by Rem Koolhaas
New Welfare Island, axonometric. Manhattan is on the left, Queens on the right, New Welfare Island in the middle. From top to bottom: Entrance Convention Center penetrated by Queensboro Bridge; Suprematist Architecton; harbor with streamlined yacht; “Chinese” swimming pool; Welfare Palace Hotel with raft; plaza; river-trottoir. Opposite the UN Building on Manhattan Island is the Counter-UN standing on a small island. On Manhattan itself can be seen the “separation” of Hotel Sphinx and the RCA Building. In Queens is “desperation park” with its modern housing; the suburb; the Pepsi-Cola sign; the Power Station. Approaching in the river is the floating pool.
Welfare Palace Hotel (1976)
The Welfare Palace Hotel—a “City within a City”—occupies the block near the tip of the island. It accommodates 10,000 guests, and each day as many visitors again. It is a composition of seven towers and two slabs. The ten-story slabs are placed on the edges of the block to define the “field” of the Hotel. Since the island tapers toward the tip, the block of the Hotel is incomplete, but the two slabs still run the full width of the island into the water so that the shore runs through the Hotel as a geological fault. On the field between the slabs, six towers are arranged in a V formation, pointing at Manhattan. A seventh tower on the Queens side does not “fit” on the island; it has become a horizontal water-scraper with a roof-garden on its former facade.
The towers increase in height as they move away from Manhattan; the tops are so designed that they “stare” at Manhattan, especially at the RCA Building, which steps down toward the Hotel.
The Hotel has four facades, designed individually to respond to the different formal and symbolic demands of their respective situations. The southern facade, along the semicircular plaza, is the dominant elevation. Three-dimensional fragments have dissociated themselves from the main slab to lead their own lives. The fragments have a double function: together, they form a decorative relief with an explicit figurative message—a city collapsing; separately, they provide differentiation of the Hotel’s accommodation—small palatial skyscrapers that can be reserved for private functions. The materials of the fragments are as diverse as possible—marble, steel, plastic, glass—providing the Hotel with the history it would otherwise lack.
The ground floor of the Hotel is subdivided into a series of independent zones, each with its own particular function:
The first zone—the sector closest to Manhattan—is a theater and nightclub-restaurant on the twin themes of shipwreck and uninhabited island. It holds 2,000 people—only a small percentage of the Hotel’s visitors. Its floor is inundated. A stage is carved out of the steel hull of an overturned, sinking ship. Columns are disguised as lighthouses, frantically piercing the darkness with their beams. Guests can sit, eat and watch performances on the terraces along the water or they may board the lifeboats—luxuriously equipped with velvet benches and marble tabletops—that emerge from a hole in the sinking ship to move slowly through the interior on submerged tracks. Opposite the sinking ship is a sandy island, symbolizing Manhattan in its virgin state. It can be used for dancing. Outside the Hotel, exactly between Manhattan and Welfare Island, floats a gigantic reproduction of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa; it is a symbol of Manhattan’s metropolitan agonies—proving both the need and the impossibility of “escape.” It is an equivalent of 19th-century public sculpture. When the weather permits it, the lifeboats leave the interior of the Hotel to go out on the river. They circle around the raft, compare the monumental suffering of its occupants to their own petty anxieties, watch the moonlit sky and even board the sculpture. A section is equipped as dance floor, relaying the music that is produced inside the Hotel through hidden microphones.
The second zone of the Hotel—open to the air—represents the island as found, and is lined with shops.
The third zone—where the course of the travelator is interrupted—is the reception area of the Hotel.
Beyond that is the fourth zone—the horizontal water-scraper with a park on top and conference facilities inside.
There is a different club at the top of each skyscraper. Their glass visors can retract to expose the club’s activities to sunlight.
The themes of the clubs relate to the themes established directly below them on the ground floor, so that elevators shuttle between two interpretations of the same “story.”
