URBAN REVIEW Nยบ1 2012. 2nd Edition
NEW YORK
URBAN REVIEW Nยบ1 January - February 2012
NEW YORK SPECIAL
PHOTOGRAPHY AND ESSAYS BY DIEGO A. PINZON Language support and text edition by Karin Miller
New York is the city where everything conveys, a surrealist place, yet the most representative one of our times. New York is an amalgamation of people, buildings and animals playing a strange dance in which there is not an apparent order. Best known as the financial capital of the world, New York is probably the place on earth that concentrates elicitsinsofar the strongestr stereotypes and, all the provokes the most imaginaries, everything that everybody should recognize as the metropolis of today. Placed ats the core of the global network, it is the catalystze of what can be considered the contemporary city for both good and evil either. Newy York is a complex jungle of human behaviors embodied into spaces, a city that reacts and perhaps best performs better the modern frenzy. I had the opportunity to visit the city three times from 2004 to 2011 and there is no hesitation to affirm conclude that, whereas the city have has not changed significantly in its physical aspect, it yet changes every day with every single movement. The city is still there, not only in its material dimension, while some buildings had are torne down and new ones replace them, the people still do what they have been doing from decades ago, thatis is, performing the same modern ballet which is no more that the modern urban life per definition,but the contemporary cultural image per se. New York might be my favorite city in the world, and the reason motivation for choosing itto be chosen a as the first target of this series of urban reviews is not because of its well known image, but because New York, along with its five boroughs, make you feel at home yet being a total stranger. There There areis not surprises in this city since every corner, every single building might have been pictured, filmed, represented‌. Yet the city is a big surprise as a whole. It is totally predictable, yet completely unpredictable, New York always keeps always something new for you, awkwardness, music, innovations, bad moods, bad words, cheap food, souvenirs‌ you can purchase happiness, bargain your hope, mortgage your life. During the first visit I made, back in 2004, the scale astonished me since there is not another metropolis with such a strong willingness sense of power, it was a shock to recognize that everything there everything is massive; massiveness may be the word that concentrates the quintessentialce idea of New York. New York is a race of survivors, a house of homeless and the faith of the faithless. In my second visit, it became clear that the city performs a very complex mechanism of social dynamics (legal and illegal), everybody in this place plays an specific role, the city is shaped for those actorsones. New York is a social agreement, a pyramidal institution where everybody is able to climb and reach an upper level while but nobody is encouraged to do so. During my last visit, the city has changed for me, not in the physical aspect because the image remains there, but the social dance became clearer, and in a positive way. It got became a self evident paradigm, the city lies there to amuse and to bore, to surprise and to upset, and it is so hard complex that it is impossible to understand. That is the charm of New York City.
