanical apparatus. “Entrance to the exhibit is through the lobby of the Trylon, from which enclosed escalators, one 96 feet long, the other 120, the longest moving staircases ever built ,in this country, carry the visitor to the two entrances in the side of the Perisphere…. There he steps onto one of two circular balconies, one above the other, set away from the walls of the Globe and revolving in opposite directions, seemingly unsupported in space…. Below lies Democracity… not a dream city but a practical suggestion of how we should be living today, a city of light and air and green space as it would appear from 7,000 feet…. During the daylight cycle, the voice of a commentator describes the physical plan of Democracity while a special symphony is synchronized with the entire show…. After two minutes of daylight the lights in the Perisphere slowly dim, stars appear in the dome above and the city’s lights go on. Night has fallen…. Far in the distance a chorus of a thousand voices is heard singing the Theme Song of the Fair. From ten equidistant points in the sky come groups of marching persons, farmers, miners, factory workers, educators—wave upon wave of men and women representing the various groups in modern society…. Starting as pinpoints, the figures attain a size of fifteen feet, a living mural in the sky…, Democracity may be in morning, mid-afternoon or night as the spectator steps upon the revolving balcony. By the time the six-minute cycle is completed and he steps off, the show will have come around again to the hour at which he entered….” (New York Herald Tribune, World’s Fair Section, April 30, 1939.)
DENOUEMENT
World War II postpones the denouement.
After the holocaust, the concept of a United Nations revives with a new urgency. America offers to finance its home base.
An international design committee is set up to advise Wallace Harrison, who is to build the new headquarters; Le Corbusier represents France.
Like a posse, a search party—it includes the Swiss—travels across the USA to find a suitable site. Starting as far away from New York as possible—in San Francisco—it gravitates slowly toward the East Coast. In September 1946 New York City formally invites the United Nations to make New York its permanent home.
Now sites in the New York area are considered: Jersey City, Westchester County, Flushing Meadows…. All this research is pretense: the real target is Manhattan itself, as it always has been. Like a vulture, Le Corbusier swoops down on his prey. He tears a piece of Manhattan off the map: the Site.
It is promptly donated by the Rockefellers.
For Le Corbusier this small strip of six blocks on the East River is as close as he will ever get to realizing his designs on Manhattan.
Follows a period that is traumatic for all parties involved.
Search that is no search: Le Corbusier investigating suitable sites for UN headquarters in Greater New York Metropolitan Region—the UN in Jersey City?
UN site torn off the map: Le Corbusier’s prey in his grasp.
Last critical intervention of Manhattan’s automatic pilot: Hugh Ferriss’ rendering of Le Corbusier’s proposal on East River site.
Each day the UN design committee meets in Rockefeller Center (its elevators are the only part Le Corbusier ever admits liking). Frantic now to make the UN the delayed beginning of a Radiant Manhattan, Le Corbusier monopolizes all discussions. Though he is officially only an adviser, it is soon apparent that he expects to become the UN’s sole architect on the strength of his urbanistic theories.
He does not know that in Manhattan theories are only diversionary tactics, mere decorative dressing for the essential founding metaphors. And Le Corbusier’s urbanism contains no metaphor, except that of the Anti-Manhattan, which is, in New York, unseductive.
In Le Corbusier’s UN, the office slab is placed exactly in the middle of a street. The auditorium, although lower, blocks a second street, one more reinforced-concrete Ark. The rest of the site is scraped clean like an old painting too drastically restored, all its layers of real or phantom architecture removed: the metropolitan surface replaced by a green Band-Aid of grass.
To Le Corbusier, this building is a medicine, bitter perhaps, but ultimately beneficial. “New York will not after all crush the UN in receiving it. On the contrary, the UN will bring to a head New York’s long expected crisis, through which New York will find the ways and means to resolve its urbanistic deadlock, thus effecting upon itself a startling metamorphosis, though in this case it is a providential one. Life has spoken….”37
That conclusion—it follows the true paranoiac like celestial inner music wherever he goes—is premature. Harrison, imperturbable in the face of the French torrent of articulation, is and remains in control of the UN project as architecture, not theory.
Le Corbusier is not invited to administer Manhattan its final medicine.
Before any design is finalized, he goes home, once more disgusted with the world’s ungratefulness—and perhaps also daunted by the “critical” difficulties posed by his vision.
“I just couldn’t imagine him detailing that curtain wall,” Wallace Harrison remembers, still anxious at the thought 30 years later.”38
City of Light, pavilion for Consolidated Edison at 1939 New York World’s Fair, interior (Wallace K. Harrison, architect). “Under the spell of the voice from the sky and the ever-changing pageant of color, light and sound, this miniature city, staged on a heroic scale, suddenly comes to life to give you a new picture of New York as it actually exists—not just a mass of lifeless masonry and steel—but a living, breathing city with a network of iron and copper arteries and veins under the surface to supply vital heat and energy—a city with electrical nerves to control its movements and transmit its thoughts….” Manhattanism concluded with a climax in cardboard.
