Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan

by Rem Koolhaas

  ISLAND

  The pathos of Harrison’s ambiguity is most touchingly evident in his Lincoln Center project.

  At first sight it is a triumph of monumental Modernism. But on close inspection it can also be understood as the resurfacing and retroactive realization of one of the original designs for Rockefeller Center’s ground floor, that “three block ocean of red velvet chairs, acres of stage and backstage” that shrank in the end to the size of Radio City Music Hall.

  But the genius of Rockefeller Center is that it is at least five projects at’ the same time In postwar Manhattan, Lincoln Center is doomed to be one project only. It has no Beaux-Arts basement, no parks on the tenth floor—no tenth floor—and missing most of all are the commercial superstructures of the Skyscrapers.

  The munificence of its culture-loving patrons has finally made possible the subsidized existence of an opera only, a theater only, a philharmonic only. Culture lovers have paid for the dissolution of Manhattanism’s poetic density. Through its amnesia, Manhattan no longer supports an infinite number of superimposed and unpredictable activities on a single site; it has regressed back to the clarity and predictability of univalence—to the known.

  That is a development Harrison cannot resist. But even in Lincoln Center the remnants of his old faith are apparent.

  Lincoln Center’s raised podium—echo of Corbett’s “Venetian” version of Rockefeller Center—is nothing but that elusive “island” that none of Harrison’s earlier colleagues managed to build.

  “A secret—and perhaps even agonized—dialectic between the rectangle and the kidney shape”: initial concept for Lincoln Center was a circular court that would connect all component theaters and facilities through a system of curvilinear lobbies, a bent version of the “Radio Forum” once planned for Rockefeller Center (Hugh Ferriss, worksheet, December 5, 1955).

  Lincoln Center as “island”: sloping plaza replaced by steps; elevations echo Corbett’s pergolas.

  ALPHABET

  The X, Y and Z buildings of Rockefeller Center are Wallace Harrison’s last contribution to Manhattan.

  The Skyscraper has come full circle; once again, it is a simple extrusion of the site that stops somewhere arbitrarily. Harrison has finally unlearned Manhattanism; X, Y and Z are the last letters of the alphabet. But on the other hand, after the Z follows A again. The implosion of these universes is like that of the original 100-story building and perhaps merely the beginning of a new alphabet.

  GLOBE

  World’s Fair, 1964.

  Theme exhibit: the Unisphere.

  The Globe again, but ghostlike and transparent, with no contents.

  Like charred pork chops, the continents cling desperately to the carcass of Manhattanism.

  X, Y and Z buildings—postwar addition to Rockefeller Center: Manhattanism unlearned.

  World’s Fair, 1964: the Unisphere. “The Globe is 120 feet in diameter with an open grid of latitudes and longitudes supporting the land masses…. It dramatizes the interrelation of the peoples in the world and their yearning for‘ peace through understanding.”

  Appendix: A Fictional Conclusion

  The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires. The Metropolis is an addictive machine, from which there is no escape, unless it offers that, too….

  Through this pervasiveness, its existence has become like the Nature it has replaced: taken for granted, almost invisible, certainly indescribable. This book was written to show that Manhattan had generated its own metropolitan Urbanism—a Culture of Congestion.

  More obliquely, it contains a hidden second argument: that the Metropolis needs/deserves its own specialized architecture, one that can vindicate the original promise of the metropolitan condition and develop the fresh traditions of the Culture of Congestion further.

  Manhattan’s architects performed their miracles luxuriating in a self-imposed unconsciousness; it is the arduous task of the final part of this century to deal with the extravagant and megalomaniac claims, ambitions and possibilities of the Metropolis openly.

  After the chronicle in “Postmortem” of the shriveling of Manhattanism—as if it had been too suddenly exposed to daylight—the Appendix should be regarded as a fictional conclusion, an interpretation of the same material, not through words, but in a series of architectural projects. These proposals are the provisional product of Manhattanism as a conscious doctrine whose pertinence is no longer limited to the island of its invention.

  The City of the Captive Globe (1972)

  The City of the Captive Globe.

  The City of the Captive Globe is devoted to the artificial conception and accelerated birth of theories, interpretations, mental constructions, proposals and their infliction on the World. It is the capital of Ego, where science, art, poetry and forms of madness compete under ideal conditions to invent, destroy and restore the world of phenomenal Reality. Each Science or Mania has its own plot. On each plot stands an identical base, built from heavy polished stone. To facilitate and provoke speculative activity, these bases—ideological laboratories—are equipped to suspend unwelcome laws, undeniable truths, to create nonexistent, physical conditions. From these solid blocks of granite, each philosophy has the right to expand indefinitely toward heaven. Some of these blocks present limbs of complete certainty and serenity; others display soft structures of tentative conjectures and hypnotic suggestions.

  The changes in this ideological skyline will be rapid and continuous: a rich spectacle of ethical joy, moral fever or intellectual masturbation. The collapse of one of the towers can mean two things: failure, giving up, or a visual Eureka, a speculative ejaculation:

  A theory that works.

