Architectural Context Part 7: Rem Koolhaas
Architectural Context Part 6: Robert Venturi
In 1853 New York’s world fair showcased recent technological inventions. Among the exhibits was the elevator invention that would ultimately shape the face of the city for the following decades. In the age of staircases, all the floors above the second were considered unfit for any commercial activities and floors above the fifth to an extent uninhabitable.¹ The invention of the elevator allowed us to reintroduce these floors to the urban setting creating the typology of a skyscraper. The influence that the technological invention of the elevator had on the City of New York is well articulated in Rem Koolhaas’s book “Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto”.
Koolhaas writes:
The elevator is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy: the further It goes up, the more undesirable 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 … any given site can now be multiplied ad Infinitum to produce the proliferation of floor space called Skyscraper.²
In Koolhaas’s articulation, the concept of skyscraper introduced a new form of relationships between context and architectural artefacts. The more stories are stacked on top of each other the less is the significance of the original ground as an origin. The skyscraper, with the ability to grow infinitely in the vertical dimension, was liberated from its immediate context and was opened up to its internal programmatic logic to a certain extent independent from the original ground. One of the interesting speculations that followed the invention of the skyscraper was a cartoon called “Theorem 1909” published in “Life” magazine that was a radicalization of the idea of a skyscraper.
The cartoon (Figure Above) was depicting an eighty-four stories high steel framework or a “rack” that could produce unlimited numbers of sites stacked on a single plot. Each of the sites independent from one another as if others don’t even exist. What is interesting in “Theorem 1909” is that disconnectedness of each plot seems to conflict with the fact that all plots together form a whole. It proposed a new conception of relationships between the parts and the whole.³ From the point of view of the city, this meant that a particular plot could no longer be matched with a concrete purpose and function.⁴ The “Theorem 1909” according to Koolhaas marked the beginning of unknowable urbanism since each of the plots was to be infused with its own program that was out of reach for an individual architect.⁵ Koolhaas argues that after only twenty-two years the seemingly obscure proposition of “Theorem 1909” was realized in the form of “The Downtown Athletic Club” (Figure 30). Being a thirty-eight storey high building “The Downtown Athletic Club” offered a different athletic activity on each floor: a swimming pool on the twelfth floor, a golf course on the seventh and a Turkish bath and a massage saloon on the tenth floor. While describing the ninth floor, Koolhaas writes:
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. 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 gloves, naked, on the nth floor — such is the “plot” of the ninth story, or, the 20th century in action.⁶
According to Koolhaas, the multiplicity of layers embedded in the typology of a skyscraper was the product of the culture of congestion, and the diversity of internal programmatic needs was a collage shaped by the cultural context of the second half of the twentieth century.⁷ For Koolhaas, the culture of congestion was a contextual force that stimulated the emergence of the skyscrapers. The culture of congestion implied a context where the skyscrapers were used as devices for generating and intensifying specific forms of human interaction.⁸ It is also important to note that another great driver for the development of the skyscraper and its wide use in Manhattan was the fact that Manhattan is an island and has limited capacity for horizontal growth. Thus, the vertical development was a form of a geographical self-consciousness of the city, a response to its geographic context.
The section of the Downtown athletic club had a central role in Koolhaas’s early work. The relationships between “Theorem 1909” and “The Downtown Athletic Club” illustrate a critical aspect of Koolhaas’s work. “Theorem 1909” was an obscure proposition a surreal concept projected onto the city, yet twenty-two years later this perplexing proposition becomes a reality in the form of Downtown Athletic Club. According to Koolhaas, the very act of projection onto the city lays the groundwork for the emergence of certain artefacts within the city. This construction of an alternate reality and its subsequent juxtaposition with reality is what lies in the foundation of the “Paranoid Critical Method” advocated by Koolhaas. This experimental method, introduced by Salvador Dali, juxtaposes a surreal concept with the existing reality in order to re-contextualize it. It creates a collage between the surreal and the real allowing one to act as a ground for the other. In its essence, it is a method for modification of the ground in order to recontextualize the figure. The paranoid-critical method was not merely an abstract concept; it allowed Koolhaas to conceptualize the idea of ground differently. Instead of being a rigid datum, it allowed perceiving the ground as a modifiable entity. Similar underlying logic can be found in Koolhaas’s entry for the 1982 Parc de La Villette competition in Paris. The proposal for the park consisted of a series of programmatic stripes attached laterally and linked by a perpendicular promenade. The Parc de La Villette proposal was an attempt to apply the same principle of the downtown athletic club onto the urban setting. The laterally joined programmatic stripes were an analogy of different floors in the section of the Downtown athletic club and the perpendicular promenade the vertical elevator. This method allowed Koolhaas to suggest that not only the ground of individual building but also the ground of a city can be reconceptualized and modified. Eisenman’s analysis of Koolhaas’s work reveals this approach by highlighting that in the competition proposal for Mission Grand Axe visualizations reveal a hand lifting up the corner of the ground suggesting that surface of the ground is something malleable (Figure Below).⁹
Similarly, in Koolhaas’s proposal for Jussieu Libraries, the ground rises in the form of continuous tilting surface trapping volumes of the void in between the floor planes. These in-between spaces are the only figures of the building. In Jussieu Libraries the malleable ground is used to create a different version of the Downtown Athletic Clubs section. Instead of spatial and programmatic discontinuity of Downtown Athletic Club, the Jussieu Libraries juxtapose spatial continuity with programmatic discontinuity (Figure 32). For Koolhaas, the section of the Downtown Athletic Club is a method to question the traditional part-to-whole relationships. The skyscraper due to its verticality becomes liberated from its immediate context and origin opening itself up for mutations caused by its inner programmatic logic. The logic is to a certain extent independent from its immediate context. In contrast to the work of other postmodernists, Koolhaas’s method proposes the idea of discontinuity and disjunction as opposed to fragmentation and contrast of a collage. Instead of being seen as a rigid plain of origin Koolhaas’s work suggests a reading of ground that is malleable.
References
[1]: Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The Monacelli Press 1994), 82.
[2]: Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The Monacelli Press 1994), 82.
[3]: Peter Eisenman, Ten canonical Buildings 1950–2000 (New York: Rizzoli, 2008), 203.
[4]: Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The Monacelli Press 1994), 85.
[5]: Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The Monacelli Press 1994), 87.
[6]: Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The Monacelli Press 1994), 155.
[7]: Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The Monacelli Press 1994), 125.
[8]: Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The Monacelli Press 1994), 152.
[9]: Peter Eisenman, Ten canonical Buildings 1950–2000 (New York: Rizzoli, 2008), 202–203.