INNOCENCE
The design of the UN marks the last significant reappearance of the Master of Darkness, Hugh Ferriss, who is called in to make quick renderings of the various alternatives proposed by the advisers. He is now more than ever a believer in Modern Architecture. But in spite of this conscious engagement, Ferriss’ art remains, subconsciously, critical. The dullness of Le Corbusier’s urbanism has never been more ruthlessly exposed than in the modest renderings of Manhattanism’s automatic pilot.
At the same time—like the healthy schizophrenic the Manhattan architect has to be—he desperately tries to imbue the new forms with romanticism and even mystery. His ultimate ambition is to absorb even modern urbanism in the Ferrissian Void.
He draws Le Corbusier’s project in the gloom of his perpetual American night as an enigmatic quantity of concrete, suspended in the air:
As nearly as I could understand things through the interpreter (I do not speak French), he insisted that buildings float….”39
Harrison is an admirer and friend of the Swiss architect. Like that of Ferriss, his attitude is ambiguous: he sincerely considers the merits of Le Corbusier’s proposal, but discovers that what is intended as explosive fragment of an anti-Manhattan has no detonation charge. Le Corbusier’s UN is after all nothing but a part of a redesigned Manhattan, laundered of its metaphoric and irrational contaminants through Le Corbusier’s equally irrational interpretations. Harrison restores its innocence. In his elaboration of the UN—transforming it from theory to object—he carefully removes its apocalyptic urgencies—“build me or else!"—and undoes the paranoia.
“The UN will bring to a head New York’s long expected crisis….”
The Master of Darkness trying to absorb Le Corbusier’s Modernism in the Ferrissian Void: The UN Building at Night.” “He insisted that buildings float….”
As Le Corbusier tried to drain Manhattan of congestion, so Harrison now drains Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse of ideology.
In his sensitive and professional hands, its abstract abrasiveness mellows to the point where the entire complex
becomes merely one of Manhattan’s enclaves, a block like the others, one isolated island of Manhattan’s archipelago.
Le Corbusier has after all not swallowed Manhattan.
Manhattanism has choked on, but finally digested, Le Corbusier.
Postmortem
CLIMAX
Consolidated Edison—Manhattan’s electricity generator—has its own pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair, City of Light. Like the Perisphere, this contains a miniature Metropolis, but without the predictive pretensions of Democracity.
The City of Light is a model of Manhattan—“from skyline to subway”—that compresses the Metropolis’ 24-hour cycle of day and night into 24 minutes. Its ballpark shows only highlights of famous games, the weather changes from sunshine to thunderstorm in seconds, sections through buildings and the earth reveal the subconscious of the infrastructure: the frenzied shuttling of elevators between ground and top, the speeding of trains underground.
But beyond this 1,000-percent intensification of life in the Metropolis, the model exhibits an even more disturbing innovation.
Manhattan has been bent.
The spine of the Grid has been forced into a slight curve, so that its streets converge at a point somewhere in the dense crowd that has rushed to witness the spectacle. The curved island describes the initial section of a circle that, if completed, would hold the audience captive. Among the multiple anxieties of the late thirties, Manhattanism runs out of time; the definitive Manhattan can only be realized as a model; Manhattanism can be concluded only with a climax in cardboard. This model is a simulacrum of the Culture of Congestion completed; its presence at the Fair suggests that Manhattan itself is doomed to remain an imperfect approximation of its theoretical model—this exhibit—which presents Manhattan as a city not of matter but of light, traveling along the cosmic curve of relativity.
HERITAGE
Democracity—a Metropolis of the Future—and City of Light have a single architect: Wallace Harrison.
The fact that one man is responsible for two such wildly divergent spectacles—whose incompatible implications deny each other—illuminates the acute crisis of Manhattanism like a fake thunderbolt. Trained and nourished on the purest architecture of Manhattan ever since the design of Rockefeller Center, Harrison, with City of Light, conceives the apotheosis of Manhattanism—be it in cardboard—while with Democracity he seems to have forgotten all its doctrines and even started to believe those rhetorical conversions to Modern Architecture that were merely intended as tactical diversions.
Wallace K. Harrison, Manhattan’s Hamlet.
It is probably inevitable that a doctrine based on the continual simulation of pragmatism, on a self-imposed amnesia that allows the continuous reenactment of the same subconscious themes in ever new reincarnations and on inarticulateness systematically cultivated in order to operate more effectively can never last longer than a single generation. Manhattan’s knowledge was stored in the brains of architects who made the businessmen foot the bill—ostensibly for their own myths of hyper-efficiency, but in fact for the creation of a Culture of Congestion, distilled by the architects from the desires of the population.
As long as its tribal secrets were preserved by a cabal of sophisticated architects posing as philistines, they were safe, safer than they would have been as explicit formulas. But such a method of preservation ensures its own extinction: never revealing their true intentions—not even to themselves—Manhattan’s architects took them with them to the grave.
They left all their masterpieces with no testament.
Manhattan had become, by the late thirties, an enigmatic heritage that the next generation could no longer decipher.