The first tower—above the uninhabited island on the ground floor—has a square beach and a circumferential swimming pool. A glass plate separates locker rooms for men and women.
The second tower—the only office building—is equipped, with the “displaced” bridge of the sinking ship. Guests feel like captains here, drinking their cocktails in the euphoria of apparent control, oblivious to the disaster that occurs 30 floors below them.
The third tower is an Expressionistic environment, concluding the agitation of the south facade in a paroxysm of decorative arbitrariness. The top of the fourth tower is vacant and awaits future, unspecified occupancies.
The top of the fifth tower, which stands in water, is a waterfall whose unpredictable reflections will be visible from the city.
The top of the sixth tower, the one furthest, removed from. Manhattan, is terminated by a three-dimensional allegorical interior that extrapolates and “predicts” the real destinies of the RCA, Chrysler and Empire State buildings, of whose tortured relationships the Hotel is the “postponed” offspring.
That part of the semicircular plaza in front of the Hotel which is not on the island is turned into ice. North of the Hotel is the “Chinese” swimming pool.
Welfare Palace Hotel. Cutaway axonometric shows, consecutively on the ground floor: inundated theater/restaurant/nightclub (with uninhabited island, overturned ship, lighthouse, columns, dining terraces, lifeboats); island-as-found-plaza with shopping; reception area of Hotel; access to the horizontal water-scraper (concealed between the rear four skyscrapers with park on top). On each side of the Hotel’s transverse axis is a long low slab—one overlooks the “Chinese” pool, the other the semicircular plaza. The facade of this latter slab has been fragmented into a three-dimensional mural which functions as luxury accommodation. In V formation are six skyscrapers—each with its own club (whose respective themes are related to the mythology established on the ground floor of each tower). Tower 1: locker rooms, square beach surrounded by circumferential pool; tower 2: ship’s bridge as bar; tower 3: Expressionist club as climax of the mural; tower 4: vacant; tower 5: waterfall/ restaurant; tower 6: Freud Unlimited Club. The light blue in front of the Hotel is an artificial skating rink; to the left of the Hotel is a park with the “Chinese” swimming pool; in front of the Hotel is a gigantic three-dimensional Raft of the Medusa executed in plastic (with a small area equipped for dancing).
The Story of the Pool (1977)
MOSCOW, 1923
At school one day, a student designed a floating swimming pool. Nobody remembered who it was. The idea had been in the air. Others were designing flying cities, spherical theaters, whole artificial planets. Someone had to invent the floating swimming pool. The floating pool—an enclave of purity in contaminated surroundings—seemed a first step, modest yet radical, in a gradual program of improving the world through architecture. To prove the strength of the idea, the architecture students decided to build a prototype in their spare time. The pool was a long rectangle of metal sheets bolted onto a steel frame. Two seemingly endless linear locker rooms formed its long sides—one for men, the other for women. At either end was a glass lobby with two transparent walls; one wall exposed the healthy, sometimes exciting underwater activities in the pool, and the other, fish agonizing in polluted water. It was thus a truly dialectical room, used for physical exercise, artificial sunbathing and socializing between the almost naked swimmers.
The prototype became the most popular structure in the history of Modern Architecture. Due to the chronic Soviet labor shortage, the archite
cts/ builders were also the lifeguards. One day they discovered that if they swam in unison—in regular synchronized laps from one end of the pool to the other—the pool would begin to move slowly in the opposite direction. They were amazed at this involuntary locomotion; actually, it was explained by a simple law of physics: action = reaction.
In the early thirties, the political situation, which had once stimulated projects such as the pool, became rigid, even ominous. A few years later still (the pool was quite rusty now, but popular as ever), the ideology it represented became suspect. An idea such as the pool, its shiftiness, its almost invisible physical presence, the iceberg-like quality of its submerged social activity, all these became suddenly subversive.