  A mania that sticks.

  A lie that has become a truth.

  A dream from which there is no waking up.

  At these moments the purpose of the Captive Globe, suspended at the center of the City, becomes apparent: all these Institutes together form an enormous incubator of the World itself; they are breeding on the Globe.

  Through our feverish thinking in the Towers, the Globe gains weight. Its temperature rises slowly. In spite of the most humiliating setbacks, its ageless pregnancy survives.

  The City of the Captive Globe was a first, intuitive exploration of Manhattan’s architecture, drawn before research would substantiate its conjectures.

  If the essence of metropolitan culture is change—a state of perpetual animation—and the essence of the concept “city” is a legible sequence of various permanences, then only the three fundamental axioms on which the City of the Captive Globe is based—Grid, lobotomy and schism—can regain the terrain of the Metropolis for architecture.

  The Grid—or any other subdivision of the metropolitan territory into maximum increments of control—describes an archipelago of “Cities within Cities.” The more each “island” celebrates different values, the more the unity of the archipelago as system is reinforced. Because “change” is contained on the component “islands,” such a system will never have to be revised.

  In the metropolitan archipelago each Skyscraper in the absence of real history—develops its own instantaneous “folklore.” Through the double disconnection of lobotomy and schism—by separating exterior and interior architecture and developing the latter in small autonomous installments—such structures can devote their exteriors only to formalism and their interiors only to functionalism.

  In this way, they not only resolve forever the conflict between form and function, but create a city where permanent monoliths celebrate metropolitan instability.

  Alone in this century, the three axioms have allowed Manhattan’s buildings to be both architecture and hyper-efficient machines, both modern and eternal.

  The projects that follow are interpretation
s and modifications of these axioms.

  Hotel Sphinx (1975-76)

  Hotel Sphinx facing onto Times Square.

  Hotel Sphinx straddles two blocks at the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, a site condition of Manhattan that (with few exceptions) has failed to generate its own typology of urban form.

  It sits facing Times Square, its claws on the southern block, its twin tails to the north and its wings spreading across 48th Street, which dissects it. The Sphinx is a luxury hotel as a model for mass housing.

  The ground and mezzanine floors contain functions that are extensions and additions of the questionable facilities that give the Times Square area its character. They are designed to accommodate the luxuriant demand of sidewalk activities along Broadway and Seventh Avenue. The Hotel’s main entrance lobby on 47th Street, facing Times Square (and the Times Building) contains an international information center. This lobby also connects with the existing infrastructural facilities.

  A new subway station—complicated as a spider’s web—will link all the subway stations that now serve the Times Square area. The legs of the Sphinx contain escalators ascending to a large foyer serving theaters, auditoriums, ballrooms, conference and banquet rooms. Over this zone, a restaurant forms the wings of the Sphinx. On one side it enjoys the view of a typical midtown street, on the other side of Nature, or at least New Jersey.

  The roof of this restaurant is an outdoor playground and garden for the surrounding residential accommodation in the flanks of the structure. This accommodation consists of a collection of any imaginable number of units: hotel bedrooms and serviced suites for transient population alternate with apartments and culminate in villas with private gardens on the terraced steps that descend in opposite directions to avoid the overshadowing that would result from the narrowness of the site, and to achieve better east-west views. The twin towers that form the tail of the Sphinx contain north-facing double-height studio apartments, while the connecting middle section is an office block for the residents.

  The neck of the Sphinx facing Times Square contains the residents’ clubs and social facilities: this is the section over the entrance lobby and main auditorium, and below the circular head of the Sphinx. This section is divided by the number of clubs that occupy it. These are headquarters for the various trades and professions to which the residents belong, each displaying its identity and proclaiming its messages by means of the ideological billboard construction that clads the face of the tower, competing with the existing signs and symbols of Times Square.

  The head of the Sphinx is dedicated to physical culture and relaxation. Its main feature is the swimming pool. A glazed screen divides the pool into two parts: indoor and outdoor. Swimmers can dive under the screen from one part to the other. The indoor section is surrounded by four stories of locker rooms and showers. A glass-brick wall separates these from the pool space. A spectacular view of the city can be enjoyed from the small open-air beach. Waves made in the outdoor part of the pool crash directly onto the pavement. The ceiling over the pool is a planetarium with suspended galleries for the audience and a semicircular bar that forms the crown of the Sphinx; its patrons can influence the planetarium’s programming, improvising new trajectories for the heavenly bodies.

  Below the pool is a floor for games and gymnastics. A staircase and ladders connect the diving island in the pool to this floor and continue to the floor below, which contains steambaths, saunas and massage parlor. In the beauty parlor and hairdresser (the lowest floor of the head of the Sphinx), residents relax. The chairs face the perimeter wall, which is clad in mirror glass. Below the part reflecting the face from a sitting position, a small porthole affords a view out toward the city below.

