Architecture + Urbanism recommends 'LAGOS WIDE AND CLOSE'

In 2001, architect Rem Koolhaas and filmmaker Bregtje van der Haak went to Lagos to document one of fastest growing cities in Africa. Based on research by Koolhaas' Harvard Project on the City, this interactive film presents an intense and chaotic engagement with a then hardly documented city, capturing multiple perspectives of a volatile moment in its evolution.

'Lagos Wide and Close - An Interactive Journey into an Exploding City' is an interactive documentary adapted from the groundbreaking 2004 interactive DVD. As one of the first interactive documentaries ever made, it offers a rare documentation of Lagos at a volatile moment in its evolution. Submarine Channel now makes the groundbreaking work available to all audiences online. Free.

Increased bandwidth now makes it possible to play the two video channels and three audio channels in parallel online in realtime.

Available at http://lagos.submarinechannel.com

Architecture + Urbanism recommends "Venice Architecture Biennale 2014"

Director of the 14th Architecture Biennale Rem Koolhaas writes about the theme ABSORBING MODERNITY 1914-2014

"In 1914, it made sense to talk about a “Chinese” architecture, a “Swiss” architecture, an “Indian” architecture… One hundred years later, under the influence of wars, diverse political regimes, different states of development, national and international architectural movements, individual talents, friendships, random personal trajectories, and technological developments, architectures that were once specific and local have become seemingly interchangeable and global. Has national identity been sacrificed to modernity?

Participating countries will engage a single theme – Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014 – and will show, each in their own way, the process of the erasure of national characteristics in favor of the almost universal adoption of a single modern language and a single repertoire of typologies. But the transition to what seems like a universal architectural language is a more complex process than we typically recognize, involving significant encounters between cultures, technical inventions, and hidden ways of remaining “national.” In a time of ubiquitous google research and the flattening of cultural memory, it is crucial for the future of architecture to resurrect and expose these narratives.

By telling the history of the last 100 years cumulatively, the exhibitions in the National Pavilions will generate a global overview of architecture’s evolution into a single, modern aesthetic, and at the same time uncover within globalization the survival of unique national features and mentalities that continue to exist and flourish even as international collaboration and exchange intensify…"

Rem Koolhaas: Delirious New York : A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1978)

Reviewed by Laura Minca

Delirious New York – A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan represents an insightful evaluation of Manhattan as an urban and architectural test-ground, a laboratory for the invention and implementation of the fundamental theories and visions that determined the metropolitan life style reach its current mythical status. In 1978 when the book was released, the confidence in Manhattan was shattered by a period of financial turmoil.
A reminder of its past glory was promptly needed, and Koolhaas had the answer: a ‘retroactive’ manifesto celebrating carefully selected stages in its evolution ever since its discovery in 1609 up to the present day.

Referring to himself as ‘Manhattan’s Ghost Writer’, Koolhaas closely observes the Metropolis’s relentless metamorphosis: from ‘an unformulated theory’ as an initial response to the instinctual vanity imposed by the Grid’s blocks, to the cathartic realization that ‘the culture of congestion’ is a cure as opposed to a malady. As a result, all those attempting to provide antidotes to its mega-polis status end up absorbed in the vortex of its ambition and speed. The remarkable thing about New York is precisely its cannibalistic tendencies to ingest its past in order to give birth to the future.

Koolhaas pays tribute to the physical delineation of the grid by implementing it into the structure of the book on a metaphorical level and referring to it as - ‘a collection of blocks whose proximity and juxtaposition reinforce their separate meanings.’ What the five different ‘blocks’ underpin through their temporal and spatial leaps is that individuality and segregation can lead to a symbiotic level of coherence - ‘Prehistory’, ‘Coney Island’, ‘The Skyscraper’, ’The Rockfeller Centre’, ‘Europeans’ are part of a whole portraying an glorified Manhattan in order for its accomplishments and imperfections to become yet more apparent.

