Delirious New York

Koolhaas, Rem (The Monacelli Press, New York, 1994)

The Frontier in the Sky

The Manhattan Skyscraper is born in installments between 1900 and 1910. It represents the fortuitous meeting of three distinct urbanistic breakthroughs that, after relatively independent lives, converge to form a single mechanism:

1. the reproduction of the World;
2. the annexation of the tower;
3. the block alone.
To understand the promise and potential of the New York Skyscraper (as distinct from the reality of its now common performance), it is necessary to define these three architectural mutations separately, before they were integrated into a "glorious whole" by the builders of Manhattan.

1. THE REPRODUCTION OF THE WORLD

In the era of the staircase all floors above the second were considered unfit for commercial purposes, and all those above the fifth, uninhabitable.
Since the 1870s in Manhattan, the elevator has been the great emancipator of all horizontal surfaces above the ground floor.
OtisÕ apparatus recovers the uncounted planes that have been floating in the thin air of speculation and reveals their superiority in a metropolitan paradox: the greater the distance from the earth, the closer the communication with what remains of nature (i.e., light and air). The elevator is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy: the further it goes up, the more undesirable the circumstances it leaves behind. It also establishes a direct relationship between repetition and architectural quality: the greater the number of floors stacked around the shaft, the more spontaneously they congeal into a single form. The elevator generates the first aesthetic based on the absence of articulation. In the early 1880s the elevator meets the steel frame, able to support the newly discovered territories without itself taking up space. Through the mutual reinforcement of these two breakthroughs, any given site can now be multiplied ad infinitum to produce the proliferation of floor space called Skyscraper.

THEOREM

By 1909 the promised rebirth of the world, as announced by the Globe Tower, reaches Manhattan in the form of a cartoon that is actually a theorem that describes the ideal performance of the Skyscraper:
a slender steel structure supports 84 horizontal planes, all the size of the original plot.
Each of these artificial levels is treated as a virgin site, as if the others did not exist, to establish a strictly private realm around a single country house and its attendant facilities, stable, servantsÕ cottages, etc. Villas on the 84 platforms display a range of social aspiration from the rustic to the palatial; emphatic permutations of their architectural styles, variations in gardens, gazebos, and so on, create at each elevator stop a different lifestyle and thus an implied ideology, all supported with complete neutrality by the rack.
The "life" inside the building is correspondingly fractured: on level 82 a donkey shrinks back from the void, on 81 a cosmopolitan couple hails an airplane. Incidents on the floors are so brutally disjointed that they cannot conceivably be part of a single scenario. The disconnectedness of the aerial plots seemingly conflicts with the fact that, together, they add up to a single building. The diagram strongly suggests even that the structure is a whole exactly to the extent that the individuality of the platforms is preserved and exploited, that its success should be measured by the degree to which the structure frames their coexistence without interfering with their destinies. The building becomes a stack of individual privacies. Only five of the 84 platforms are visible; lower in the clouds other activities occupy remaining plots; the use of each platform can never be known in advanceof its construction. Villas may go up and coliapse, other facilities may replace them,. but that will not affect the framework.
In terms of urbanism, this indeterminacy means that a particular site can no longer be matched with any single predetermined purpose. From now on each metropolitan lot accommodates-in theory at least- an unforeseeable and unstable combination of simultaneous activities, which makes architecture less an act of foresight than before and planning an act of only limited prediction.
It has become impossible to "plot" culture.
The fact that the 1909 "project" is published in the old Life, a popular magazine, and drawn by a cartoonist -while the architectural magazines of the time are still devoted to Beaux-Arts- suggests that early in the century "the people" intuit the promise of the Skyscraper more profoundly than ManhattanÕs architects, that there exists a subterranean collective dialogue about the new form from which the official architect is excluded.

ALIBIS

The skeleton of the 1909 theorem postulates the Manhattan Skyscraper as a utopian formula for the unlimited creation of virgin sites on a single urban location.
Since each of these sites is to meet its own particular programmatic destiny -beyond the architectÕs control -the Skyscraper is the instrument of a new form of unknowable urbanism. In spite of its physical solidity, the Skyscraper is the great metropolitan destabilizer: it promises perpetual programmatic instability.
The subversiveness of the SkyscraperÕs true nature -the ultimate unpredictability of its performance- is inadmissible to its own makers; their campaign to implant the new giants within the Grid therefore proceeds in a climate of dissimulation, if not self-imposed unconsciousness.
From the supposedly insatiable demands of "business" and from the, fact that Manhattan is an island, the builders construct the twin alibis that lend the Skyscraper the legitimacy of being inevitable.
"The situation of [ManhattanÕs] financial district with rivers on either side forbidding lateral expansion has encouraged architectural and engineering skill to find room aloft for the vast interests that demand office space in the heart of the New World." In other words: Manhattan has no choice but the skyward extrusion of the Grid itself; only the Skyscraper offers business the wide open spaces of a man made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

CAMOUFLAGE

To support the alibi of "business," the incipient tradition of Fantastic Technology is disguised as pragmatic technology. The paraphernalia of illusion that have just subverted Coney Island's nature into an artificial paradise -electricity, air-conditioning, tubes, telegraphs, tracks and elevators- reappear in Manhattan as paraphernalia of efficiency to convert raw space into office suites. Suppressing their irrational potential, they now become merely the agents of banal changes such as improving illumination levels, temperature, humidity, communications, etc., all to facilitate the processes of business. But as a spectral alternative, the diversity of the 84 platforms of the 1909 Skyscraper holds out the promise that all this business is only a phase, a provisional occupation that anticipates the Skyscraper's conquest by other forms of culture, floor by floor if necessary. Then the man-made territories of the frontier in the sky could be settled by the Irresistible Synthetic to establish alternative realities on any level.
"I am business.
"I am Profit and Loss.
"I am Beauty come into the Hell of the Practical."
Such is the lament of the Skyscraper in its pragmatic camouflage.

