Book Review:

Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York

Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny

"We will each write a ghost story," said Lord

Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were
four of us....I busied myself to think of a story -- a story to
rival those which had excited us to this task. One which
would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and
awaken thrilling horror -- one to make the reader dread to
look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings
of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost
story would be unworthy of its name. I thought and
pondered -- vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention
which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull
Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. Have you
thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each
morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.
...Night waned...and even the witching hour
had gone by, before we retired to rest. When I placed my
head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to
think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided
me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind
with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I
saw -- with shut eyes, but acute mental vision -- I saw the
pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing

he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man

stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful
engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half
vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful
would be the effect if any human endeavour to mock the
stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His
success would terrify the artist; he would hope that, left to
itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated
would fade; that this thing, which had received such
imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and
he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave
would quench for ever the transient existence of the
hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of
life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes;
behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his
curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but
speculative eyes.
I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed
my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished
to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities
around....I could not so easily get rid of my hideous
phantom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of
something else. I recurred to my ghost story -- my
tiresome unlucky ghost story! O! if I could only contrive
one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been
frightened that night!
[From Mary Shelley's 1931 Introduction to Frankenstein]

"The most interesting thing about architecture

is arriving in new worlds rather than returning to old ones."

Rem Koolhaas

Rem Koolhaas has resurrected the Frankenstein

monster; only now it is a book of history, the architectural
history of New York City. Like Dr. Frankenstein's experiment,
the project takes on a life of its own. By insisting that
architecture is really about society, culture and politics,
and how these things change and interact, this book
transcends the retelling of urban history. It critically
examines the 20th century architecture through the prism
of a very specific (although never openly and formally
established) "prison" theory, Manhattanism.
With unexpected passion, Koolhaas' monster,
Delirious New York, exceeds the master's goals, moves
quickly and intelligently, providing a good understanding of
the role of complex and multiple social and political
phenomena in the evolution of the modern metropolis. It
looks at urban life in this century as a fluid, largely chaotic
"culture of congestion" over which architects -like Dr.
Frankenstein's kids- can assert virtually no lasting control.
And who would want to? Not Koolhaas. His love of the
urban conditions is surpassed only by his mania for the
unknown, the untenable, the unmanageable and the
untried.
Example. Coney Island amusement parks
turning into skyscrapers.

Koolhaas' monster is made of mechanic parts;

it is a lovable amusing robot; and it is big. :
"Dreamland can/should reproduce experience
and fabricate almost any sensation, sustain any number of
ritualistic performances that exorcise the apocalyptic
penalties of the metropolitan condition, and survive the
onslaught of over a million visitors a day."
The above quotation from
Delirious New York, describes the intentions of Senator
W.H.Reynolds in his vision of the Coney Island park to end
all parks, Dreamland, at the dawn of the century. Visitors to
Dreamland were ferried from Manhattan onto a large pier
that could harbour up to 60.000 people at a time,
entering the park through the porches underneath plasterof Paris reconstructions of huge ships in full sail. Once
inside this "underwater" post-proletarian "universe" visitors
could visit the largest ballroom in the world, leaving
behind the traditional intimacy of the ballroom dance
experience by donning rollerskates, and hence
counteracting the seemingly clumsiness of human
movement in this age of technological frenzy. Amongst
the attractions offered was Lilliput, an experimental midget
community, where the midget inhabitants were showered
with aristocratic titles while encouraged to disregard the
normal moral codes of society, with its own parliament and
fire fighting corps. An incubator hall where a new race was
nurtured - premature babies born in the greater New York
area were collected into the ultra-modern hospital with its
german farm house facade, and human fate was directly

affected in this synthetic environment.

In Dreamland only 150 meters
separated the beginning and the end of the world, and
visitors flowed backwards through the panoramic
experiences within the dome building called "Creation",
through the buffer of the Circus, and into the
"Destruction" theatre on a series of water canals. The
cast of human and animal performers in this three- theatre
experience moved from arena to arena via undeground
passages. An infinite number of simultaneous
performances could be given independently and
interwoven with each other by a single rotating cast. From
the Japanese tea room, to the simulated flight over
Manhattan (preceding the first actual aeroplane flight),
from coasting through the mountains of Switzerland with
its streams of artificially cooled air, to floating along
the canals of Venice, this fantamagolic theme park is
arranged in a single programmatic composition such that
the presence of each attraction is indispensable to the
impact of the others.
Space took on a virtual guise as
cubic meters superseded square meters and the floating,
rotating, ascending and descending activities expanded
the space within the envelope of the facade. Real life
entered with the expectations of the hoards of visitors, was
affected by the intergration of fabricated communities, and
projected through new technological feats by interpreted
representations of historical reconstructions, futuristic
visions and a diversity of global locations, cultures and

