"The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it."
The history of skyscrapers as narrated by Manfredo Tafuri and Rem Koolhaas offered interestingly distinct interpretations. Especially on implications and relationships the skyscrapers had on the metropolis. Nevertheless, there are some areas where the two authors shared parallel and similar understandings. In the following pages, I will attempt to unfold the similitude and difference between them. In addition I will examine how the framework created by these seemingly opposing interpretations have impacted the contemporary practice.
"Frank Lloyd Wright’s mile-high skyscraper had an internal logic. Condensing itself an entire city, it was coherently placed in the ideal prairie of Usonia. The new super skyscrapers, however, are not in the desert; they are within the city even if they refuse to take part in it. …….. In the John Hancock Building, for instance, people can live, work, and participate in social life without ever leaving the gigantic antiurban machine."
Manfredo Tafuri, "The Disenchanted Mountain", in "The American City", P.503 MIT Press
"Corbett’s "solution" for New York’s traffic problem is the most blatant case of disingenuity in Manhattanism’s history. Pragmatism so distorted becomes pure poetry.
Not for a moment does the theorist intend to relieve congestion; his true ambition is to escalate it to such intensity that it generates-as in a quantum leap- a completely new condition, where congestion becomes mysteriously positive."
Rem Koolhaas, "Delirious New York", p.123 Monacelli Press 1978
On the issue of skyscraper..
The skyscraper as an iconic representation of the prosperity of a metropolis has come to a point of crisis in the early 1920s. The 1922 Chicago Tribune competition opened a initiation for examining this crisis. The lack of direction and confusion between meaning and formal definition within the capacities of skyscrapers, urged architects to rethink and reevaluate propositions made by skyscrapers.
As the building type of "early" skyscraper emerges from around 1850s, such as Jayne Granite Building in Philadelphia (1852) by William L. Johnston and Equitable Life Insurance Building in New York (1870) by Gilman Kendall and Post. To As recent as the John Hancock Building in Chicago (1968) by Bruce Graham of SOM and the so called "super skyscraper" such as the World Trade Center in New York (1972) by Minoru Yamasaki. Skyscrapers remained to be a critical issue concerning conditions of the metropolis.
Both Tafuri and Koolhaas understood the skyscraper as a kind of by-product of the urban conditions, initially derived from pragmatic needs and commerce related functions. However, the way in which the two authors depicted the "outcome" of skyscrapers varied quite differently. While Tafuri presented the nature of skyscrapers as the result of the capitalism towards profit gains, Koolhaas sees it as an open-ended place of opportunities, without rejecting its pragmatic derivations. For Koolhaas, the true nature of the skyscraper is "the ultimate unpredictability of its performance."
"Skyscraper holds out the promise that all this business is only a phase, a provisional occupation that anticipates the Skyscraper’s conquest by other forms of culture, floor by floor if necessary. Then the man-made territories of the frontier in the sky could be settled by the irresistible Synthetic to establish alternative realities on any level." "only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky."
Rem Koolhaas, "Delirious New York", p.87 Monacelli Press 1978
On the contrary, for Tafuri, the skyscraper is understood as a "gigantic antiurban machine". His criticism is base on the understanding that the self-sustaining nature of the super skyscraper will distant itself from the rest of the metropolis. The result of this condition created alienation between local entities that were meant to compliment one another in order to structure the metropolis.
"…skyscrapers again became exceptional events that enclose the paradox of the metropolis within themselves."
Manfredo Tafuri, "The Disenchanted Mountain", in "The American City", P.503 MIT Press
The story of skyscrapers as told by Tafuri offer the notion of resistance and alternatives, where as Koolhaas proposes the concept of acceptance and explorations. It is important to note that, these criticisms were written in a time when Modernity was under a completely new evaluation.
For Koolhaas, the skyscraper is a way to negotiate and to recognize the different events within a metropolis. In addition, due to the complex and uncontrollable nature exists in metropolis, it can encompass any vivid intervention. It is a palette with primary colors, it is up to the architect to invent and to deal with the mixtures of possibilities.
For Tafuri, skyscrapers were read as objects that bared little relationship to the city it sits on. He tends to see the skyscraper apart from the city. He described them as "surreal towers" that are about "empty signs, inflated, intent on communicating nothing besides their own surreal presence" Tafuri seemed to have an utopian notion of how a metropolis should behave.
Although there are opposing view at work between Tafuri and Koolhaas as described above. However, in Rem Koolhaas’ S,M,L,XL, in the chapter on Atlanta, he wrote explicitly criticizing Atlanta as being "a city of clones". Koolhaas cites developer/architect John Portman as the man responsible for creating alienation between large complex buildings and the rest of the city. In which buildings are connected by bridges, forming an "elaborate spider web of skywalks". Once in the system there is no way out, one never need to leave the building. Perhaps, Koolhaas in this case is referring exclusively on Atlanta but one can not dismiss the similar observation on the conditions created by the skyscrapers/ super-structures in which he shared similarly with Tafuri.