In a secret meeting, the architects/lifeguards decided to use the pool as a vehicle for their escape to freedom. Through the by now well-rehearsed method of auto-propulsion, they could go anywhere in the world where there was water. It was only logical that they wanted to go to America, especially New York. In a way, the pool was a Manhattan block realized in Moscow, which would now reach its logical destination.
Early one morning in the Stalinist thirties, the architects directed the pool away from Moscow by swimming their relentless laps in the direction of the golden onions of the Kremlin.
Arrival of the Floating Pool: after 40 years of crossing the Atlantic, the architects/lifeguards reach their destination. But they hardly notice it: due to the particular form of locomotion of the pool—its reaction to their own displacement in the water—they have to swim toward what they want to get away from and away from where they want to go.
NEW YORK, 1976
A rotating schedule gave each lifeguard/architect a turn at the command of the “ship” (an opportunity rejected by some hard-core anarchists, who preferred the anonymous integrity of continuous swimming to such responsibilities).
After four decades of crossing the Atlantic, their swimsuits (front and back panels were exactly the same, a standardization following a 1922 edict to simplify and accelerate production) had almost disintegrated. Over the years, they had converted some sectors of the locker room/ corridor into “rooms” with improvised hammocks, etc. It was amazing how, after 40 years at sea, relationships between the men had not stabilized but continued to display a volatility familiar from Russian novels; just before arriving in the New World, there had been a flare-up of hysteria which the architects/swimmers had been unable to explain, except as a delayed reaction to their collective middle age.
They cooked on a primitive stove, living on supplies of preserved cabbage and tomatoes, and on the fish they found each daybreak washed into the pool by the Atlantic’s waves. (Although captive, these fish were hard to catch due to the pool’s immensity.)
When they finally arrived, they hardly noticed it—they had to swim away from where they wanted to go, toward what they wanted to get away from. It was strange how familiar Manhattan was to them. They had always dreamed of stainless-steel Chryslers and flying Empire States. At school, they had even had much bolder visions, of which, ironically, the pool (almost invisible—practically submerged in the pollution of the East River) was proof: with the clouds reflected in its surface, it was more than a Skyscraper—it was a patch of heaven here on earth.
Only the Zeppelins they had seen crossing the Atlantic with infuriating velocity 40 years before were missing. They had expected them to hover over the Metropolis like a dense cloud drift of weightless whales.
When the pool docked near Wall Street, the architects/swimmers/ lifeguards were shocked at the uniformity (dress, behavior) of their visitors, who swamped the craft in a brute rush through the lockers and showers, completely ignoring the instructions of the superintendents. Had Communism reached America while they were crossing the Atlantic? they wondered in horror. This was exactly what they had swum all this time to avoid, this crudeness, lack of individuality, which did not even disappear when all the businessmen stepped out of their Brooks Brothers suits. (Their unexpected circumcisions contributed to this impression in the eyes of the provincial Russians.)
They took off again in shock, directing the pool further upstream: a rusty salmon, ready—finally—to spawn?
3 MONTHS LATER
The architects of New York were uneasy about the sudden influx of Constructivists (some quite famous, others long thought to have been exiled to Siberia—if not executed—after Frank Lloyd Wright visited the USSR in 1937 and betrayed his Modern colleagues in the name of Architecture).
The New Yorkers did not hesitate to criticize the design of the pool.
They were all against Modernism now; ignoring the spectacular decline of their profession, their own increasingly pathetic irrelevance, their desperate production of flaccid country mansions, the limp suspense of their trite complexities, the dry taste of their fabricated poetry, the agonies of their irrelevant sophistication, they complained that the, pool was so bland, so rectilinear, so unadventurous, so boring; there were no historical allusions: there was no decoration; there was no…shear, no tension, no wit—only straight lines, right angles and the drab color of rust.
(In its ruthless simplicity, the pool threatened them—like a thermometer that might be inserted in their projects to take the temperature of their decadence.)
