Friday, July 18, 2003

 
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994).

New York architects’ “state of mind in the mid-twenties” is “a schizophrenia that allows them simultaneously to derive energy and inspiration from Manhattan as irrational fantasy and to establish its unprecedented theorems in a series of strictly rational steps.” (173, italics in original)

This attitude converges with Marshall Berman’s ever-expanding capitalism as creative engine for industrial progress and social promises. As defined by the 1916 Zoning Law, Koolhaas’ Manhattan is the unspoken proof and creation of capitalist logic, in which skyscrapers needle clouds so as to make the most productive and most lucrative three-dimensional spatial use of two-dimensional land plots. “The businessmen have to agree: Manhattanism is the only program where the efficiency intersects with the sublime” (174). But both businessman and architect broker in dreams that become a different urban reality. Which one of the two can imagine what happens with the space within buildings are left empty in times when the space of the buildings’ exteriors are valued more than the space inside, whether for aesthetic pride of heritage design or as valuable commercial advertising venue?

posted by Open Mouth 1:14 AM