The first chapter – ‘Prehistory’ - delves into the stringent need to mythologize the story of a glorious past suitable for a triumphant present. The author focuses on an ‘embryonic’ Manhattan, starting with its discovery in 1609 and the subsequent transplant of a utopian Europe - a radical procedure which Koolhaas labels as ‘a theatre of progress’, a perpetual domination of barbarism by refinement through ruthless eradication of past evidence. Thus, the concept of ‘lobotomy’ gets ingrained into Manhattan’s subconscious, becoming the leitmotif in its further stages of evolution. The implementation of the Grid in 1811 indicates the same amnesic behaviour, the same indifference to the existing topography driven by an insatiable need of spatial control, of dominating the irregular – in this case, rough nature.

However, the apparent success of this two-dimensional discipline in taming a primitive plan by imposing its utilitarian aims, will fail on a three-dimensional level. The strategy of thought behind the Grid’s configuration was labeled by Koolhaas as a ‘negative symbol of the shortsightedness of commercial interests’ which trades the element of design and creativity for convenience. This subjugation can only instigate and fuel the vertical ego of each block, and generate, finally, a three-dimensional anarchy.

The reader is subsequently introduced to Manhattan’s first volumetric experimentations, with the antithetical, yet complementary tandem: the needle and globe, referred to as ‘an archetypal contrast that will appear and re-appear throughout Manhattan’s ever-new reincarnations’. London’s Crystal Palace and the Latting Observatory are the incipient, crude answers to the insatiable need for innovation as spectacle, for liberation through the avoidance of the Real.


The discovery of vertical ascension technologies such as the elevator sparks within Manhattan’s inhabitants a sense geographical self-consciousness and provides the island with an additional means of escape: ‘mass ascension ’. As Manhattan evolves from a city to a metropolis, the need for Pleasure becomes imperative. Koolhaas focuses his study on Coney Island - ‘an incubator for Manhattan’s incipient mythology’,’ the finish line for a weekly exodus’ – as the perfect environment for social experimentation, for the implementation of the ‘technology of the fantastic’. In order to survive as a resort and provide unlimited means of temporary release as the antidote to the frantic urban life-style, Coney greets the reservoir of people flooding its beaches with an over-dose of hyper-real, mutating into the opposite of Nature. The Artificial becomes the main attraction, counter-acting the metropolitan theatricality with the ostentatious and finally, the grotesque. As Steeplechase, Luna and Dreamland materialize, each more flamboyant than its precursor, Coney needs to keep feeding its visitors their weekly dose of super-natural by introducing a series of outlandish scenarios and mechanisms that will later shape Manhattan itself. Excess is the lead word and, if ‘Coney Island is the World’, then everything is deemed to eventually implode and return to basics. The Sodoman fire is nature’s way of purifying the ground the human being mutilated for its own superficial, ‘innocent’ pleasures as labeled by Koolhaas. The cycle of life is complete: after creation, evolution and extinction comes rebirth - Coney Island is redeveloped as a series of parks and promenades.

After a period of technological breakthroughs, the elevator meets the steel frame, making way for an utopian theorem, formulated in 1909 - an expression of the ambitions lingering in the collective subconscious - according to which ‘any given site can now be multiplied ad infinitum to produce the proliferation of floor space called Skyscraper’. Each of these artificial sites is defined independently from all the other, treated as a virgin territory with its own destiny which can accommodate any desired activity. The Skyscraper promotes unity in form but fracture in meaning, in programmatic cohesion, becoming a ‘stack of individual privacies’. As Koolhaas explains, the Skyscraper represents the meeting of three urbanistic revelations: ‘the reproduction of the world’, ‘the annexation of the tower’ and ‘the block alone’, each individually analyzed by the author and subsequently integrated into a ‘glorious whole’.


As the culture of congestion intensifies, so does the latent need for escape and spectacle, a void hunting the collective subconscious caused by Coney’s sudden extinction. However, the restrictions imposed by the grid’s delineation, generate a vertical race, won in 1911 by the 100th floor building -‘a mammoth structure, towering into the clouds and containing within its walls the cultural, commercial and industrial activities of a great city’ – the Hybrid is born.

