COLLEGE OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY School of Architecture A.A. 2017/18 ARCHITECTURAL THEORY_II DELIRIOUS NEW YORK. Prof. Arch. Manlio MICHIELETTO PhD

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1 COLLEGE OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY School of Architecture A.A. 2017/18 ARCHITECTURAL THEORY_II Prof. Arch. Manlio MICHIELETTO PhD 1

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3 Architects dressed up as their buildings at the Beaux Arts Ball in 1931, picture found here. From left to right: A Stewart Walker as the Fuller Building, Leonard Schultze as the Waldorf-Astoria, Ely Jacques Kahn as the Squibb Building, William Van Alen as the Chrysler, Ralph walker as 1 Wall Street, D.E.Ward as the Metropolitan Tower and Joseph H. Freelander as the museum of New York. 3

4 INDEX 1. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Thames & Hudson, 1978; Monacelli Press, The New York City 1916 Zoning Resolution 3. The Manhattan Grid 4. Coney Island 5. Manhattan s architecture 6. Bibliography

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9 2. The New York City 1916 Zoning Resolution The New York City 1916 Zoning Resolution was a measure adopted primarily to stop massive buildings such as the Equitable Building from preventing light and air from reaching the streets below. It established limits in building massing at certain heights, usually interpreted as a series of setbacks and, while not imposing height limits, restricted towers to a percentage of the lot size. 9

10 2. The New York City 1916 Zoning Resolution Equitable Building

11 2. The New York City 1916 Zoning Resolution Luis Sullivan, The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,

12 2. The New York City 1916 Zoning Resolution Empire State Building

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15 Seagram Building By mid-century most new International Style buildings had met the setback requirements by adopting the use of plazas or low-rise buildings surrounding a monolithic tower centered on the site. This approach has been criticized for its hostility and, among other issues, led to the codes being reformed in

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17 The Manhattan Grid 17

18 The Manhattan Grid 18

19 Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan is an engaging review of modern architecture and urbanism, setting a celebratory account of the surreal culture of congestion found in Manhattan. Written while Rem Koolhaas was a visiting professor at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, and first published in written during a period of financial crisis, with the city government narrowly avoiding bankruptcy through a substantial federal loan. 19

20 Rem Koolhaas There is no manifesto, no architectural debate, no doctrine, no law, no planning, no ideology, no theory; there is only Skyscreaper. 20

21 At a time when confidence in the city is at an all time low, Koolhaas promotes Manhattan as a prototype of the modern metropolis, a collaboration of visionaries that strive to make life in the city a deeply irrational experience. 21

22 Declaring himself as the city s ghost-writer, Koolhaas tells the story of Manhattan, a mythical island and setting of an urban experiment in which the city becomes a factory for man made experiences, a laboratory to test the potential of modern life. He claims that Manhattanism is the one urbanistic concept that revels in hyper density and is fuelled by the splendours and miseries than come with the urban condition of man made living. With Manhattan as an example, this book is a blueprint for a culture of congestion. 22

23 The first chapter gives an overview of the history of the island, discovered in 1609, and depicted by a French artist as existing European components reassembled into a single location, A Utopian Europe. A utopia that is indifferent to topography, imposing the mental over the real. DELIRIUM: an acute mental disturbance characterized by confused thinking and disrupted alteration 23

24 The grid system in Manhattan predicted the future condition of the city; its two dimensional restrictions gave way to three dimensional freedom, and the millions of people that it now houses was envisaged far before a tiny proportion were even present. 24

25 Much like the grid, central park was created long before the programmes which fill it had been realised, quoted as a colossal leap of faith, the contrast it describes between the built and the unbuilt hardly exists at the time of its creation. 25

26 The book is a representation of the grid: a collection of blocks whose proximity and juxtaposition reinforce their separate meanings. Each block correlates to a chapter; Coney Island, the Skyscraper, Rockefeller Centre and Europeans. 26

27 3. Coney Island When Manhattan transforms from a city into a metropolis, Coney Island offers a resort, the safety value of the worlds most highly charged metropolis. As demand for escape increases; the island is forced to mutate; it must turn itself into the very opposite of nature, and instead of providing a release from the urban pressure, Coney provides intensification. The island s artificiality becomes an attraction, counteracting the theatricality of the new metropolis with its unique super-natural. 27

