Soliloquy: The Bloke Alone

The Bloke Alone

by Rem Koolhaas

The Horse Show Association -"whose roster was the nucleus for the firs1 social register" -owns Madison Square Garden, on a block east of Madison Avenue between 26th and 27th streets. In 1890 it commissions a new building- a rectangular box 70 feet high that occupies the entire block. The interior of the box is hollow; its auditorium, the largest in existence, seats 8,000 and is sandwiched between a 1,200-seat theater and a 1,500-seat concert hall, so that the entire surface of the block is a single, articulated field of performance. The arena is designed for the Association's hippodrome events, but is also rented out for circuses, sports and other spectacles; an open-air theater and restaurant are planned for the roof. Firmly in the tradition of World's Fairs, Stanford White, its architect, .marks the box as a site of special interest by constructing a copy of a Spanish Tower on the roof of the hall. As one of the Garden's promoters he is also responsible for programming the entertainment inside, even after the building is finished, in a form of never-ending architectural design. But it is difficult to ensure the financial viability of the colossal arena with tasteful performances alone; its size is incompatible with the social strata whose domain it is intended to be. "The Building was a financial lemon from the day it opened." To avert disaster White is forced to experiment, to invent and establish "situations" with a wide popular appeal within the interior acreage. "In 1893 he sets up a gigantic panorama of the Chicago Exposition, to save New Yorkers the long trip West. ..." Later he turns the arena into replicas of "the Globe Theatre, old Nuremberg, Dickens' London and the city of Venice, the visitors floating ...from exhibit to exhibit in gondolas." White is caught in the crossfire of the battle between high and low culture that has already flared up at Coney: his spectacles are so"taste-less" that they keep the Social Register away, but they are still not intense enough to attract the masses. In the difference between a real gondola and Dreamland's mechanical gondola propelled along its mechanical track lies White's dilemma: he is a man of taste w ho ought to have less. He has no time to resolve it: in 1906 a madman shoots him on the roof of his own project.

Tongue

In 1905 Thompson, bored with Luna, buys a block east of Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th streets. For the first time Coney's Technology of the Fantastic will be grafted onto the Grid. In one year, Thompson builds his Hippodrome, another box, seating 5,200, topped by "the largest dome in the world after the Pantheon". Two electric Towers, transplants from Luna's forest, identify the Sixth Avenue entrance and mark this block as another miniature state where an alternative reality is established. The stage itself is the core of Thompson's realm: it breaks out of the traditional proscenium to reach 60 feet into the audience like a gigantic mechanical tongue. This "apron" is capable of instantaneous metamorphosis: among other transformations, "it is possible to turn this portion of the stage into a creek, a lake or a running mountain stream. .." Where Luna's ploy of displacement was the trip to the Moon, Thompson's first Manhattan performance is called "a Yankee Circus on Mars" in an ambitious attempt to turn the surface of his entire block into a spacecraft. "A stranded circus was to be sold at auction by the sheriff, but was saved by a messenger from Mars who bought it for his king. .." Once on Mars, "the Martians ask [the performers] to remain permanently and to become inhabitants of that far-away planet..." Such is Thompson's plot, which leaves the visitors to his theater similarly marooned on another planet. The climax of the circus' Martian performance is an eloquent abstract choreography: 64 "diving girls" descend a staircase in squads of eight, "as if they are one." The tongue becomes a lake, 17 feet deep. The girls "walk down into the water until their heads are out of sight"never to return to the surface. (An inverted underwater receptacle that contains air is connected by corridors to the backstage area.) It is a spectacle of such ineffable emotion that "men sit in the front row, night after night, weeping silently. .."