Furthermore, the infinite interchange of programmatic layers within a neutralizing shell pinned down by Koolhaas as ‘Architectural Lobotomy’ means ‘less and less surface has to represent more and more interior activity’. The segregation of form from function, of the container from the contained as well as the extrapolation of this procedure on the internal realm of the building – ‘the vertical schism’ – generate a collection of islands within an island, of ‘cities within a city’, each rivaling for recognition and individuality. The ‘Forest of Towers’ tested in Luna Park by Thompson has been successfully transplanted to Manhattan in both aesthetics and spirit.

The introduction of the 1916 Zoning Law emerges at a moment when awareness is raised upon Manhattan’s frenzied growth pattern which cannot be disciplined anymore by the rigorous grid. Consequently, a series of ideologies follow, experimenting with the control of chaos. Through his acclaimed renders, Ferris unconsciously develops an innovative formula aiming to manage the vertical explosion by prioritizing natural light and ventilation, promoting ‘the city’s infinite growth without endangering its legibility, intimacy or coherence’. By taking his conceptual experimentations and variations on the Zoning Law to a further scale, Ferris produces the first concrete image of the final assembly - the ‘Mega-Village’ as Manhattan’s inevitable destiny and ‘The Ferrisian Void’ – ‘an architectural womb that gives birth to the consecutive stages of the Skyscraper in a sequence of sometimes overlapping pregnancies, and that promises to generate ever-new ones.’ The dream of never-ending creation of endless realities continues.

Koolhaas focuses in the next chapter on the cannibalistic instinct as the epitome of Manhattan’s evolutionary approach ‘featuring all the strategies, theorems, paradigms and ambitions that sustain the inexorable progress of Manhattanism’. By closely following the reincarnations of the Waldorf-Astoria and the Empire State Building, a summary of the phases of Manhattan’s urbanism in a period of 150 years unfolds. What will destruct the hotel is the ‘paradoxical tradition of the last word’ it had zealously pursued and which eventually translates into it not being a Skyscraper. Regeneration is imperative and the site is ready to add another layer to its invisible archaeology. The Waldorf-Astoria is demolished and replaced by ‘a skyscraper surpassing in height anything ever constructed by man’ – The Empire State Building referred to as ‘the last manifestation of Manhattanism as a pure and thoughtless process, the climax of the subconscious Manhattan’.

The Rockfeller Centre represents the conscious phase of the collective experiment, ‘a masterpiece without a genius’ as a result of all key ideologies, strategies and theorems Koolhaas has introduced the reader to by this point. One of these is Raymond Hood’s ‘City of Towers’, disputing the 1916 Zoning Law - which cannot control the bulk of Manhattan’s buildings, but only their shape - by proposing larger sites within the same block to be reorganized into various configurations. By expanding the concept to greater areas of the metropolis, Hood plans a gradual metamorphosis into ‘The City under the Single Roof’ and consequently ‘The City within a City’ by strategically inserting the so-called ‘Mountains’ as confluence nodes that exceed the limitations of a single block and that, through their colossal size – ‘absorb and interiorize all traffic’.

Thus, the paradox of solving congestion by generating more congestion arises. In 1929, the Crash brings along a climate of uncertainty that simplifies the expectations to be met by The Rockfeller Centre, solidifying its conceptual integrity and theoretical clarity. From ‘a financially reasonable enterprise’ it becomes purely speculative - a collection of ideologically separate projects that meet on the same site, ‘exposing an archaeology of architectural philosophies’.

‘The Metropolis is perfect’. This is the sentence that concludes Rockfeller’s success and that synthesizes the calm before the storm, i.e. the European invasion.