Prelodium: TRAIN OF THOUGHT 1. THE CIVIC BODIES
Ethnic Mixture. A Review of Richard Sennett. Essay by Diego Pìnzon
2. INSIGHT THE SOLID
A Review of MARSHALL BERMAN. Essay by Diego Pìnzon
3. IS IT BOSTON AN IMAGINABLE CITY? Essay by Diego Pìnzon
4. MOSES VS JACOBS.
TWO FACES OF MODERNITY. Essay by Diego Pìnzon
5. THE EXPONENTIAL GRID.
A Project for The Greatest Grid Competition of the Museum of the City of New York In Partnership with Eduardo Parra
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6. LITERATURE REVIEW 1: The Dwarf by DIEGO PINZON
7. INTO THE SPRAWL A Graphic Survey into The Suburbia
8. A TRIBUTE TO HUGH FERRIS. Essay by Diego Pìnzon
9. LITERATURE REVIEW 2: Crime And Punishment by DIEGO PINZON
10. KOOLHAAS TOOK NEW YORK A Review of Rem Koolhaas. Essay by Diego Pìnzon
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TRAIN OF THOUGHT Cabs, taxi drivers cursing the traffic, a jungle of concrete that rose from the almighty dimension of the economic capitals, the hidden ones, the ones that bless somebody, the same that break the other ones. The jungle of steel and concrete that protect from the harmful sunlight in summer and the blizzards in winter. The infinite sequence of windows and skins, advertisings and roofs, beggars, accents, slang, an infinite path towards heaven or hell. The fiddler in the corner heading trying to get enough for the rent, the old man rushing to the temple, the cop looking for something, he already doesn’t know what is, and probably will not know‌ the dancer, the pickpocket, the lost tourist, the businessman running to his respective temple, the young girl looking for the new fashionable stereotype, the current and ephemeral pop star asking herself the reason of the jam, her driver asking himself the reason of her popularity, her stalker asking himself the reason of her charming and the manager asking herself the way to rent her even moremaximize her profitabilityle. Windows everywhere, every size, material and form able to be conceived, an urban mosaic had risen a game of shadows and lights, twilight, shapes playing with the sun from dawn to dusk, cathedrals conceived to allow the sunlight achieve the street level, slopes of concrete, a jungle of poles, a forest of neon advertisings, all the mankind seemed to gather in the same place. One kid whistling, one officer running, one musician playing, one janitor dropping out off the garbage, one mother looking for her daughter, one girl looking for her mother, one mongrel sniffing for food, one homeless nourishing with wastes, one Japanese flashing a picture, one bicycle rusted at the corner, one migrant distributing
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flyers, one student walking to the subway station, one blacksmith looking for a job, one squirrel getting up the tree, another driver annoying and cursing, one marine coming back home, one man fixing the neon light, one secretary finding her boss, another student purchasing books, one second handed vendor dealing with obsolete records, one fat woman considering the new junk food suicide combo, one child nagging his father, one jealous wife nagging her husband, another guy calling back for an interview, the postman wondering an address, all rushing in this boundless honeycomb in a constant pace. The mixture of offices, shops, dwellings, streets, bridges, stations, buses, people, animals altogether perform this unique urban rhythm, one that changes along the day, along the month and along the year, it is predictable but unpredictable at the same time, all those artifacts mixing, blending, shaping, destroying, creating, evolving, developing a reality we all called the city. New York is a city that condenses everything, for good and bad, it embodies all kind of human behaviors, all kind of people, for good and bad, all kind of commodities, for good and bad, all kind of social classes, for good and bad, everything is entangled in this modern matrix, everything is possible but nothing is real, this city of the ephemeral is the kingdom of dreams but a dimension of nightmares, is the core of the contemporary civilization, but the periphery of the humanism. In the end, New York is a place for everybody and everything but nobody and nothing ends up its identity. It Iiss just the place of the non material, it is the largest island in a global archipelago, it is a constant flux of whatever able to move, it is everything and nothing‌
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1. THE CIVIC BODIES Ethnic Mixture. A review of Richard Sennett
SENNETT, Richard. Flesh And Stone. The Body and the City in Western Civilization. W.W Norton & Company. 1996
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Ethnical diversity in New York might be one of the its most remarkable urban qualityqualities, the melting pot has been gathering communities from all around the world since it became the core of the financial economy., From Jane Jacobs to Richard Sennett, the combination of different cultures in the same place evolved very different sociological studies and points of view within the city. Flesh and Stone is one of the first, and perhaps the more important book, of the American sociologist Richard Sennett. This work is based on the relationship between the human body, his own conception and its representation within the city. From the nude Greek in the time of Pericles, through Romans, the French revolution and the Jewish in Venice, the Civic citizen of the modern New York ends this historical line as an outcome long time initiated. The isolation of the human to in the urban context is the main thesis of Sennett in the last chapter. The modern phenomenon of social isolation is a theme examined long many years ago but the way how that Sennett underlines the role of the concept of civic body turns changes the classical point of view. The first relation able to be studied is the dichotomy between periphery and center in the city and how it shapes the human behaviors. In fact, the lack of boundaries allowed the territorial expansion while the city became divided into functional zones. Planning as an evil became evident in the cases where the presence of utilitarian borders hinders mobility or the absence of structures renders impossible improvements to the quality of life of the citizens impossible. The second point addressed is the relative denaturalization of the body with its surroundings or as Sennett pointed out: The logistic of speed, however, detach the body from the spaces through which it moves‌ A detachment created within the concept of comfort.
Image from the Ellis Island Immigration Museum
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Once the public transportation formed a new way of mass mobility, the physical relation of the man with the territory became distortedy either in terms of distances and time, appeared distorted while outer external conditions like weather became irrelevant to the everyday life. In these this sense, the idea of belonging to a territory started to be fadedfade into a new, high speed street life. The third and last point is the recognition of an identity based on homogeny of cultural patterns. This sense of belonging to a group moved to a separatist belief materialized through spatial boundaries. The separated city has been a public desire and the planning methods, a tool to achieve it. Sennett wrote as a summary and taking for exampleusing Jane Jacobs and her prototypic neighborhood as an example: Life in Greenwich Village exemplifies perhaps the most we have been able to achieve: a willingness to live with difference, though a denial this entails a shared fate.