Still, to have Constructivism over with, the New Yorkers decided to give their so called colleagues a collective medal at a discreet waterside ceremony. Against the background of the skyline, the dapper spokesman of New York’s architects gave a gracious speech. The medal had an old inscription from the thirties, he reminded the swimmers. It was by now irrelevant, he said. hut none of Manhattan’s present architects had been able to think of a new motto….
The Russians read it. It said, “THERE IS NO EASY WAY FROM THE EARTH. TO THE STARS.” Looking at the starry sky reflected in the narrow rectangle of their pool, one architect/lifeguard, still dripping wet from the last lap, answered for all of them: “We just went from Moscow to New York.. Then they dove into the water to assume their familiar formation.
5 MINUTES LATER
In front of Welfare Palace Hotel, the raft of the Constructivists collides with the raft of the Medusa: optimism vs. pessimism. The steel of the pool slices through the plastic of the sculpture like a knife through butter.
First tentative landings of pool: Wall Street. A moving “block” joins the blocks of Manhattan’s Grid.
Notes
PREHISTORY
1. E. Porter Belden, New York: Past, Present and Future (New York: Putnam, 1849), p. 1.(back)
2. John A. Kouwenhoven, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York (New York: Doubleday, 1953), p. 43.(back)
3. John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 148.(back)
4. Ibid., pp. 297-98.(back)
5. William Bridges, “Commissioners' Remarks,” in Map of the City of New York and Island of Manhattan (New York, 1811), p. 24.(back)
6. Text of advertisement in Belden, New York: Past, Present and Future.(back)
7. Reps, The Making of Urban America, pp. 331-39.(back)
8. Ibid.(back)
9. William Richards, A Day in the Crystal Palace and How to Make the Most of It (New York, 1853).(back)
10. Official Guidebook, New York World's Fair (New York: Exposition Publications, 1939).(back)
CONEY ISLAND: THE TECHNOLOGY OF THE FANTASTIC
1.Lindsay Denison, “The Biggest Playground in the World,” Munsey's Magazine, August 1905. (back)
2.Maxim Gorky, “Boredom,” The Independent, August 8, 1907. (back)
3.History of Coney Island (New York: Burroughs & Co., 1904), pp. 4-7. (back)
4.Denison, “The Biggest Playground.”(back)
5.Edo McCullough, Good Old Coney Island (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957), p. 55. (back)
6. Guide to Coney Island (Long Island Historical Society Library, n.d.).(back)<
br />
7.McCullough, Good Old Coney Island, p. 291. (back)
8.Guide to Coney Island. (back)
9."The Annual Awakening of the Only Coney Island,” New York Times, May 6, 1906. (back)
10.Guide to Coney Island. (back)
11.Ibid. (back)
12."The Annual Awakening.”(back)
13.Oliver Pilat and Jo Ransom, Sodom by the Sea (New York: Doubleday, 1941), p. 161. (back)
14.History of Coney Island, p. 10. (back)
15.Ibid. (back)
16.Guide to Coney Island. (back)
17.History of Coney Island, pp. 24, 26. (back)
18.Pilat and Ransom, Sodom by the Sea, p. 191. (back)
19.Guide to Coney Island. (back)
20.Grandeur of the Universal Exhibition at St. Louis (Official Photographic Company, 1904). (back)
21.History of Coney Island, p. 22. (back)
22.Ibid. (back)
23.Ibid., p. 12. (back)
24.Ibid., p. 15. (back)
25.Ibid., p. 16. (back)
26.Guide to Coney Island. (back)
27.Pilat and Ransom, Sodom by the Sea, p. 168. (back)
28.Denison, “The Biggest Playground.”(back)
29.James Huneker, The New Cosmopolis (New York, 1915). (back)
30.Gorky, “Boredom.”(back)
31.Walter Creedmoor, “The Real Coney Island,” Munsey's Magazine, August 1899. (back)