Ever since its discovery, Manhattan has been treated as ‘an urban canvas, exposed to a constant bombardment of projections, misrepresentations, transplantations and grafts’.
Koolhaas chooses to follow in this final chapter two protagonists of the era on their quest to reclaim, impose on and appropriate Manhattan: Dali and Le Corbusier - Surrealism vs. Modernism. They are both consumed by an ardent obsession for Manhattan and plan to conquer it: Dali by interpretative appropriation and Le Corbusier by proposing to literally destroy it. If Dali keeps the metropolis physically intact, Corbusier delves even deeper into his fixation by searching validity for his New City through the actual eradication of New York.
Koolhaas is restless in detailing Corbusier’s character as the villain that, haunted by its own victims and paranoiac tendencies, creates The Radiant City as a final blow aimed to annihilate the essence that lays at New York’s restless expansion – congestion. As a result,’ He creates an urban non-event that New York’s own planners have always avoided’. Redemption through Modernism is a tactic that lastly turns against its own creator.

The author dedicates the appendix to his own vision on how the Metropolis should continue its experimentation and reinterpretation of the Culture of Congestion by embracing its modernist ethos and its retroactive revelations. Furthermore, he encloses four speculative proposals – ‘The City of the Captive Globe’, ‘Hotel Sphinx’, ‘New Welfare Island’ and ‘Welfare Palace Hotel’ - as ‘a fictional conclusion’ meant to concentrate the essence of the product Manhattan has become , a ’conscious doctrine whose pertinence is no longer limited to the island of its invention’.

The book is a compelling read, a strategic collection of episodes belonging to a complex and particularly dense historical past. Nevertheless, it concludes on a predictable note, representative for most theoretical books: a New York grounded in the reality of facts, buried under a ‘mountain of evidence’ sets the foundation for Koolhaas’s archaeological reverie and subsequently his scenarios for impossible fantasies.

Rem Koolhaas: Delirious New York: A Retrospective Manifesto for Manhattan (1978)

Reviewed by Carrie Bayley

“Manhattan is the arena for the terminal stage of western civilisation... a mountain range of evidence without manifesto”, Koolhaas observes, and so begins his retroactive manifesto, a scripted chronology of the stages of Manhattanism, its’ permutations and lasting legacies; notably the culture of congestion, Manhattans own “metropolitan urbanism” and revolutionary lifestyle. Through his optimistic narrative “Delirious New York”, Koolhaas, a former screenwriter, sets about investigating the underlying and ironic truths of Manhattan, from the first signs of architecturally applicable technologies, through the great crash and to the present day, 1978. Through a pragmatic approach in understanding external factors and a series of case studies, he documents the reoccurring elements and themes in New York’s development and decline that make it “a theatre of progress” and “the capital of perpetual crisis”. This focuses in particular on the skyscraper as a product of the physical manifestation of Manhattanism on the grid, along with the relationship between this density-focused architecture and the culture of congestion.

At a time where New York had gained a reputation as “a graffiti-covered, crime-ridden relic of history”, Koolhaas, then the recent founder of OMA and visiting lecturer at Eisenman’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, begins to assess and promote what it took to make the capital of invention the ideal precedent and, therefore, what it would take to regain its rightful place on the world stage. He is reconstructing the “perfect Manhattan” so that it’s monumental successes and failures become more evident and it is by selecting New York as the focus of his first major work that Koolhaas sets a foundation for his career.

Split into five distinct “blocks”, an anthology covering “Coney Island, The Skyscraper, Rockefeller Center … Europeans ” and a fictional appendix, each with further component parts, the book acknowledges its affiliation with the Manhattan grid as “a collection of blocks whose proximity and juxtaposition reinforce their separate meanings”. In 1807-1811 “the final and conclusive” plan for Manhattan was made, resulting in the 2028 blocks of the grid to which Koolhaas pays a particular critical focus, labelling it an “artificial domain planned for nonexistent clients in anticipation”, a negative symbol of the short-sightedness of commercial interests with no regard for interaction between fragments or spontaneity. It is with an ever-growing population in a “metropolis of rigid chaos” that the skyscraper then becomes inevitable, forcing an upward extrusion of the grid to maximise profit, often without regard for the art of designing buildings. With the introduction of the 1916 zoning law comes a level of control on the cities scale explosion, without being too restrictive and therefore unintentionally providing a basis for intelligent architectural invention. “The metropolis needs/deserves its own specialized architecture”. When, through his work and with several other architects, Hugh Ferris investigates, but doesn’t solve, the true issues of Manhattan, focusing on the unexplored potential of zoning law, he famously creates the first concrete image of the “mega village” and later the “Ferrisian Void”. “Manhattanism is conceived in Ferriss’ womb”.