  Finally a lounge, indoor/outdoor restaurant and garden form the section that separates the head of the Sphinx from the clubs. This is the location of the jacking and twisting mechanisms of the head of Hotel Sphinx: in response to certain important events, the face of the Sphinx can be directed to “stare” at various points in the city. In response to the level of nervous energy in the Metropolis as a whole, the whole head can be jacked up or down.

  New Welfare Island (1975-76)

  Welfare (now Roosevelt) Island is a long (about three kilometers), narrow (200 meters on average) island in the East River, more or less parallel to Manhattan. Originally the island was the site of hospitals and asylums—generally a storehouse for “undesirables.”

  Since 1965, it has been undergoing a half-hearted “urbanization.” The question is: is it to be a true part of New York—with all the agonies that implies—or is it to be a civilized escape zone, a kind of resort that offers, from a safe distance, the spectacle of Manhattan burning?

  The island’s planners have so far chosen the latter alternative—although no more than 150 meters from Manhattan, it is now connected to the mother island merely, by a cable car (colored in a cheerful “holiday” purple) whose service could easily be suspended in case of urban emergencies.

  For over a century, Welfare Island’s dominant architectural incident had been the crossing of the monumental Queensboro Bridge that connects Manhattan to Queens (without an exit to the smaller island) and casually cuts Welfare Island into two parts. The area north of the bridge has now been developed by the Urban Development. Corporation, a New York State agency, with a series of blocks that terrace down with equal enthusiasm to both Manhattan and Queens (why?), and which are arranged on both sides of a picturesquely kinked Main Street. New Welfare Island, on the contrary, is a metropolitan settlement on the sector south of Queensboro. Bridge, a stretch that coincides with the area between 50th and 59th streets in Manhattan.

  The project is intended as a resuscitation of some of the features that, made Manhattan’s architecture unique: its ability to fuse the popular with the metaphysical, the commercial with the sublime, the refined with the primitive—which together explain Manhattan’s former capacity to seduce a mass audience for itself. It also revives Manhattan’s tradition of “testing” certain themes and intentions on smaller, experimental “laboratory” islands (such as Coney Island at the beginning of the century).

  For this demonstration, the Manhattan Grid is extended across the East River to create eight new blocks on the island. These sites will be used as a “parking lot” for formally, programmatically and ideologically competing architectures—which would confront each other from their identical parking spaces.

  All the blocks are connected by an elevated travelator (moving pavement) that runs from the bridge southward down the center of the island: an accelerated architectural promenade. At the tip of the island it becomes amphibious, leaving the land to turn into a trottoir on the river, connecting floating attractions too ephemeral to establish themselves on land.

  Those blocks that are not occupied are left vacant for future generations of builders.

  From north to south, New Welfare Island so far accommodates the following structures:

  1. Built around Queensboro Bridge without actually touching it is the Entrance Convention Center—a formal entrance porch to Manhattan that is, at the same time, a colossal “roadblock” separating the southern half of the island from the northern. An auditorium for mass meetings is slotted underneath the bridge; two marble slabs contain cellular office accommodation. Between them, above the bridge, they support a suspended glass object—whose steps reflect the curve of the bridge—that contains a stacked sports and entertainment center for the Conventioneers.

  2. Buildings that were once proposed for New York, but for whatever reason aborted, will be built “retroactively” and parked on the blocks to complete the history of Manhattanism. One such building is a Suprematist Architecton stuck by Malevich on a postcard of the Manhattan skyline—sometime in the early twenties in Moscow—but never received. Due to an unspecified scientific process that would be able to suspend gravity, the involvement of Malevich’s Architectons wit
h the surface of the earth was tenuous: they could assume, at any moment, the status of artificial planets visiting the earth only occasionally—if at all. The Architectons had no program: “Built without purpose, [they] may be used by man for his own purposes….” They were supposed to be “conquered” programmatically by a future civilization that deserved them. Without function, Architectons simply exist, built from “opaque glass, concrete, tarred felt, heated by electricity, a planet without pipes…. The planet is as simple as a tiny speck, everywhere accessible to the man living inside it who, in fine weather, may sit on its surface….”

  3. In the middle of the New Welfare Island development is the harbor, carved out of the rock to receive floating structures such as boats—in this case Norman Bel Geddes’ “special streamlined yacht” (1932).

  4. South of the harbor is a park with a “Chinese” swimming pool in the form of a square, part of which is carved out of the island, while the complementary part is built out on the river. The original coastline has become three-dimensional—an aluminum Chinese bridge that follows in plan the line of the natural coastline. Two revolving doors at either end lead to locker rooms inside the two halves of the bridge (one for men, the other for women). Undressed, the sexes emerge from the middle of the bridge, from where they can swim to the recessed beach.

  5. The tip of the island is occupied by Welfare Palace Hotel and a semicircular plaza.

  6.The travelator continues on the water to a point just south of 42nd Street. Along its way, it passes a small island opposite the United Nations Building, to which the Counter-UN has been attached: a slab that repeats the silhouette of the original, with an attached auditorium. The open space of this small island serves the recreational needs of the office workers of this Counter-UN.