The problem with urban planning would seem to be that, while it would be optimal to build a city from scratch, you tend to be stuck figuring out what to do with the city you already have somewhere in the middle. That’s a lot of what Delirious New York is about. Koolhas shows how NYC grew, and the ideas that went into it, and the ideas that were floating around it that tried to go into it. It’s not like a Jane Jacobs v. Robert Moses thing; it’s more of an architect’s take on the other architects, plus a meditation on the themes underlying the architecture.
There’s a number of great themes to NY. The tower is one of the most important, going back to the 19th Century’s Crystal Palace in Bryant Park (which was the American take on Victoria’s and Albert’s CP in London). There’s plenty of towers at Coney Island (one of which kept being mistaken for a real lighthouse, to much annoyance of ship captains) in its turn-of-the-century heyday. There’s the Trylon of the 1939 World’s Fair, my personal favorite. And, of course, there’s the dozens and dozens of towers incorporated into the skyscrapers that sprouted up on Manhattan over the years.
Manhattan just grew at the beginning, and you can tell this today by walking around the lower parts of the island, where the roads run higgledy-piggledy as roads will. In the 19th Century the NY grid was created, dividing the city into the streets and avenues we know now. A real grid, creating the issue of blocks. Each block is the same, inviolable. What do you do with them?
Theoretically city planning was from scratch, then, at this point, except that you didn’t have the congestion of the city, and its pressure to push the city up into the sky. Nor, yet, did you really have the structural tools to do so. But they came soon enough, and the next thing you know, you can start building skyscrapers which, as Koolhas said, originally simply reproduced the earth (and the Flatiron Building is a perfect example of this, a little triangular space with a tall triangular building reproducing the ground on every level). As tall buildings become feasible, people started imagining what they would be like, and there were theorists of skyscrapery. What goes inside a building, once it’s built? What should it look like from the outside. Koolhas discusses the lobotomy between interiors and exteriors. The outsides of the buildings start taking on their certain look, while the insides can be just about anything from (real) recreations of ancient Babylon to (real) golf courses to (fictional) little suburban houses taking up entire floors, complete with lawns and flowering shrubbery. Often a building would take over the shape of an entire block (but no more, because the grid is the absolute limit, and there are still almost no exceptions – Central Park, of course, Lincoln Center, maybe some of the socialist realist blocks of urban renewal); an entire block-wide building filled with whatever you wanted to put into it. Architecturally, from the outside, skyscrapers became monuments, or as Koolhas puts it, automonuments: monuments to themselves. The Woolworth Building is a temple of commerce, whatever that is, but really, it’s a temple calling one to worship its own existence.
It didn’t take long for a big problem with skyscrapers to surface: they cast big shadows, stealing the sunlight from the street. In 1916 zoning laws were passed that required that, while at the bottom a building could take up as much as an entire block, from a certain point up, it had to be set back. This leads to a certain classic NYC skyscraper look for 40 years or so, a large bottom with a tower in the middle, something of a cathedral with spire approach. Some buildings simply got pointy, like the Empire State or Chrysler. Models for these sort of zoning-law buildings are seen in the wonderful Hugh Ferriss paintings, models of massive buildings in a expressionistic City of Nowhere.
Through all of this, there are the theorists. All sorts of designs of what the city ought to be (many of which would require tearing down the existing city). Large areas with parks in the middle and four enormous towers on each corner. Sidewalks raised above street levels creating a Venice with cars on the street filling in for boats on the canals. Great stuff, wildly imaginative, often totally ridiculous or impossible. But a lot of what you might look at now as old-timey science fiction illustration derives at the time from very serious ideas of urbanism.
Le Corbusier (Corbu, the crow) came along in the 30s with his plan for the city, which did indeed require that the present city be torn down. He had been hawking this plan for a city around the world; no one took him up on it. It included a different kind of skyscraper, which he called the horizontal skyscraper rising out of the jungle, the antidote to the mishmash lobotomized automonumental buildings that existed now in Manhattan. These buildings can only be understood in that that are anti-Manhattanist, anti-grid, anti-zoning, anti-congestion. What you get from Corbu is the United Nations building, rising out of its park on the east side. The cleanest possible modern skyscraper. (Or better still, if you’re looking for the antidote to what came before, maybe you should look at the Mies’ Seagram’s Building, right in the thick of things, in its own little concrete park, with the modernist Lever House across the street with its own created rooftop park.)
One of the big take-aways from the book, if only indirectly, is that idea that you can’t plan a city, that they just grow, for whatever reasons. Of course, you can lay out a grid, as did New York and D.C. You can rebuild all at once, as did San Francisco after the earthquake, or Haussman’s Paris. But at the point you need to fold in skyscraper architecture, you’re probably talking about a city that is already there, and already pretty dynamic, so you’re stuck with some measure of pre-existing infrastructure. You can, I guess, build something in a vacuum as goofily postmodern as Dubai, but most cities making names for themselves today are pretty old (Taiwan and Singapore, for instance), throwing up tall buildings to make a point, not to re-urbanize. Disney planned out his Prototype Community, very much in the classic city planning approach of a Corbu, covering every aspect of its citizens’ lives, but it wasn’t his death that kiboshed it, it was the organic Jane Jacobs gospel that convinced people that cities needed to be lively at ground zero. (If the Disney Corp people had ever felt that Walt’s idea would succeed, they would sooner or later have produced it, Epcot or no Epcot. Hell, they made a movie out of Country Bears, after all.)
I love walking around cities. A city like New York, with so little history, is almost comprehensible (it’s its magnitude that does you in). I look forward to Budapest, Vienna and Prague in a few weeks. Centuries upon centuries of history. Get out the walking shoes.
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