From Manhatta to Manhattan, the continuous experiment begins with its discovery by the Dutch in 1609, a link with the Europeans that continues through the rise and fall of the enterprise. “Manhattan is a theater of progress...the cyclical restatement of a single theme: creation and destruction irrevocably interlocked”, a quote which applies to many other scenarios throughout the text. An overview of Manhattans answer to the Crystal Palace introduces the reader to invention as a public spectacle, isolated from direct confrontation with reality. This is further explored in the section “Coney island: the technology of the fantastic”, a resort for the testing of ideas, social experimentation and surrealism in the form of reality. “ A resort implies the presence, not too far away, of a reservoir of people existing under conditions that require to escape occasionally to recover their equilibrium” and to survive as a place offering contrast from the reality shortage in the city, Coney contrasts the natural with the supernatural. To give an idea of scale, the infrastructure and communications networks contained within Luna Park are far superior and more energy consuming that most contemporary American cities. When the centennial tower arrives “it also offers an additional direction of escape: mass ascension”.

Through the accidental and planned inventions of its three parks, infrastructure is created to meet the demands of it’s overtaxed system and, becoming less popular the more people it attracts, Coney island develops bizarre and outrageous technologies, concepts and urban scenarios that eventually become applied in a normal context as the focus shifts to Manhattan. This establishes an urbanism based on the technology of the fantastic- defining completely new relationships between site, program, form and technology. As it is sent crashing back to reality after fire, that even its well-practised fire-fighter cast can’t extinguish, Coney meets its downfall. More ironically, it is proposed that the land should be turned into a public park, becoming a model for the modern Manhattan of grass, exactly what it was providing an alternative to. But the precedent doesn’t work second time around, the testing ground has to adapt with the times. Where Coney Island is the testing ground for the skyscraper, Manhattan then continues to be a testing ground for urbanism. And who is to argue that Manhattan wasn’t the inventor of these things? If not, Koolhaas is very convincing.

The inception of the culture of congestion and the technologies developed, notably the elevator and steel, facilitate the rise of the Manhattan skyscraper, “born in instalments between 1900 and 1910”. This represents the meeting of three breakthroughs, “the reproduction of the world”, “the annexation of the tower” and “the block alone”, each defined separately by Koolhaas “before they were integrated into a ‘glorious whole’”. As the demand for office space rises in an emerging metropolis with a restrictive grid, created there is a need for the production of an unlimited number of virgin sites in a single location, each with it’s own destiny outside of the control of the architect. Koolhaas describes the “ideal performance of the skyscraper” in its initial stages as a concept, existing in 1909, as 84 disconnected virgin sites stacked on top of each other- “a new form of unknowable urbanism”. As models of this descent manifest themselves within the grid, so presents itself one of Manhattans most intense themes- “a city in a building”. As the concept of the 100th floor approaches and the skyscraper becomes even more the product of an architecture by economy and with it comes what Koolhaas terms “Lobotomy”, that is, “less and less surface has to represent more and more interior activity”, a container for undetermined interior activity rather than the expression of that externally, a still relevant scenario characterising today’s urban fabric. At the point where the 1916 zoning law is introduced, the culture of congestion becomes an enterprise, an indication of the culture of the 21st century. “Congestion itself is the essential condition for realising each of these metaphors in the reality of the grid”.