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This means, in other words, the reality of diversity in New York City faces the necessity to survive among cultural differences even if there is a background thought to deny it as a social thriving possibility. The role of the body and the city in those terms seems to be contradictory; bodies and the city apparently deny each other, a modern outcome that many sociologists argue. Although it is not a reciprocal relation, in modern New York, the inhabitants play a complex relation with the city by performing different roles in the center or the periphery, independently of the surrounding and following cultural patterns based upon its diversity. In conclusion, what civic means to the urban life seemed to be transformed in New York with the rose of the modernism as a dogma and a target. It no longer represents the relation between the city’sy inhabitants and their city but rather it changed to a relation between individuals sharing a nobody’s place that belongs to no one alien place called New York City.
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2. INSIGHT THE SOLID
MODERNISM IN NEW YORK. A REVIEW OF MARSHALL BERMAN It is modernism the apotheosis of a historical process or it is it just another step in on a long path. It iIs modernization a natural result of the modern thought and New York the place that embodies and embeds it, or just another place and moment in time that will fade away in time aslike other cities like Rome and Constantinople. All that is solid melts into the air is the concept imagined by Karl Marx that summarizes what modernity is in essence: a historical process in which everything must and should change and be changed supported by the latest stages of the capitalism. Berman quoted: The innate dynamism of the modern economy, annihilates everything that it creates –physical environments, social institutions, metaphysical ideas, artistic visions, moral values- in order to create more, to go on endlessly creating a new world anew. Marshall Berman Wrote All that is solid melts into the air as an attempt to decipher what really modernity really is and which are its meanings. When it was it born as a concept, when it did it transform into a doctrine and when it was it pictured as a social end?. At this point, New York as the birthplace of Berman and its close reference to the daily modernism plays the whole process of modernization into its two best known faces, the one of development and the one of cultural preservation. New York is a symbol of active communication, of how modernism can be imagined and lived,lived; how the urban context transforms itself thanks to the new economic necessities and how its inhabitants are the people close enough to perform it in the best and iconic way. However, modernism in New York cannot be taken only as a positive quality, in fact, in the practice of modernism as an ideal, the paradigm of communication and representation of an initiative, the symbol fight with the others aiming for the same and the result is a constant annihilation of the meaning melting themselves into the air. According to Berman, the modernity in New York faces three different stages between the fifties and the seventies being the first two being a denial and contraposition of each one stage and the third, their natural outcome. During the first part of the twentieth century, New York faceds the willingness and of power of Robert Moses, a contradictory and complex character that perhaps, played the role of a powerful broker and faced the consequences of it. Moses’ idea of modernity was to allow and increase movement within the city and its surroundings by the construction of avenues, parks, parkways and summing up, the entire needed infrastructure able to provide and improve mobility and leisure to the New Yorkers.