Control

In the tradition of economic free enterprise, control is exercised only at the scale of the individuai plot. With Madison Square Garden and Thompson's Hippodrome, the area of such control coincides more and more with the area of an entire block. The block itself is equipped with technological paraphernalia that manipulate and distort existing conditions beyond recognition, establishing private laws and even ideology in competition with ali the other blocks. The block becomes a "park" in the tradition of Coney Island: it offers an aggressive alternative reality, intent on discrediting and re-placing all "natural" reality. The area of these interior parks can never exceed the size of a block: that is the maximum increment of conquest by a single "planner" or a single "vision". Since all Manhattan's blocks are identical and emphatically equivalent in the unstated philosophy of the Grid, a mutation in a single one affects all others as a latent possibility: theoretically, each block can now turn into a self-contained enclave of the Irresistible Synthetic. That potential also implies an essential isolation:no longer does the city consist of more or less homogeneous texture- a mosaic of complementary urban fragments- but each block is now alone like an island, fundamentally on its own. Manhattan turns into a dry archipelago of blocks.

Freeze-Frame

A 1909 postcard presents a freeze-frame of architectural evolution -three major breakthroughs coexisting on Madison Square: the multiplication of the Flatiron, the lighthouse of the Metropolitan and the island of Madison Square Garden. At the time the postcard is produced - with its multiple vanishing points it is no simple photograph - the Square "was the center of Metropolitan Life such as New York has never seen reproduced. ...Fashion, Clubdom, Finance, Sport, Politics and Retail Trade all met here at high tide. ...It was said that someone standing long enough on Fifth Avenue and 23 Street might meet everybody in the world. ...Viewing Madison Square from the "old' Flatiron junction, the scene was Parisian in its kaleidoscopic aspect ". As Manhattan's social center, this tangle of intersections is the theater where business is being repulsed and replaced by richer forms of activity. That the Square is a front line accounts for its urbanistic fertility in provoking new tendencies. But apart from documenting a multiple break- through, the postcard is also a picture of a triple impasse: on its own, each of the three tendencies has no future. The Flatiron's mere multiplication lacks meaning; the Metropolitan Life Building has meaning, but it is compromised by the contradiction between its pretense of isolation and the reality of its location on just one of many plots on the same block, each poised to steal its thunder; and Madison Square Garden cannot make enough money to justify the extravagance of its metaphors. But when the three are put together, their weaknesses become strengths: the Tower lends meaning to the multiplication, the multiplication pays for the metaphors on the ground floor, and the conquest of the block assures the Tower isolation as sole occupant of its island. The true Skyscraper is the product of this triple fusion.

Cathedral

The first built amalgamation is the Woolworth Building- completed in 1913, four years after the freeze-frame. Its lower 27 floors are a straightforward extrusion supporting a 30-story tower; the graft occupies an entire block. But this "Glorious Whole, quite beyond the control of human imagination:' is only a partial realization of the potential of the Skyscraper. It is a master- piece merely of materialism: none of the programmatic promises of the new type are exploited. The Woolworth is filled, from top to bottom, by business. The Tower is subdivided into office suites with discrete decorative themes - an Empire-style room next to a boardroom that mixes Flemish and Italian Renaissance -while the lower floors accommodate modern administrative operations -files, telexes, tickers, pneumatic tubes, typing pools. If its interior is business only, its exterior is pure spirituality. "When seen at nightfall bathed in electric light as with a garment, or in the lucid air of a summer morning piercing space like a battlement of the paradise which St. John beheld, it inspires feelings too deep even for tears. ...The writer looked upon it and at once cried out 'The Cathedral of Commerce'" The Woolworth does not actually contribute any radical modifications or breaks to the life of the city, but it is supposed to work miracles through the emanation of its physical presence; a larger mass than ever constructed before, it is at the same time seen as disembodied, anti- gravitational".Brute material has been robbed of its density and flung into the sky to challenge its loveliness. ..." The building is activated electronically in April 1913, "when President Wilson pressed a tiny button in the White House and 80,000 brilliant lights instantly flashed throughout the Woolworth. ..." Through its sheer feat of existing, the Woolworth has a double occupancy, one concrete- " 14,000 people -the Population of a City" -the second intangible- "that spirit of man which, through means of change and barter, binds alien people into unity and space, and reduces the hazards of war and bloodshed. ..."

