Highrise of Homes: A Misreading

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Highrise of Homes: A Misreading Seonwoo Kim (Diploma 14, Y4)

Highrise of Homes (1981) is a series of drawings by James Wines, depicting a paraphernalia of detached houses sitting on a steel frame tower. It was a direct parody of the famous Life Magazine cartoon, Real Estate Number (1909), which advertised a fictional plot for a cottage in the sky. Three years prior to Wines’ reinterpretation, Rem Koolhaas embedded the 1909 cartoon in his seminal book Delirious New York (1978), exalting it as a “theorem” that sets precedent to the Manhattan Skyscraper. To Koolhaas, the 1909 proto-Skyscraper predicted the divorce of the exterior and the interior and the infinite fracturing of the floating plots. With the birth of the Skyscraper, the architect could no longer script buildings with a pre-determined program. Instead, he would design the mere skeleton of the building, within which the microcosm of the city would grow. Whereas the 1909 cartoon provided a metaphor for Koolhaas, for Wines, it provided a literal solution. Wines genuinely believed in the artistic possibilities of the shared frame and the individualised infill. He intended the Highrise of Homes as an archetype for mass-housing, which would be determined by “choice, chance and change” as opposed to “the homogenizing vision of a single architect.” What was important to Wines, was not the neutrality of the shared frame, but the idiosyncratic expressions of the homes, as signifiers of familiarity and belonging. Suspended in air, the detached home is, at once, a beacon of individuality as well as a reference of the collective memory; it is a communicative device. Both Koolhaas and Wines reappropriated the original 1909 cartoon to expand their theories on urbanism, density, and the role of the architect. Therefore, it would only seem fitting that we, as the new generation of architects, attempt at our own misreading. The mission is not to uncover the truth, but to find what is relevant to us in the gaps and niches of the existing narrative. By retracing the lineage of the Highrise of Homes chronologically, starting from the 1909 cartoon to the divergence between Rem Koolhaas and James Wines’ respective interpretations, the essay will endeavour to break a linear reading of the Highrise Homes and make room for its new misreading.

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