BERMAN, MARSHAL. All That is Solid Melts into the Air. The Experience of Modernity. Penguin Books. 1988
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The dark face of the moon washidden costs were made evident when, through his attempts, he dividedbroke and passed over different communities. and Berman witnessed this process in his own neighborhood in the Bronx. Moses’ conception of modernization repelled and destroyed everything that wcould hinder his purposes, like communities and, racial mixtures. The target and the process of modernization melted and mixed themselves to a point wheren it was impossible to recognize the differences among the output and the outcome. In other words, Moses’ processes of modernization were a targets itselfthemselves. The bulldozer and the meat ax were his tools, the social dimensions, beyond the possibility to reach a place faster, were totally ignored. Allen Ginsberg, as the main source of Berman’s way to understanding of this part of the modernism, described the Moses’ transformation pace of the city as the Moloch that swallows everything into an eternal coiled course of construction and destruction, obsolescence and renewal. In the end, that is what modernism represents and that is the reason that why everything solid melts into the air. The counter face became a social movement mostly represented by Jane Jacobs during the sixty decadeSixties. Through her female understanding of the city and the everyday life routine, she sought saw that the city is as an entangled system of social relations. Those relations where eased andwere materialized by a prototypical mixture neighborhoods, like the Greenwich Village, where mostly tthe way of life was ignored and over passed over by Moses’ projects. In the Jacobsian world, the self-preservation instinct of a community becomes a rule with the mixture of land uses, ethnical groups and social classes. The modernism proposed by Moses as an a homogeneous W.A.S.P space is a negative ofagainst what the city is and how it should work, against negative of what Jacobs fought for. Finally, in the Sseventies, there was an answer to both sights related with views of modernism,. the answer was that the Moses’ modernism wouldill no longer be able to continue growing due to several historic con sequences; as the energy crisis, the lack of public funds to invest and the decreasing tendency of losing fate to the state. The Sseventies are well recognized as a period of social turmoil where people like Moses no longer belonged. The sStreet modernism, or what Jacobs represented, was neither unsuccessful due to the lack of faith of the public domain, in fact thcriticism ine art and literature feedback with criticism and a sort of nihilist existentialism. In fact, the pPeriod of Gghost, as Berman named called it, is a time in which the past was a memory, the present is uncertainty and the future does not exist. The mModernism was revalued from its roots and questioned as a vision of the world. In New York, however, the artistic movements represented by popular icons like Richard Serra,. Andy Warhol and so on created a recycled modernism recycled; this is a modernism that not doesn’t pretends to be an universal paradigm, but a process of historic changes. In spatial terms, the recycling of the Soho might be one good example of this. In the end, the Ccity of New York embodied all that modernism can brings to a city; and let’s finish with the most important statemententence of Marshall Berman: To be modern, I said, is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into the air.
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3. IS IT BOSTON AN IMAGINEABLE CITY? Almost 40 years ago Kevin Lynch supported by the MIT wrote his very well known book The Image of the City. This book described the ability of urban entities to be reminded by set of backgrounds and items overlapped in mental images, images aiming to recognize and perform the identity of a city. What seems to be a failure within the structure of the imaginable theory is the fact that not only clear objects over the panorama shape a wealthy picture which furthermore, shall remind the physical features of the city. For instance Fez in Morocco is a city with a strong identity even if is clearly chaotic and confusing at the first seek. Cities are not only shaped by physical issues and communities not only remember and identify the urban features by the position and relation of objects over the space. Since people are related within space but also by personal ties beyond the space, the city cannot be only defined basing on the urban placement of elements. Beyond the weakness of the theory and, considered it was written 40 years ago (before the importance of the anthropologist´s view of the city), Lynch understood the spatial coherence among the town items despite of the probability of the pedestrian to recognize his\her environment as a random structure. Coming back to Boston and according to Lynch, the city is far to be an easy legible place. In fact, besides its topographic features as Beacon Hill which in theory should be able to make easier the Bostonian lecture of the space, it is hard to identify clear position points.
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The difficult to read Boston´s spatial configuration rise especially from two aspects, the first one is the strong scar over the downtown by the Central Artery dividing the financial center from North End district. The second aspect is, in fact the difficult to understand the urban fabric at the financial district that makes oddly hard to know where it begins or ends or the spatial connections to and from another districts. Nevertheless, the 5 main elements on Lynch´s theory in Boston spatial configuration: Paths are far configured to be clear between the common and north end, just in between the city downtown Edges are clear but not enough to be considered as a solid structure of boundaries. Districts can be recognized but somehow not the limits among them (except North end´s boundaries). Nodes are presented more as a crossway points rather than remarkable elements. Landmarks (like the Common and the skyscrapers at the downtown) are clear anyway. City form is the set of spatial relations among the last elements; the form is clearer as much as those elements are well performed on the urban background. In the contrary chaotic and non-spatial references can create and opposite image of the city. The critic on Lynch´s theory is placed on the lack of openness out of the United States´ contexts as a followed example across his theory. Kevin Lynch never structured a scale in which a city or urban element can be placed between totally legible or impossible to be reminded. It is possible to deduce that Boston is better placed than Los Angeles and Jersey city.
LYNCH, KEVIN. The Image Of The City. The MIT Press. 1960
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Afterword, Boston cannot be distinguished as a legible or non imaginable city, is just an urban complex as many others around the world, for instance, there are places able to be understood due to the continuity of its urban fabric as the Commonwealth zone, aside another ones hard to be legible like the downtown. It means that cities are far to be distinguished under a sole pattern based on spatial clear identification.
