The double life of Utopia: the skyscraper
1. the reproduction of the world
Each plane of a skyscraper is considered as a virgin land, which the architects have no control over the specific programs. The skyscraper becomes the great metropolitan destablizer that promises perpetual programmatic instability. Considering that Manhattan is separated from the continent by two rivers at each side, which excludes the possibility of expansion, the skyscraper is the only choice for the growing business demand.
The skyscrapers are seen as repetition/reproduction of the site/earth by Rem Koolhaas.
The lobby of the skyscrapers accommodates social facilities such as shops and bars, which competes with the street and finally makes the surrounding streets deserted. Like the Unite de Marseilles, they have the ambition to become “a city within a city.”
The Model of the 100 Stories Building
The building is interrupted every 20th floor by public plazas that separate different functional sectors: industry at the bottom, business in the second quarter, living in the third and a hotel in the fourth. The 20th floor is a general market, the 40th a theater, the 60th a shopping district the 80th a hotel the 100th an amusement park, roof garden and swimming pool. And it has a temperature and atmosphere regulating system.

The forthcoming model of the skyscraper is the combination of three attributes: 1.the reproduction of the site (seen in Flatiron Building). 2. The introduction of a tower (Metropolitan Life Building). 3. The occupancy of the whole block (the Madison Square Garden). All the three form of building have their own drawbacks: the multiplication lacks meaning, the tower has meaning but its intention of isolation is compromised by the its location, which is just a small plot in one single block, and the sole occupancy of the whole block, like the Madison Square Garden cannot make enough money to support itself. But when the three ally with each other, 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 land. This is the combination of three types of building. And this combination is supposed to be capable of accommodating different functions, making the whole as a self-contained universe. An application and exemplification of Rossi’s typology.
The combination of the three thus becomes an “automonument” which establishes its monumentality out of its sheer volume rather than any conventional symbolism. But there is a controversy between its monumentality and its mission to accommodate living, which is anti-monumental.
Architectural Lobotomy: The separation of exterior and interior. Two different architecture inside and outside the building (eg. Murray’s Roman Garden). The fantastic inside (using the most modern technology to achieve a shift in metropolitan culture) supplants the utilitarian (the grid system) once pervasive in Manhattan. An inconspicuous revolution takes place in the obstinate traditional urban landscape (the grid). Different stories happen in the standardized urban field.

The Skyscraper Theorists
Hugh Ferriss’ charcoal renderings of the skyscrapers focus solely on mass, but not the details. So he becomes a surreptitious corrector of Manhattan Skyscrapers under his dream of turning New York into a new Athens. He then decodes the 1916 Zoning Law and creates a prototype for skyscrapers.
Unconscious phase to quasi-conscious phase.

Harvey Wiley Corbett
“Modernized Venice” to promote congestion.

The Empire State Building
In essence there is a pyramid of non-rentable space surrounded by a pyramid of rentable space. It is automatic architecture which is thoughtless and is without cultural concerns.

Waldorf-Astoria Hotel is not simply the end-product of a long pedigree, but even more its sum, the simultaneous existence --- on a single location, at a single point in time --- of all its “lost” stages. It was necessary to destroy those early manifestations in order to preserve them. The compromised solution of architecture in the commercial, pop-cultural and delirious Manhattan. In Manhattan’s Culture of Congestion, destruction is another word for preservation.

Manhattan is described by Raymond Hood as a version of functionalism distorted by the demands and opportunities of density and congestion. With the life in Manhattan given, people are segregated into two categories: one of Metroplitanites --- literally self-made --- who have used the full potential of all the apparatus of Modernity to reach unique levels of perfection, the second simply the remainder of the traditional human race.

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’.

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.