Delerious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan - The Double Life of Utopia: The Skyscraper: The Frontier in the Sky by Rem Koolhass Summary by Gustav Kjær Vad Nielsen Koolhass breaks down the notion of the Manhattan Skyscraper into ‘three distinct urbanistic breakthroughs’; The reproduction of the world, the annexation of the tower and the block alone, in an attempt to understand the unfulfilled promise and potential of the New York Skyscraper(p82). Separately these breakthroughs cannot be justified but together, their weaknesses become strengths: (…) The tower lends meaning to the multiplication, 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(p99). A reproduction of the world in terms on a territorial upwards multiplication implies an unknowable urbanism caused by the creation of ‘unlimited’ virgin sites which in its essence cannot be predetermined by any purpose an therefore promises perpetual programmatic instability.(p87) Builders avoid this confrontation by camouflaging the necessity of Skyscrapers and using the need for “business” and the fact that Manhattan is an island as alibis for continuing the madness. As the tower is annexed and afterwards the block the previous disconnected plot now turns into a disconnected block offering a latent possibility of isolation for whole blocks. The solipsism takes shape and generates the so called lobotomy, where the exterior and interior is totally separated while and soon a law of building clauses is defined to control the Mega-village’s vertical expansion.
Koolhass, R. 1994, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, The Monacelli Press, New York.