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4. MOSES Vs JACOBS TWO FACES OF MODERNITY
CARO, ROBERT A. The Power Broker. Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Vintage Book Editions. 1975 JACOBS, JANE. The Death And Life Of Great American Cities. Random House Inc. 2002 Ed
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Domain: Love the public, not the people representing public Target: Love of power---nepotism Urbanism: viewed the existing urban fabric of his city as arbitrary in form, entailing no obligation on his parts to preserve or renovate what others before him had made Planning process: Operate in a built metropolis, hacking your waythrough with an meat ax Planning as: Enlighten impulse to create a city based on the moving body Principles: - Sought to undo diversity - Eroding the dense urban center - Public good by fragmenting the city - Monotony as an image of modern times
Domain: The social identity of the communities lies in their interaction and self sense of protection. Target: Conservation of cultural values Urbanism: An integrated decision making process encouraging to empower local communities Planning process: Cooperation, discussion, feedback among different actors Planning as: A tool to preserve the culture of the everyday life in medium income communities Principles: - The street life as an utterly objective - Dense urban center as an example of right cohabitation - Public good by concentrating into the sharing of cultural principles - Diversity as an image of modern times
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Method: Immense concentration of power Segregation: Ghetto took on the barely submerged meaning of “those who have been left behind”. To belong to a ghetto came to be seen as a matter of sharing a common Culture: The recent history of multi-culturalism in NY has moved in a separatist direction, but this ethnic separatism is a dead end, economically if nothing else. Borders: Homogenization of lifestyle by the standardization of the culture into borderless districts Denial: Left behind… Legacy: Restructuring of NY brought to a head the forces of individual movement which began to take from form two centuries before in Europe. He bequeathed to those who remainded in the old, diverse urban core a sharpened, more difficult problem in dealing with their own perceptions and sensations of others Legacy Two2 Had difficulty understanding, though, that he had created a new economic territory. The growth of New York City’Y periphery in fact coincided with the increase in office and service tasks which, thanks to the electronic communications, no longer had to be located in the dense urban core where rents were high (economy of the periphery, accessibility and proximity to home, female employment) Coincidence: Proliferation of middle income neighborhoods as a target Personal Failure: A person of immense power who often did not understand what he was building
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Method: Intrinsic sense of surveillance Segregation: Life in Greenwich Village exemplifies perhaps the most we have been able to achieve: a willingness to live with difference, though a denial this entails a shared fate. Culture: We need all kind of diversity, intricately mingled in mutual support Borders: Highly critical of “massive single uses” in cities which “form borders”, for borders in cities usually make destructive neighborhoods. Denial: Sense of belonging Legacy: Diorama urbanism: superficial ideas has preempted the public domain Legacy Two: Had to have realize the usefulness of her own work for the goals of retail planning and cannot have been overly surprised by the ultimate outcome Coincidence: Proliferation of middle income neighborhoods as a target Personal Failure: Her ideas through multiple translations become corrupted
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5. THE EXPONENTIAL GRID A Project for The Greatest Grid Competition of the Museum of the City of New York In Partnership with Eduardo Parra The city grid has been considered an aim to rationalize the urban realm. The grid in Manhattan, beyond the walled city, follows this pattern of planning. The attempts to neutralize the space found a further phenomena which was to break out of the homogeneity of the space. In Manhattan, the blocks started to bring spatial predominance to the intersections and the pacing on the incremental value of the corners was tied closely with the accumulation of capitals within the city. The starting point is to consider that the grid is placed as an abstract structure to allow a controlled urban expansion. The grid is considered a matrix of a set of paradigms that shaped the urban image along the XXth century. It is important to underline that, being the grid a planar geometrical order; it has become a relative spatial disorder in the moment when the singular crops within homogeneous blocks developed into different forms. This development was dependent on the pressure over land prices, creating a hard shaped heterogeneous skyline. We considered the Manhattan urban condition as an ongoing continuum process able to redevelop its own paradigm. In this circumstance, we develop a concept which is divided into two parts; the first one considers the abstract realm of the evolution of the geometric paradigm and its later spatial progression. The future of the city might return to the grid but in a further process of unfolded space. Considering the grid as a first stratum (first evolution), it represents the current scale and dimension which is playing as a spatial matrix structure, the next step might be the projection of the grid into a 3rd dimension, a 3d grid.