Definitive Instability:
The Downtown Athletic Club
We in New York celebrate the black mass of Materialism.
We are concrete.
We have a body.
We have sex.
We are male to the core.
We divinize matter, energy, motion, change.
-Benjamin de Casseres, Mirrors of New York

APOTHEOSIS

The Downtown Athletic Club stands on the bank of the Hudson River near Battery Park, the southern tip of Manhattan. It occupies a lot "varying from 77 feet wide on Washington Street to 78 feet 8 inches wide on West Street with a depth of 179 feet 1 1/4 inches between streets"...
Built in 1931, its 38 stories reach a height of 534 feet. Large abstract patterns of glass and brick make its exterior inscrutable and almost indistinguishable from the conventional Skyscrapers around it.
This serenity hides the apotheosis of the Skyscraper as instrument of the Culture of Congestion.
The Club represents the complete conquest-floor by floor-of the Skyscraper by social activity; with the Downtown Athletic Club the American way of life, know-how and initiative definitively overtake the theoretical lifestyle modifications that the various 20th-century European avantgardes have been insistently proposing, without ever managing to impose them.
In the Downtown Athletic Club the Skyscraper is used as a Constructivist Social Condenser: a machine to generate and intensify desirable forms of human intercourse.

TERRITORIES

In only 22 years the speculations of the 1909 theorem have become reality in the Downtown Athletic Club: it is a series of 38 superimposed platforms that each repeat, more or less, the original area of the site, connected by a battery of 13 elevators that forms the north wall of the structure.
To the financial jungle of Wall Street, the Club opposes a complementary program of hyper-refined civilization, in which a full spectrum of facilities-all ostensibly connected with athletics-restores the human body.
The lowest floors are equipped for relatively conventional athletic pursuits: squash and handball courts, poolrooms, etc., all sandwiched between locker rooms. But then ascent through the upper layers of the structure- with its implied approximation of a theoretical "peak" condition-leads through territories never before tread upon by man. Emerging from the elevator on the ninth floor, the visitor finds himself in a dark vestibule that leads directly into a locker room that occupies the center of the platform, where there is no daylight. There he undresses, puts on boxing gloves and enters an adjoining space equipped with a multitude of punching bags (occasionally he may even confront a human opponent).
On the southern side, the same locker room is also serviced by an oyster bar with a view over the Hudson River.
Eating oysters with boxing g/oves, naked, on the nth floor-such is the "plot" of the ninth story, or, the 20th century in action.
In a further escalation, the tenth floor is devoted to preventive medicine. On one side of a lavish dressing lounge an array of body-manipulation facilities is arranged around a Turkish bath: sections for massage and rubbing, an eight-bed station for artificial sunbathing, a ten-bed resting area. On the south face, six barbers are concerned with the mysteries of masculine beauty and how to bring it out.
But the southwest corner of the floor is the most explicitly medical: a special facility that can treat five patients at the same time. A doctor here is in charge of the process of "Colonic Irrigation": the insertion into the human intestines of synthetic bacterial cultures that rejuvenate man by improving his metabolism.
This final step brings the sequence of mechanical interference with human nature, initiated by such apparently innocent attractions as Coney Island's Barrels of Love, to a drastic conclusion.
On the 12th floor a swimming pool occupies the full rectangle; the elevators lead almost directly into the water. At night, the pool is illuminated only by its underwater lighting system, so that the entire slab of water, with its frenetic swimmers, appears to float in space, suspended between the electric scintillation of the Wall Street towers and the stars reflected in the Hudson. Of all the floors, the interior golf course-on the seventh-is the most extreme undertaking: the transplantation of an "English" landscape of hills and valleys, a narrow river that curls across the rectangle, green grass, trees, a bridge, all real, but taxidermized in the literal realization of the "meadows aloft" announced by the 1909 theorem. The interior golf course is at the same time obliteration and preservation: having been extirpated by the Metropolis, nature is now resurrected inside the Skyscraper as merely one of its infinite layers, a technical service that sustains and refreshes the Metropolitanites in their exhausting existence.
The Skyscraper has transformed Nature into Super-Nature.
From the first to the twelfth floors, ascent inside the Downtown Athletic Club has corresponded to increased subtlety and unconventionality of the "programs" offered on each platform. The next five floors are devoted to eating, resting and socializing: they contain dining rooms-with a variety of privacies-kitchens, lounges, even a library. After their stringent workouts on the lower floors, the athletes-puritanical hedonists to a man-are finally in condition to confront the opposite sex-women-on a small rectangular dance floor on the 17th-story roof garden.
From the 20th to the 35th floors, the Club contains only bedrooms.
"The plan is of primary importance, because on the floor are performed all the activities of the human occupants";52 that is how Raymond Hood-the most theoretical of New York's architects-has defined Manhattan's version of functionalism distorted by the demands and opportunities of density and congestion.
In the Downtown Athletic Club each "plan" is an abstract composition of activities that describes, on each of the synthetic platforms, a different "performance" that is only a fragment of the larger spectacle of the Metropolis.
In an abstract choreography, the building's athletes shuttle up and down between its 38 "plots"-in a sequence as random as only an elevator man can make it-each equipped with techno~psychic men's own redesign.
Such an architecture is an aleatory form of "planning" life itself: in the fantastic juxtaposition of its activities, each of the Club's floors is a separate installment of an infinitely unpredictable intrigue that extols the complete surrender to the definitive instability of life in the Metropolis.

INCUBATOR