28 3. Coney Island Coney s amusement parks Steeplechase, Luna and Dreamland emerge, each more ostentatious than its predecessor, providing an infrastructure that made the island the most modern fragment of the world. Within Coney these three parks act as the testing grounds for a new technology of the fantastic, from which stem the strategies and mechanisms that came to shape Manhattan. 28

29 3. Coney Island 29

30 3. Coney Island 30

31 3. Coney Island 31

32 3. Coney Island A glorious whole the skyscraper represents a coming together of a number of urbanistic breakthroughs. The tower was first tested on Coney with the snow white pinnacles of Luna s skyline. 32

33 4. Manhattan s architecture Now, in Manhattan, building became tower through the union of the elevator and steel frame, giving way to a construction which was able to support newly discovered territories, the further you ascend, the more you leave behind the undesirable circumstances below. 33

34 4. Manhattan s architecture Manhattan s architecture under went a lobotomy, less and less surface represented more and more internal activity. By separating the internal and external, the monolith of the skyscraper spared the outside world of everyday life, a shell housing layers of reality. Entering a building in Manhattan, even changing floors, could become an act of moving between worlds. 34

35 4. Manhattan s architecture The deliberate disconnection of storeys the vertical schism accepted the skyscrapers instability in a definitive composition, succumbing to cultural potential. Each new building spanning a block, like a collection of urban islands, each striving to be a city within a city, all potentially at war with each other. 35

36 4. Manhattan s architecture Any site could now be multiplied ad infinitum to produce a proliferation of floor space. The skyscraper was a utopian formula which could be used an instrument for a new form of unknowable urbanism. 36

37 4. Manhattan s architecture Media technologies were structurally integrated into the modern metropolis, as can be seen in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Daily News Building, and most importantly the Rockefeller Center. Like the speculative Manhattan grid, the Rockefeller Centre was an artificial domain planned for non existent clients, it finds a perfect occupant in the Radio Corporation of America and its subsidiary NBC and their state of the art production facilities. 37

38 4. Manhattan s architecture Rockefeller Centre 38

39 4. Manhattan s architecture The theatricality that was once experienced on Coney Island, and then of the interior activities of the skyscraper, could now be fabricated within the Centre and transmitted across the world, the nerve center of an electronic community that would congregate at Rockefeller Center without actually being there. Rockefeller Center is the first architecture that can be broadcast. 39

40 4. Manhattan s architecture Manhattanism is congestion for congestion s sake, and the reason why any of Le Corbusier s schemes failed to be realised in Manhattan. Radiant City, which Koolhaas describes as a majestic flow of humanist non sequiturs, is a proposal to erase all the utopian urbanistic ideals upon which Manhattan was built and replace them with a uniform set of towers Cartesian skyscrapers - evenly planted in green spaces. His desire was to purify the city, and give its residents access to light and air. 40

41 4. Manhattan s architecture His urban form removed the congestion, offering only the efficiency of banality in exchange. This congestion, in a realm divorced from reality, forces the metropolis ever upward into the speculative. There was no place for Manhattan s technology of the fantastic within the Cartesian skyscraper, for Corbusier; use of technology as instrument and extension of the imagination equals abuse for him technology itself is fantastic. 41

42 4. Manhattan s architecture Le Corbusier 42

43 4. Manhattan s architecture The Cartesian skyscraper had been stripped of the stone cladding that enclosed the Manhattan skyscraper and allowed the ideological hysteria of the internal architecture to thrive. Koolhaas concludes that the glass walls of Corbusier s skyscraper enclosed a complete cultural void. 43

44 4. Manhattan s architecture During these playful journeys through Manhattans history, Koolhaas advocates his duty to modernity, if not to architectural modernism as a movement. He focuses on Manhattan s ability to invent the modern, creating a parallel to the sober and abstract ideals of Le Corbusier s European Modernism. The city s buildings are not advocated as architectural masterpieces, but the tools for reinventing city life. 44

45 8. BIBLIOGRAPHY Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Thames & Hudson, 1978; Monacelli Press,

46 9. GROUP PRESENTATION Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Thames & Hudson, 1978; Monacelli Press, 1994, MAIN TOPIC: The double life of Utopia: The Skyscreaper 46

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Six Canonical Projects by Rem Koolhaas

Six Canonical Projects by Rem Koolhaas Essays on the History of Ideas Ingrid Bock architektur + analyse 5 Acknowledgments Introduction Biographical Notes 8 9 25 1. WALL: EXODUS,OR THE VOLUNTARY PRISONERS