The Grid as a concept
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On the other hand, the material realm reaches the literal spatial process of the geometrical patterns of the grid above the city as a reality (mega-structure). This is an abstract exoskeleton assembled following a non-material matrix which is able to be constructed as a progressive process of spatial filling according to the natural growth of the city. It is possible to realize a spatial grid rooted in the current condition of the city but developed exponentially, scaled above the city three times, and evolved into a second and third sequenced stratum following a scaffold structure. Thus, the spatial grid is fractured and unstructured, it brings different qualities and it is the further evolution of the concept. Every evolution of the grid is intersected with the material features of the existing urban artifacts generating a hybrid composition between the existing city and the developed metropolitan scaled mega-structure. Being a structure based on a repetitive nature, it articulates the very different and multiple particularities at the ground level fitting with the current spatial patterns. The project is not considered a monolithic intervention; it is an abstract empty matrix which is progressively occupied according to the urban processes of Manhattan and fusing it with the city through a symbiotic process. This is how the evolution of the city through a grid spatially and exponentially unfolds. The Grid over the city
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The Grid intercepting the current landscape
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The base of the Grid intercepting the current landscape
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6. LITERATURE REVIEW THE DWARF
LAGERKVIST, PAR. The Dwarf. Hill And Wang Publisher. 1945
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Evil is rooted in humanity´s mind. Evil is a subjective condition in which all considered as wrong and condensed into a whole ethical structure. Par Lagerkvist (Nobel Prize 1951) featured a human being (the dwarf) evil by nature and placed into the courts of Federico Sforza in the medieval Milan. The dwarf is just the joker and personal messenger of Federico Sforza but, by his personal thoughts, the dwarf shapes a historic contexts in which the sense of morality has strong attachments to the personal placement in the royal court. This character behaves being conscious of his bad actions, questioning by the way the links between the ethic and the necessity to improve social influences. Along the tale the dwarf suffers of constant dilemmas which at the end takes him out of the court due to his strange and cynical behaviors but strangely  fulfilling his masochistic desires in the dungeons. The dwarf is just a question about what morality means in society and how it can change depending on historic contexts. Finally it is worth enough to underline the importance of the character of the dwarf. He represents the evil side of the human behavior under a context of humiliation and physical disability. The dwarf is a monster created by the society, maybe not guilty by himself, a kind of cruel externality, a monster placed in the underground of the human mind. Â
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7. INTO THE SPRAWL
A Graphic Survey Into The Suburbia
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8. A TRIBUTE TO HUGH FERRIS The light sculptor... after Phidias and Michelangelo it is difficult to find an artist that hasd intervened so dramatically in the process of construction of the urban landscape. Hugh Ferris was in fact an architect, but his career was important in the field of painting solids which will become buildings according to the light. Hugh Ferris was one of the main supporters of the materialization of that collective fantasy called Manhattanism by Rem Koolhaas. If Phidias definitely shaped the idea of an Athens gone long time agolong gone but still rooted in the collective memory and Michelangelo performed permanently the catholic power over the cCity of Rome (both paradigmatic urban landscapes), Ferris, inspired in by both artists, played a role similar in the construction of the XXth Ccentury image. During the boom period of the skyscrapers rising over Manhattan, there was an obvious necessity to regulate their constructionbuildings and to guarantee thate sunlight to reach the street level. Ferris’ study about how solids can be rendered and sliced on slopes to play with the sunlight and provide illumination and warmth to the city was the most important study concerning to a later regulation. His charcoal drawings s accomplished an impressionistic method in which built smudges allow the light to be introduced down to the pedestrian level. The sum of those solids created a womb of what will be, in the near future, the quintessentialce image of Manhattan. This container of solids, in a complex relation with the sun and the night, shaped the identity and the symbolism of a thriving metropolis where everything is possible, the future lied lay in Ferris’ drawings. The Metropolis of Tomorrow was the posthumous legacy of Ferris’ ambition. The book summarizes his best works plus a set of renders of the current landscape of Manhattan and its possible developments. The second part attends discusses a number of trends that will be further developed and the last part sums up particular influences within the imaginary metropolis. Certainly, Hugh Ferris’ drawingss looks