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August 24, 2006

House Defied & Architecture Revolted Against

“There is no manifesto, no architectural debate, no doctrine, no law, no planning, no ideology, no theory, there is only – skyscraper…” – Rem Koolhaas

In the view of most of us non-specialists, architecture probably can be vaguely summed up as a field of human activity dealing with the problem of how to build a house, while its more sophisticated sibling, urban design, would consequently tackle the issue of how to arrange houses into a city. To find out just how much of an oversimplification such laic view may represent, therefore, it may be instructive to make an entirely non-expert excursion into the field, to discover how the practitioners of the seemingly simple subjects of architecture and urban design themselves conceive of their subject matter. After all, to the extent that we find ourselves in the position of urban dwellers, we cannot help being daily users and witnesses of the feats of urban design and construction. We had better care to know.

Rem Koolhaas, Dutch founder of the OMA/AMO office for metropolitan architecture, and famous unorthodox rebel of contemporary architecture, or certainly of thinking about architecture, met the fate of many an unorthodox rebel in being made into a great classic. A respected figure of international renown, he might be familiar to Japanese audiences for his enthusiastic engagement with the challenges presented by the mind-boggling growth of the many megalopolises in the Far East region. At a public lecture in Tokyo earlier this year, Koolhaas bluntly declared that in face of the speed, density, and scale of expansion East Asian urban centres are undergoing, all of the neatly accumulated western experience which informed most classical urbanism is simply irrelevant. He has repeatedly criticised "architects" for enclosing themselves inside their expert vocabularies and preconceived notions of what architecture “is”, and has himself consciously posed equally as a public intellectual actively involved with the social, economic, and political contexts of contemporary urbanism.

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Yet all that started decades ago with the book, which has since been twice reprinted in its Japanese version under the above title, distinctly tamer than the English original: "Delirious New York - A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan" (first published 1978). Anyone who so wishes can actually successfully read this lengthy essay as an insightful enquiry into the architectural history of that self-conscious modern icon: the island of dreams and nightmares, which no decent monster, no alien invasion, no apocalyptic catastrophe of the 20th century cinematographic imagination can possibly fail to choose for backdrop. But “Delirious New York” is completely serious about being a manifesto. At second sight it becomes obvious that the historical narrative serves the author as a pretext for releasing upon his reader a project of his own: to formulate the principles of the hidden doctrine, ideology, philosophy, embodied in the growth, structures and motions of the soaring city. Koolhaas’ language balances on the edge between the matter-of-fact informative tone of historical narrative and outbursts of colourful associative energy which might perhaps suitably be called poetry. And from his provocative stanzas a vision of a living entity does emerge: a passionate, unpredictable, chaotic, bustling creature of Manhattan with a personality of its own.
In 1811, a committee named to regulate the “final and conclusive” occupancy for Manhattan lays out The Grid: projecting on an as yet relatively empty island the fictitious lines of 155 east-west non-existent streets and 12 north-south non-existent avenues the commissioners predicted for all times the shapes and volumes of yet unbuilt houses for often yet unborn populations. Another crucial development came in 1870s with Elisha Otis’ invention of The Elevator, when the city, released at last from the ground level, feverishly started exploring the potential of endless vertical multiplication of its surface area: and the skyscraper was born and the skyline of towers.
The limited land closed off irrevocably by the two arms of ocean and Hudson river invites the rationale of economy and Manhattan will be perceived as a child of utilitarian polemic of how to make the best use (and largest profit) of the available surface. However the author ever seems to suggest that while such view may be superficially correct, there are much deeper and less controllable forces at work under the guise of maximization of utility: a chaotic, disorganized explosion of accumulated powers latent in growing urban masses and supplying Manhattan with its lifeblood, permanent state of crisis and congestion.
It is indeed one of the most prominent features of the author’s vision – for vision it indeed is, hardly an argument – that there is always at the bottom of modern urban experience an unresolved tension between rational attempts at a radical and definitive solution to the state of crisis which the city is in, and a subconscious awareness that the state of crisis is the city itself. That the rush, congestion and permanent crisis represent an inseparably defining moment of modern urbanism. While Koolhaas identifies in the emblematic Manhattan the state of crisis as the fundamental modus of modern metropolitan experience, he refuses to apply to such discovery any moral standards, he refuses to start with identifying such crisis as a problem to be solved, and indeed seems rather to enthusiastically embrace the vision of burgeoning chaos as a source of life-giving creative energy. This is the spirit in which he guides the reader through symbolic nodal points where major architects, investors and projects encountered the subliminal forces of the city: the Rockefeller Center, the Downtown Athletic Club, the Empire State Building are not portrayed as venerable solid monuments, but come to life as dramatic events.
It is not entirely easy to see what would be the program of contemporary urbanism on such terms in the world according to Koolhaas, though the fire he turns against such iconic representatives of architectural modernism as Le Corbusier perhaps suggests what it would not be. It would be anything else but the clear-cut cartesian blueprint of Le Corbusier’s otherworldly Radiant City, an antithesis of Manhattan which the latter disparagingly described as “city of panic” and compared to jungle. The closing part of the essay’s is a dramatically construed depiction of Corbusier’s private war with Manhattan where he at least partially manages as an act of revenge to finally cut across The Grid and impose on Manhattan his concept of UN headquarters. For a more positive expression of Koolhaas’ own urbanism we may ultimately need to turn to his own realized projects. For now, we may walk through our urban jungles with more perceptive eye.

Posted by david at August 24, 2006 12:30 PM

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