Automonument

Beyond a certain critical mass each structure becomes a monument, or at least raises that expectation through its size alone, even if the sum or the nature of the individual activities it accommodates does not deserve a monumental expression. This category of monument presents a radical, morally traumatic break with the conventions of symbolism: its physical manifestation does not represent an abstract ideal, an institution of exceptional importance, a three-dimensional, readable articulation of a social hierarchy, a memorial; it merely is itself and through sheer volume cannot avoid being a symbol- an empty one, available for meaning as a billboard is for advertisement. It is a solipsism, celebrating only the fact of its disproportionate existence, the shamelessness of its own process of creation. This monument of the 20th century is the Automonument and its purest manifestation is the Skyscraper. To make the Automonument Skyscraper inhabitable, a series of subsidiary tactics is developed to satisfy the two conflicting demands to which it is constantly exposed: that of being a monument -a condition that suggests permanence, solidity and serenity- and at the same time, that of accommodating, with maximum efficiency, the "change which is life", which is, by definition, antimonumental.

Lobotomy

Buildings have both an interior and an exterior. In Western architecture there has been the humanistic assumption that it is desirable to establish a moral relationship between the two, whereby the exterior makes certain revelations about the interior that the interior corroborates. The "honest" facade speaks about the activities it conceals. But mathematically, the interior volume of three-dimensional objects increases in cubed leaps and the containing envelope only by squared increments: less and less surface has to represent more and more interior activity. Beyond a certain critical mass the relationship is stressed beyond the breaking point; this "break" is the symptom of Automonumentality. In the deliberate discrepancy between container and contained New York's makers discover an area of unprecedented freedom. They exploit and formalize it in the architectural equivalent of a lobotomy -the surgical severance of the connection between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain to relieve some mental disorders by disconnecting thought processes from emotions. The architectural equivalent separates exterior and interior architecture. In this way the Monolith spares the outside world the agonies ot the continuous changes raging inside it. It hides everyday lite.

Experiment

In 1908 one of the earliest and most clinical explorations of this new artistic territory occurs at 228-32 West 42nd Street, which by now is called "Dreamstreet:" The site of the experiment is the interior of an existing building. Officially, its architect, Henri Erkins, describes his project, "Murray's Roman Gardens" as "the realistic reproduction, largely from the originals in the form of direct copies, casts, etc. ...of the homes of one of the most lavishly luxurious of the world's ancient peoples -the Romans of the Caesarean period -the reconstruction of a Roman residence. ..." Inside, exact perception of space and objects is made impossible by Erkins' consistent use of mirrors -"so large and artfully disposed that no joint is apparent and it is indeed impossible to discover where the substantial form ceases and the reflection begins. ..." The center of Erkins' "villa" is "an open court with a colonnade on each side" -an artificial open-air garden, realized through the most advanced technical means: "The ceiling is decorated to represent a blue sky in which electric lights twinkle, while by an ingenious arrangement of optical apparatus, the effect of clouds sweeping over the Sky is produced. ..:" An artificial moon puts in an accelerated appearance, crossing the firmament several times each evening. The mirrors not only disorient and dematerialize, they also "duplicate, triplicate and quadruple the interior exotics" to make the resort a model of decorative economy: the electrified "Roman Fountain" in the Atrium is only one-quarter real, the "barge" one-half. Where there are no mirrors, projecting screens, complex illumination effects and the sounds of a concealed orchestra suggest an infinity of forbidden space beyond the accessible parts of the villa. Murray's is to be "the storehouse for all that was beautiful in the World that the Romans knew, conquered and plundered:' The collector collected is Erkins' formula for harvesting the past, for the borrowing and manipulation of memory. Overlooking the garden is a mezzanine that gives access to two separate apartments where elaborate three-dimensional murals and a hyperdensity of converted objects and decorative motifs represent Egypt/Libya and Greece: an obelisk has become a lamp, a sarcophagus an "electric car" to transport dishes from one end of a table to the other. This combination blurs the sense of time and space: periods that were once sequential have become simultaneous. In this three-dimensional Piranesi, iconographies that have remained pure invade each other. Figures from an Egyptian bas-relief play music in a Roman perspective, Greeks emerge from Roman baths at the base of the Acropolis and a "semi-nude female figure in a recumbent position [blows] iridescent bubbles from a pipe, castles in the Air": antiquity is invested with modern sexuality. The accumulated loot is customized to carry contemporary messages to the metropolitan audience: Nero, for instance, is reinterpreted. "Although he is reported to have been an indifferent spectator of the burning of a considerable part of the Town [Rome], it is shrewdly suggested that he was interested rather in the opportunity the conflagration offered for improvement rather than in the loss it entailed. For Erkins, this cross-fertilization represents a true modernity - the creation of "situations" that have never existed before but are made to look as if they have. It is as if history has been given an extension in which each episode can be rewritten or redesigned in retrospect, all past mistakes erased, imperfections corrected: "The latest evolution of the art of past ages applied to the creation of a veritable modern place of recreation [is] modern, or modernized art. .." Murray's Roman Gardens is a second chance for the past, a retroactive utopia.