practices.
Homelessness as the opposite of
homesickness, is the word that best describes and qualifies
the above, necessary detailed reference to dreamland. In
this context, it signifies a longing for the perfect place to
which one has never been; it is not a longing for home; it is
a longing for ideals.
Homelessness turning into mega-villages;
Nostalgia turning into lobotomized interiors.
The experience of the amusement parks is
displaced from Coney Island to Manhattan; the interiors of
the new skyscrapers imitate environments, spaces and life
qualities forever (?) lost or never reached before. Images of
ideals and utopias from the nostalgic past, the obscure
present and the unknown -but somehow predictablefuture.
What is at question here is the quality of the
relationship between body and space, the individual and
the city, the "alive" monster and its inhospitable
environment. One brilliant meditation on this is probably
Anthony Vidler's The Architectural Uncanny. Through
Freud's concept of "uncanny" or unheimlich (literally
"unhomely"), Vidler highlights the need for the body to live
in creative space where the homeless, the haunted and the
outsider (dreamland's midgets perhaps?) are truly at
home.

The term unheimlich and its opposite heimlich

originally appear in Freud's essay "the uncanny". Among
the key connotations of heimlich are: "friendly, intimate,
homelike: the enjoyment of quiet content etc., arousing a
sense of peaceful pleasure and security as in one within
the four walls of (one's) house." But in the German usage,
the comfort of "homeliness" also tends to take on a
somewhat ambiguous association, through a house's ability
to conceal, to isolate and to hide the occupants from the
sight of the others. Heimlich immunes the occupants from
the need to confront the unfamiliar, the new and the
innovative. The tyranny of "homeliness" is clear when the
threatening and incomprehensible is equated with the
"unhomely" in the term unheimlich or uncanny. "What is
uncanny is frightening precisely because it is not known
and familiar."
To understand some of the power of the
concept of unheimlich we have to take a look at his
Beyond the pleasure principle. Here Freud's ambivalence
with homely comforts, or indeed any form of psychological
security, is expressed through the dramatic notions of Eros
(Life Force) and Death Instinct (Thanatos). Death Instinct is
a psychological process of the self always returning to the
familiar and established routine. It is characterized by
repetitions and a psychological conservatism in the body's
refusal to dissipate energy.
Taking from the Freud's notion of entropy in the
idea of homeliness, Vidler puts forward a theory of "live
space" in cities. He sees homesickness and its ally,

nostalgia as a sort of death-wish, and the cultural

celebration of the home as underpinned by the desire for
the body to avoid the stress and pain of Oedipal struggle.
For it to come alive, Vidler suggests, the body must
emancipate itself from that protective unity between body
and the building encapsulated in the idea of home. For
Vidler (and for Freud), the uncanny and the unheimlich are
the only possibilities in which the body can be truly alive
(Frankenstein's monster). The body is free when is able to
move in space situated in diversity which forever ruptures
borders between established forms and uses. There is thus
a profound irony in "homely comfort". The body and self
can only achieve their existential destiny when they accept
loss as natural and irrevocable: "homelessness" is the only
route to self discovery.
Through Vidler's prism, Koolhaas' goal becomes
more evident. Dreamland's symbolism becomes
transparent. The ironic schism, this optimistic aspect of the
Manhattan's theory that incorporates all kinds of paradoxes
and fights the "form follows function" command in order to
doubt and re-discover itself again and again staying
forever young, is what mostly amazes Koolhaas. The
Manhattanism approach, though it may seem at first
ridiculous (especially for the aging European intellect), it is
after all a celebration of life. The New World expresses its
youthfulness and desire of self-definition through
architecture and urban design, trying to be liberated from
mother Europe's tight squeeze.
"For how should we laugh at the spectacle of

positive projects like that of the "fighting the flames" event

on Coney Island juxtaposed to the actual fire (Thanatos)
that destroyed the fairground in 1911, a fair created for
pleasure (Eros) at the expense of the masses and
contrasting with their degradation? Political irony, surrealist
irony, supreme irony, but this, when juxtaposed to the
future projects of pleasure and economic gain in Manhattan
exposed finally as non-ironic. On the one hand, the facts of
the case, set out with bald titles -"Foundation", "Fire",
"End", on the other, the juxtaposition- itself a time honored
montage technique- that throws everything, including the
stance of the author, into doubt".
Koolhaas' monster is made of differentiated
parts; it is a surrealistic "exquisite corpse" (the resurrected
body again). Surrealists had passed a piece of paper
around a table, each filling a space and folding the sheet to
hide their contribution, creating a collective effort, a
collage technique, the exquisite corpse, which would break
the dominance of a single, centralized, authorial voice. Le
Corbusier cannot be a genious authority in New York.
Rockefeller center -that Corbu despises- may
be the perfect example of the exquisite corpse technique
in architecture. In the way its history is represented,
Rockefeller center becomes a tool of irony, although it was
never intented to be such; a patchwork of all ideals,
utopias and grand schemes imagined for New York, it is a
monument of this city's dream for "bigness". A symbol of
the "symbols' forest" (Beaudelaire) that this city is, Mary
Shelley's -or Dali's- dream beyond reverie

After all, New York is a surrealistic experience.