That made Manhattan’s architecture susceptible to the ravages of European idealism, as the Indians had been to measles; Manhattanism had no defense mechanism against the virulence of any explicit ideology.
HAMLET
Harrison is Manhattan’s last genius of the possible. It is his tragedy that after World War II the possible coincides no longer with the sublime. No longer can architects count on the businessmen’s phantom calculations that make the impossible inevitable. The postwar architecture is the accountants’ revenge on the prewar businessmen’s dreams.
The revolutionary formula of Coney Island—technology + cardboard = reality—has returned to haunt Manhattan. The result is not “peeling white paint” but the disintegrating curtain walls of the cheap Skyscraper: that is, unfortunately, the last contradiction in terms Manhattan resolves. Harrison’s career is marked by this waning of Manhattanism. He becomes Manhattan’s Hamlet: sometimes he acts as if he still knows the inner secrets, at other times as if he has lost them or never even heard of them. In the name of Modernity, Harrison—like a reluctant liquidator—seems to strip Manhattan, step by step, of its architectural assets; but at the same time—in the name of Manhattanism—he preserves always some of its essence and resuscitates its most persistent echoes.
CURVE
Harrison’s trajectory from Rockefeller Center via the Perisphere and the City of Light to (after the war) X-City, the UN, the Alcoa and Corning buildings, La Guardia Airport and Lincoln Center describes the tangible stages of his ambivalence.
At first sight X-City (1946) is a straightforward version of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, a collection of Towers in a park on the East River site of the later UN. But its centerpiece, as revealed once again in Ferriss renderings, is an impossible coupling of elements that any European would surely have kept separate: an idiosyncratic composition of two slabs—curved in plan—straddling an auditorium that is curved in both plan and section.
Those curves—since City of Light the secret symbols of a bent, definitive Manhattan—become Harrison’s trademark.
After X-City they recur obsessively in the UN; not only is the roof of the auditorium curved, but inside there is a dizzying collection of curved balconies that stun the visitor with the impact of their unexpected sensuality. The park around the slabs is landscaped on a single theme: the curve. The line of flagpoles flying all the nations’ flags along First Avenue inflects suddenly in the middle toward the main slab to form Harrison’s longest curve in Manhattan.
The most spectacular curve is described by the plan of La Guardia Airport. The building’s guiding concept is a curve that runs its full length. Its suspense (where does it end?) is reinforced by blocking out the airplane traffic behind plates of frosted glass, so that even through the “Modern” curtain wall, Manhattan is perpetually shrouded in mist.
The same curve returns in his Alcoa Building (the entrances are formed as if the curtain wall is lifted like a veil to form a curve) and the Corning Glass Building (where the interior “escapes” from the main volume in the form of a curved extension of the mirrored lobby ceiling).
Harrison’s oeuvre is a secret—and perhaps even agonized—dialectic between the rectangle and the kidney shape, between rigidity and freedom. His first architectural impulse, derived from the Modernism of, for instance, Calder, Leger, Arp—all his friends—is always to propose some curvilinear antithesis to the rigidity of Manhattan—the most glorious example being of course the Perisphere. But then that liberating impulse surrenders to the implacable logic of the Grid; the free form is forced back uncomfortably to the conformity of the rectangle.
Only his curve remains as a fossil of the freer language.
That curve is Harrison’s theme, the discreet signature of his loyalties divided between the old and the new. Always juxtaposed against the inhumanity of the Grid, he posits his own limp curve of humanism.
X-City (rendering by Hugh Ferriss). On site of present UN building, two curved slabs straddle a colossal, luminous “blob” surrounded by office towers. X-City was conceived by Harrison simultaneously as the retroactive realization of the “dream” of Rockefeller Center—the “blob” would finally contain, among other theaters, accommodation fo
r the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic—and as a modernistic “revision” of Rockefeller Center’s urbanistic ideology. Where Radio City is a series of superimposed projects in which each “layer” enriches the others, functions in X-City are rigorously separated and each given its own specific location. Discipline of the Grid is rejected in favor of free play of Towers implanted in a riverside park. Big apron cantilevered over East River was to be heliport. When site was subsequently considered for UN headquarters, Harrison “converted” scheme to accommodate the new program. Theaters were turned into the main public assembly rooms, slabs into Secretariat (on the south) and a hotel (north slab). But for a body that wanted to symbolize World Unity, relationship between the two slabs—and within that, the inexplicable bifurcation of the north slab into two towers—remained problematic.
X-City “converted” for, the United Nations, plan (Harrison, assisted by George Dudley).
X-City is the missing link between Radio City/Rockefeller Center and Lincoln Center, an in-between stage in the gradual loss of Manhattan’s density. On the same site, Harrison would later realize a fragment of his proposal—the two-tower slab, now unbent—with his United Nations Apartments on the exact location of Le Corbusier’s unrealized second slab. Lincoln Center is a partial realization of the “blob.” In the sequence Radio City—X-City—Lincoln Center, the collapse of a Culture of Congestion stands most starkly revealed.