House

Perhaps most original about the tumult of frozen lust of Murray's decoration is its consistent quasi-three dimensionality: a whole population (the original inhabitants of the villa) is arranged along the walls to enliven the social transactions in the rooms and apartments. They make the "upper ten ...dressed in somewhat sombre colors" intruders in the sanctity of their empire of the senses. The public are only guests. Reinforcing the house metaphor, relationships generated in the over- saturated downstairs can be consummated upstairs: "In the upper part of the building are twenty-four luxurious bachelor apartments of parlor and bedroom provided with every comfort and convenience, including separate bath room accommodations." With the Gardens, Erkins and Murray have stretched the private format of the house to absorb the public. Such is the collective realm in Manhattan: its scattered episodes can never be more than a series of bloated private enclaves that admit 'houseguests'.

Pride

After performing his architectural lobotomy Erkins' pride is that of a successful surgeon. "The fact that all ingenuity of plan, the wealth of artistic elaboration and the profusion of gorgeous ornamentation, revealed in this unique establishment, have really been 'grafted' as it were onto a building of essentially plain and formal character, planned and erected originally for a purpose absolutely foreign to that for which it is today utilized, lends additional interest to the results achieved and reflects the greater credit of the author and originator of this superb exemplification of Modern taste and skill. "Henry Erkins ...was constrained to adopt, as the basis for this beautiful production, a building originally planned for use as a schoolhouse, but which the magic wand of Mr. Erkins' genius has transformed so happily that in its present arrangement, equipment, adornment and ornamentation, it nowhere betrays the slightest trace of its originaI purpose in any way. ..." Lobotomy satisfies the two incompatible demands imposed on the Automonument by generating two separate architectures. One is the architecture of metropolitan exteriors whose responsibility is to the city as sculptural experience. The other is a mutant branch of interior design that, using the most modern technologies, recycles, converts and fabricates memories and supportive iconographies that register and manipulate shifts in metropolitan culture. A system of Murray's is planned throughout Manhattan. An Italian Garden on 34th Street and Murray's New Broadway - " 3 acres of floor space devoted to Dining Room" - are planned to open in 1909. From the beginning of the 20th century architectural Lobotomy permits an urbanistic revolution in installments. Through the establishment of enclaves such as the Roman Gardens- emotional shelters for the metropolitan masses that represent ideal worlds removed in time and space, insulated against the corrosion of reality - the fantastic supplants the utilitarian in Manhattan. These subutopian fragments are all the more seductive for having no territorial ambitions beyond filling their interior allotments with a hyper-density of private meanings. By leaving intact the illusion of a traditional urban landscape outside, this revolution ensures its acceptance through its inconspicuousness. The Grid is the neutralizing agent that structures these episodes. Within the network of its rectilinearity, movement becomes ideological navigation between the conflicting claims and promises of each block.