like the materialization of Gotham City, his ethereal volumes seem s to be have risen as an enlightened product of a thriving society. In his early years, the influence of famous architects, such as Raymond Hood, gave feedback to him, whereas in the later years, he was the one whose influence played an important role in the conception of the city’s idea and the spatial planning methods. The broadcasting of Ferris’ architecture picked up to a point in which his ideal became mostly a planning policy during a several year time periods. The trend of a new landscape, which began to hoard buildings into a luminous womb, was, perhaps Ferris’ most visionary concept. This jungle of shining needles multilayered into a futuristic vision transformed the idea of what the city should be, doubtless materialized along several years. The Ferrisian idea swallowed even not only the buildings in Manhattan but also the bridges, overpasses and monuments, creating a symbiosis between the urban artifact and the whole urban dimension. Despite of the cold city performed from by Ferris’ imagination, Manhattan became not only an addition of singular objects under the sun, but its outcome an entire conceptual model beyond the human needs, a paradigm per se, a city never seen before. FERRIS, HUGH. The Metropolis Of Tomorrow. Dover Publications Inc. 2005
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The Ferrisian Method of Building shape according to the light
The Ferrisian womb as an urban matrix and image
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9. LITERATURE REVIEW 2 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
DOSTOIEVSKY, FYODOR. Crime And Punishment. Penguin Popular Classics. 1997
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This might be the most touching book of Mr. Dostoievski, the one that shapes clearer the sense of a human who believes to be a superhuman, able and allowed to commit deeds beyond the social laws. Rodion Raskolnikov murdered a greedy old woman worthless for the society at all. Rodion Raskolnikov aimed to erase that kind of useless elements of the society based on a supernatural skill to understand what was going wrong. He in fact murdered Alyona Ivanovna unleashing deep rooted anguishes from his souls. What is important to highlight is the discovery of the consequences that arose from that feeling of real authority beyond the mankind and allowing him with to rule over the destiny of the masses. Raskolnikov is just a normal person granted with the same rights and authority than the others, but, besides his ability to understand the society in which he lives and the kind of people grown up from it, he, at the beginning believed to be endowed with a kind of supreme moral authority like other special people (Napoleon for instance). This self-conferred authority supported him to commit the crime. Nevertheless the feeling of moral superiority quickly faded into the reality. He indeed was a simple man who realized later not to be that kind of special human being and the tortuous path to achieve his social and personal redemption tells the last part of the story. Crime and Punishment is not only one of the best psychological novel but is one of the most accurate description of the human soul by the perform of the deeply hidden but very real feelings of self-destruction, and the impossibility to rise an universal power based on a supreme moral authority.
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10. KOOLHAAS TOOK NEW YORK A REVIEW OF REM KOOLHAAS
KOOLHAAS, REM. Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. Monacelli Press. 1994
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New York was founded in 1614 by Dutch merchants, from this moment in time and forward into the future, the development of the city can be understood as a matrix of uncommon and very own unique urban paradigms or, this is, at least, what Rem Koolhaas understood during his research. The city, thanks to its very own particularities, has been developed as an image of the XXth urban paradigm. From its foundation, to the first European settlements and the walled city, New York (New Amsterdam) was no more than a merchant village but what will happens afterwaord can be easily intended inferred as the model of a new kind of urban construction, a new paradigm hads risen. Along Throughout his research, Koolhaas pointed out four moments from the XIXth century to the Ffifties that served as a cornerstone of urban changes (play landsamusement park in Coney Island, skyscrapers, The Rockefeller Center and the postwar European influence). Those moments nevertheless would be used as an explanation of the boosting icon of a thriving urban context as we globally understand the city today. On the other hand, eEach one of these moments perform further urban developments as well, that will be spread across the earth as a symbol of what a global metropolis should be. In the end of the XIXth century, the Island of Manhattan was overcrowded and the sanitary conditions were far from to be the best. To escape from this harmful environment, it was used common to travel out of the city during the weekends to Coney Island, in the southern borough of Brooklyn. This place has a long tradition of presence of immigrant communities, especially Russians and Italians. In Coney Island, as Koolhaas wrote, the technology of the fantastic will set out asn one of the main paradigms of the modernization by the development of an entertaining industry which will be applied in the whole urban context.
