I just finished reading Rem Koolhaass' manifesto
Delirious New York. A book that has had a profound influence on modern architecture, but also which studies the culture and society which have brought that architecture about. I highly recommend it to anyone interested at all in architecture or cultural studies. Following is my midterm brief review and exposition on the book:
The Fantastical unParadise
From Manhattan to Dubai
by Erik Leahy
Manhattan. The defacto example of the modern bustling, global metropolis, crammed to the breaking point with both people and activity on its own island nation, soaring ever skyward to capture the value of every last drop of usable land. This is the setting that Rem Koolhaas seeks to understand in his 1978 retroactive manifesto on the condition which is Manhantanism: Delirious New York. Koolhaas’s analysis looks at three components of the Manhattan environment: architectural mutations, utopian fragments and irrational phenomena. This analysis lays out the framework for a theory which was never stated, that of Manhattanism, a theory which created its own fantasy program, culture and built environment to support itself, both in Manhattan and eventually abroad.
Manhattan begins its modern life in miniature, a kind of architectural diorama, in the form of the fun parks of Coney Island. The parks of Coney Island, at the end of the 19th Century become the testing ground for Manhattanism; to Koolhaas “Coney Island is a fetal Manhattan.” Coney becomes a surreal combination of technology, mass entertainment and architectural fantasy.
The Irresistible Synthetic, which shows up at both Coney and Manhattan; represents an architecture and society of synthetic cardboard fantasies and technological wonders. “In a laughing mirror-image of the seriousness with which the rest of the world is obsessed with Progress, Coney Island attacks the problem of Pleasure, often with the same technological means.” As the eventual progression of any proper scale model, this technological pleasure will eventually find its way to the larger island of Manhattan to be (in a strange twist of lyrical irony) used to further the economic progress and expansion of capitalist New York.
The parks of Coney Island, Luna, Steeplechase and Dreamland, enclose a fictional world which exists irrelevant to and, often, in contradiction of the outside world. Bringing such fantastical themes as a city on the moon or an underwater utopia to New York seeks to “over stimulate the imagination and keep any recognizable earthly realities at a distance.” This overstimulation and disregard between the reality of the outside world and the interior fantasy will create the condition of the Great Lobotomy in the skyscraper-islands of Manhattan. The coup de grace of Coney’s effort to remove itself from the reality of the outside world comes in 1911 when Dreamland, burning to the ground, is suspected of being a ploy to attract attention, “Manhattan’s newspapers refuse to believe in the authenticity of the final disaster.”
The birth of the Skyscraper in Manhattan signals the coming of the key features of Manhattanism. Critical to the form of the skyscraper are three points: reproduction of the world, annexation of the tower, and the extrusion of the Manhattan block as a whole. The skyscraper allows for the arrival of the Great Lobotomy from Coney Island. Contained within the massive extruded edifice of the skyscraper is a disjointed world of fictional man-made realities. This is the Great Lobotomy. Just as each floor of the skyscraper contains its own self-enclosed and independent world within the confines of the building, each building is itself a contained world (read island) within the 2,028 island blocks of Manhattan. Each skyscraper is a world removed from the realities around it, a reflection of the pleasure-seeking fantasy of Coney though brought into the practical business world of Capitalism, at its finest.
In the 1920’s, the islands receive a new fantastical justification in the form of the transplanting of Venice on the island of Manhattan. Harvey Wiley Corbett proposes a transportation plan which both strengthens and seeks to destroy the idea of Manhattanism. By layering the pedestrian and automotive traffic on separate levels, creating a modern-day Venice, Corbett at once supports the lobotomized idea of the separated skyscraper island while, at the same time, removing the congestion which justifies the existence of those islands. The Culture of Congestion while at once created by the existence of the mega-structures of Manhattan is, at the same time, reliant upon those structures for its continued survival.
The Downtown Athletic Club symbolizes the epitome of the Manhattan skyscraper, fully subjected to the Great Lobotomy and removed from all traces of reality. It is a program which would normally be serviced in a large hall with ample room for athletic facilities and activities, though in the jungle of Manhattan becomes sliced up and stacked up on its own island. Members move from floor to floor, each containing separate activity: swimming, golf and boxing and oysters, with bedrooms for R & R on top. A fantasy island of social activity, where members “reach new strata of maturity by transforming themselves into new beings”; not only have the buildings become fantastical now the residents of the metropolis are slipping into the same fantasy of the imagination.
Surrealism is supported by the Paranoid Critical Method, formulated by Salvador Dali. PCM is “the Conquest of the Irrational… the spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectifications of delirious associations and interpretations.” On his arrival to Manhattan, “Dali’s first discovery is that in Manhattan Surrealism is invisible,” the entire existence of Manhattan is surreal.
Just as Coney Island passed its tested theories of pleasure-oriented Manhattanism into the economy-oriented condition of Manhattan Island, today, the story has come full circle as the two developments come together and are passed on again, though this time not back to Coney. Leaving the Island in the water of the New World, Manhattanism has now spread to the island of civilization in a sea of sand on the Arabian Penninsula: Dubai. In Dubai both schools of Manhattanism have come together: that of pleasure and economy. Dubai is the modern equivalent of the fantasy land of Coney Island combined with the capitalistic quest for progress of Manhattan; a glimmering spectacle of man-made fantasy off the Persian Gulf, reflecting the glimmering towers of Coney’s Luna Park.
Dubai, in the great tradition of the Great Lobotomy, has sought to remove any trace of the reality of its desert existence. The city is a veritable playground of the Paranoid Critical Method. Man-made indoor ski slopes are the epitome of this fantasy creation, removing all sense of the outside reality. In the maddened method of the Paranoid Critical, the reality is that an artificial winter wonderland exists adjacent to sand dunes which would also serve as a sufficient, albeit warm-weather, ski slope. However, the whole point of Manhattanism is to remove the inhabitants from the reality of their existence and provide them with a fantasy to occupy their minds. In this way the ski slope must be snow…in the desert.
Just as the Downtown Athletic Club sought to create a race of physically perfected and mentally incapacitated metropolitan inhabitants, Dubai, a traditional population of Bedouin nomads, must also find a new population to fill its dreamland, not only for the sake of having a society open to the ideas of Manhattanism but also simply to attract people to fill, and congest, its growing metropolis. In order to attract residents Dubai must create increasingly absurd fantasies for today’s endlessly stimulated population. Dubai is constantly shipping people from all around the world, and melting pot of a surreal society, just crazy enough to want to go skiing in the desert.
Rem Koolhaas has embraced the fantasy of Dubai and the other desert-confined Arab Emirates. To him it must be a perfect opportunity to execute his theories of Manhattanism in what is now becoming the Manhattan of his time. Already he has designed a master plan and convention center for the emirate Ras Al-Khaimah as well as the master plan for Waterfront City in Dubai. Both plans have immediate resemblances to Manhattan: both lain out in a square grid with a combination of mutated blocks into skyscrapers and grid-defying utopian fragments throughout. The key point of both projects is a giant spherical building, the realization of the Globe Tower from Coney Island. Though the architecture of Manhattan has changed significantly in recent years, Manhattanism has traversed the globe and started a new existence in the entrepreneurial, fantastical kingdoms of the desert.