Cave

In 1908 a delegation of American businessmen visits Antonio Gaudi in Barcelona and asks him to design a Grand Hotel in Manhattan. No site is known for the project; the businessmen may merely want an initial sketch, to raise money on and match later with a location. It is unlikely that Gaudi is aware of the quantum leaps and breakthroughs Manhattanism has produced; the businessmen themselves must have recognized the affinity between Gaudi s hysteria and Manhattan's frenzy. But in his European isolation, Gaudi is like the man in Plato's cave; from the shadows of the businessmen's descriptions and requirements he is forced to reconstruct a reality outside the cave, that of an idel Manhattan. He synthesizes a premonition of the true Skyscraper that applies both the lobotomy and the mutant branch of interior design not only on the ground floor but in layers throughout the interior. His hotel is a sheaf of stalagmites, combined to form a single conoid that is, unmistakably, a Tower. It inhabits a podium or island, connected by bridges to the other islands. It stands aggressively alone. Gaudi's design is a paradigm of floor-by-floor conquest of the Skyscraper by social activities. On the outer surface of the structure, low floors provide individual accommodation, the hotel rooms; the public life of the hotel is located at the core, on enormous interior planes that admit no daylight. This inner core of the Grand Hotel is a sequence of six superimposed restaurants. The first is decorated with a concentrate of European mythologies that will be reinforced by the choice of menu and European music, played by a large symphony orchestra. Each of the other restaurants, with its own hermetic iconography, represents another continent; the stack together represents the World. A theater and exhibition hall are superimposed over the world of the restaurants. The whole is topped by a small observation sphere that awaits the moment when the conquest of gravity will be no longer metaphor but fact.

Schism

There is to be no seepage of symbolism between floors. In fact, the schizoid arrangement of thematic planes implies an architectural strategy for planning the interior of the Skyscraper, which has become autonomous through the lobotomy: the Vertical Schism, a systematic exploitation of the deliberate disconnection between stories. By denying the dependence of one floor on any other, the Vertical Schism allows their arbitrary distribution within a single building. It is an essential strategy for the development of the cultural potential of the Skyscraper: it accepts the instability of a Skyscraper's definitive composition beyond a single floor, while at the same time counteractine it by housing each known designation with maximum specificity, if not overdetermination.

Shadow

For a time "real" Skyscrapers like the Woolworth and versions of the older type are erected simultaneously; in the latter the simple operation of extrusion takes more and more grotesque proportions. With the Equitable Building (1915) the process of reproduction loses its credibility through the grim deterioration -both financial and environmental- it inflicts on its surroundings. Its shadow alone reduces rents in a vast area of adjoining properties, while the vacuum of its interior is filled at the expense of its neighbors. Its success is measured by the destruction of its context. The time has come to subject this form of architectural aggression to regulation. "It became increasingly evident that the large project was a concern not only of an individual, but of the community,and that some form of restriction must be adopted.."

Law

The 1916 Zoning Law describes on each plot or block of Manhattan's surface an imaginary envelope that defines the outlines of the maximum allowable construction. The law takes the Woolworth as norm: the process of sheer multiplication is allowed to proceed up to a certain height; then the building must step back from the plot line at a certain angle to admit light to the streets. A Tower may then carry 25 percent of the plot area to unlimited heights. The last clause encourages the tendency of single structures to conquer the vastest possible area, i.e., a whole block, in order to make the 25 percent that can be Tower as large (profitable) as possible. In fact, the 1916 Zoning Law is a back-dated birth certificate that lends retroactive legitimacy to the Skyscraper.

Village

The Zoning Law is not only a legai document; it is also a design project . In a climate of commerciai exhilaration where the maximum legally allow able is immediately translated into reality, the "limiting" three-dimension parameters of the law suggest a whole new idea of Metropolis. If Manhattan was in the beginning only a collection of 2,028 blocks, it is now an assembly of as many invisible envelopes. Even if it is still a ghost town of the future, the outlines of the ultimate Manhattan have been drawn once and for all. The 1916 Zoning Law defines Manhattan for ali time as a collection of 2,028 colossal phantom "houses" that together form a Mega-Village. Even as each "house" fills up with accommodation, program, facilities, infrastructures, machineries and technologies of unprecedented originality and complexity, the primordial format of "village" is never endangered. The city's scale explosion is controlled through the drastic assertion of the most primitive model of human cohabitation. This radical simplification of concept is the secret formula that allows its infinite growth without corresponding 1055 of legibility, intimacy or coherence. (As a simple section reveals, each envelope is a gigantic enlargement of the originai Dutch gable house with the tower as an endless chimney. The City of the Zoning Law -the Mega-Village- is a fantastic enlargement of the original New Amsterdam).