Koolhaas explains a “summary of the phases of Manhattans urbanism, featuring all the strategies, theorems, paradigms and ambitions that sustain the inexorable progress of Manhattanism”. Portrayed in the creation of the Waldorf Astoria hotel and the Empire State building, “a skyscraper surpassing in height anything ever constructed by man”, is the conversion from virgin site to skyscraper in 150 years, an example of what he terms an auto monument. The problem at the beginning is simply that it isn’t a skyscraper and should become one in order to reap the financial harvest permitted by the 1916 law. There is no room for nostalgia. The Empire State is the last manifestation of Manhattanism as pure and thoughtless process, the climax of subconscious Manhattan and the first example of what was to come.

Through a description of the life of the Rockefeller Center we begin to understand Koolhaas’ intentions. By this point, he has introduced key characters and themes which are optimised in the creation of the Rockefeller Center, a city within a city exemplifying the financial viability of the skyscraper and representing congestion on all possible levels. As a hybrid building, the building isn’t assigned a hierarchy, nor does it follow a specific typology, but parts of the mountain are assigned to necessary functions, what Koolhaas terms the “the vertical schism, which creates the freedom to stack such disparate activities directly on top of each other without any concern for their symbolic compatibility”. To fit a brief “the center must combine the maximum of congestion with the maximum of light and space”, an achievable target given the great depression of the 1930’s which represented time to think, “an enforced break in the frenzy of production”, and for the principals of the center to become more idealistic than commercial. It is described as “a masterpiece without a genius”, a result of the work of the associated architects, formed in part during the crash and proof for Koolhaas of the advantages of architecture by committee. “There is at least one idea for each of its 250million dollars”. “Rockefeller Center is the fulfilment of the promise of Manhattan. All paradoxes have been resolved. From now on the metropolis is perfect.”. It promises a significant contribution to the city planning of an unfolding future.

The end is marked with the invasion of the Europeans who come to “reclaim” Manhattan and adapt it to their own needs. “A tourist returns from foreign unrecognisable” and so did the skyscraper once it had been to Europe”. Through a bizarre cross fertilization of misunderstood rhetoric, American pragmatism and European idealism have exchanged ethos”. A particular emphasis on Dali and Le Corbusier represents Koolhaas’ apparent aversion to Le Corbusier. Where Dali does not attempt to tamper “with its physique”, Le Corbusier “proposes literally to destroy it” and in doing so first attempts to disprove the existence of the city as machine before he can create his own alternative where there is no place for the technology of the fantastic only business, the result being the anti skyscraper. After a “worldwide journey of paranoia” Corbusier brings the Radiant city, a theoretical metropolis in search of location and the anti Manhattan, to New York. But the scheme possesses no metaphor and by proposing to literally solves congestion and kills it, so creating the urban non event New York’s own planners have always avoided, a result of excluding of the factors that have built the Ferissian mountain. In the late thirties Manhattanism is waning. Post-war architecture is the accountants’ revenge on pre-war businessmen’s dreams. The formula “technology + cardboard = reality” created in the early days of Coney Island has retuned to haunt Manhattan, the result being not “peeling white paint but disintegrating curtain walls of the cheap skyscraper”. “Through its amnesia, Manhattan no longer supports an infinite number of superimposed and unpredictable activates on a single site; it has regressed back to the clarity and predictability of univalence- to the known.”

In a fictional conclusion, Koolhaas demonstrates a series of four ironic, speculative and hypothetical projects for New York which encompass all the themes in the book and are “an interpretation of the same material”. With the story of the pool, the last metaphor raises its head, representing the new influx of designers escaping to the freedom of New York but who will inevitably find it destroyed when they present themselves as scriptwriters for the New York stage.

Rem Koolhaas: Delirious New York: A Retrospective Manifesto for Manhattan (1978)

A précis by Emma Watson

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 1978 - written during a period of financial crisis, with the city government narrowly avoiding bankruptcy through a substantial federal loan. 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’.

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.’

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. 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. 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.’

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.



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’. 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.

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. 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. 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’.

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. 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.

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. 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’.



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. 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’. 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’.

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.