1. Coney Island
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In fact, and due to the customary trips to the zone by the New Yorkers, aA group of entrepreneurs found a highly profitable business by building an entertainment industry based on playamusement parks lands endowed with the technological advances of the time. Thus, the competition for a more attractive spot and the improvement of the amusement activities made at first the Steeplechase, then Luna park, and lastly Dreamland a sequence of technological advances. Innovations that will furthermore develop an idea of spatial evolution based on the idea of entertaining but later acknowledged as urban modernization. Two basic innovations evolved and transformed the urban thought based on what was conceived in Coney Island’s play landsamusement park idea to increase profits. The first, and probably the most important, is the use of electricity power ion public spaces as an idea to increase the time spent at the park at lower costs. The implementation of electricity as a mass commodity will be replied reproduced in the whole city as a technological success and a very important improvement. The second phenomenon is the creation of an urban imageinary (as an utopist idea) of modernization based on a set of icons across the urban context stemming from on the merchandising explosion of advertisement. From the Coney Island’s play landsamusement park, advertising on streets became a part, and sometimes a reason to modernize the urban landscape. Inherent to the entertaining architecture evolved at the play landsamusement park, an idea that became a strong icon will be the core of the New York paradigm: the tower as an urban artifact. From the beginning of the XXth century and the idea to increase high the height ofn buildings, to render them more profitable, new technologies emerged either as an idea to evolve the way in which a building plays with its context and as an exciting vision of a new utopia; the birthorn of the skyscraper.
2 The Skyscraper
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Koolhaas argued that the concept of the skyscraper was a result of three circumstances, the extrusion towards the sky of the isolated block, that union with the tower and the idea to reproduce the world in a sole building. This is also supported by the improvements of the sanitary infrastructures and the invention of the elevator. As an outcome of the mixture of technology and idealism, the rise of skyscrapers changed sharply the face of the city sharply, from the first attempts like the Flatiron Building to its apotheosis at the Empire State Building. This process wasere mostly based on a rush to createachieve the tallest building and also as a consequence of an spatial lobotomy in which the relation with the context wasere no longer important since the building itself was a whole world inside. The third moment of the evolution of the Manhattan paradigm was with the process of design of the Rockefeller Center. Being an specific building, and moving apart fromto other global phenomena as we saw before, the RCA as a unique project, embodied what Koolhaas called the fundamental nature of the culture of congestion. This project concentrated all kind of uses into a single urban complex;, it is the vision of how a city should be based on a perpetual rush. It also concentrates the principles founded in the Coney Island’s amusement parkplay lands as a megalomaniac ambition or as Koolhaas said (it provided Manhattan to a kind of escape “a metropolitan resort” within its territory). Architecture as a broadcasting target. The last point was the European Influence in on the city after the WWII by two very differentt ways to understandings of the Manhattan’s paradigm, and were provided by two different characters, Salvador Dali and Le Corbusier.
3. The Rockefeller Center
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Theose points of view cannot be more different. In fFact, Dali found the city as the apotheosis, the materialization of the surrealism because it was intendeds as the fragmentation and subjectification of the urban realm by the unstructured interrelation of its very uniqueown and different items. New York was, for Dali, a delirious interpretation of the unconscious paranoia of modern times, a speculation, a desire and an abhorrencence of the modernism in all of its meanings. On the other hand, Le Corbusier faced a lesser positive experience. In Le Corbusier’s’ thought, the city should work as a synchronized machine, New York was too surrealistic and definitely lackeds of the mechanisms to work appropriately based on its scale. The French architect understood the city as an aggression , a jungle that deserveds a scale adjustment., New York for him was the antithesis of his model, a price banality. Koolhaas pointed out: he solves the problem but kills the culture of congestion. The influence of the two Europeans faced different wayshad different effects, while Dali stood back from in the city as it wasis, Le Corbusier´s’ rejection to the current landscape persuaded later architects to turn the conception of the architecture within the city and the design of the United Nations Headquarter could be the best example of this. To sum up, Koolhaas’ research about the urban development of New York lies on the importance of the culture of congestion as a prototypic vision of the modern capitalist development. Manhattan implies a set of improvements, idealisms, attempts and non evident theories replicated all around the world as a strong imagine,ary which is not self evident, but greatly important. Rem Koolhaas’ input to understand this phenomena is a step ahead in the recognition of the urban evolution.
4. The X, Y and Z complex at the Rockefeller Center
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NEXT ISSUE: URBAN REVIEW Nยบ 2 - BOGOTA
URBAN REVIEW Nยบ1 January - February 2012
NEW YORK SPECIAL
PHOTOGRAPHY AND ESSAYS BY DIEGO A. PINZON Language support and text edition by Karin Miller