"The new atrium became a replica as inclusive as downtown itself, an ersatz downtown. Downtown’s buildings are no longer complementary; they don’t need each other; they become hostile; they compete. …A cluster of autonomies…"
Rem Koolhaas, "S,M,L,XL", p.843 Monacelli Press 1995
On the issue of intention and political origin..
Manfredo Tafuri’s interpretation of the history is a reiteration of sequential time line, that rationally depicts the development of the metropolis. With attempts to be critical while being objective. Tafuri followed the traditional depiction of dichotomy and opposition as a way to narrate the history. Where as Rem Koolhaas’ interpretation carried less of that historical baggage of trying to understand the history as being didactical. Rather he presented history through the lens of the present. The reading of history of metropolis as understood in temporal terms, where the development of the metropolis is a process through time, in which the past negotiates with the present. "The city exists through time, a dimension that is lived as fantasy of the new and the fantasy of the past. It is a presence in perpetual oscillation between the past and present."
"Thus the model of Rockefeller Center, of the multiblock skyscraper, in which American urbanism placed such hope in the period between 1940 and 1950, have not constitute a new departure on which to base a progressive restructuring of the city. It has contributed, however, to making clear the antiutopian significance of a any project on an urban scale, In this sense, projects such as Battery Park City or the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco may be considered the most authentic heirs of Rockefeller Center’s lesson..."
Manfredo Tafuri, "The Disenchanted Mountain", in "The American City", P.500 MIT Press
"New York’s architects, by making their Skyscrapers compulsively competitive, have turned the entire population into a jury. That is the secret of its continuing architectural suspense."
Rem Koolhaas, "Delirious New York", p.130 Monacelli Press 1978
History as narrated by each author is presented not only in the ideas conveyed by the writing but in the composition of the topics as well. The chronological, totalizing and didactic over view of the skyscraper in Tafuri, differs greatly from Koolhaas’ somewhat chronological, fragmented and exploratory account. Tafuri uses a totalizing logic to evenly reveal the historical and cultural events he examines, while Koolhaas uses these events to construct concepts that can allow intervention to occur. Rather than trying to comprehensively explain history, Koolhaas uses history-with the notion of the past and the present- as a way to generate new ideas for intervention.
Ultimately, the research material in which two authors touched upon are the same, what is different is their interpretation of this history. Tafuri uses the research material, as a way to justify a statement or contention that attempts to explain reality, to make sense of the metropolis. Koolhaas, on the other hand, uses the research material as a generative element that further encompasses development of the city we lived in.
On the implications for contemporary practice..
It is unclear whether the politics of modernity cited by both authors have any direct implications on the contemporary practices. Clearly, the time in which these two pieces of writings were written carried a tremendous value in determining its effects on the contemporary practice. Koolhaas’ account on developing the "partial transparency", with partial registration on the surface, neither about pure Transparency (Mies, Modernism) nor Opacity (Grave, Post Modernism), is to allow fragmentation to occur in order to generate a new wholeness. This notion may not have been develop solely by Koolhaas but it is certainly share by architects in the practicing world
"Currently our North American cities, and in general the cities of the Western Hemisphere, are structured by two parallel themes that address each other in fluctuating opposition. The first of these is represented by the weighty, traditional artifacts that acknowledge a significant past. The second is formed by the less substantial products of the more recent modern tradition, which can now be referred to as the current past. …An architecture that predominantly addresses only one side of this temporal equation will ultimately be unable to create the synthesis necessary for it to enter a new phase. This synthesis must recognize the past, be rooted in the present, and be directed toward the future. .
At a time when the direction of both architectural theory and practice are clouded with ambiguity, Rem Koolhaas’ conception offers a new understanding to the world of architecture. To accept the metropolis condition as a dialectical material, to embrace the most advanced global capital consumerism. Without rejecting the historical linkages, it is in a way recognizing the differences and to learn to work with a given frameworks, instead of resisting it due of an ideal ideology exists within an intellectual mind field.
To allow his practice further justified itself, Koolhaas’ theory compliments his practice. He has allowed room for interventions to surface and tolerance for mistakes to occur. This differed from Tafuri’s position, where he is more concerned with an ideal condition. Nevertheless, the way in which these two trained architects’ reading of the Metropolis relied significantly on their current practices. Ultimately their current encountering will contribute towards their formulation of thoughts. It is one thing to be critical of the system, it is another thing, to be critical while within the system.
Bibliography
Tafuri, Manfredo The Disenchanted Mountain The American City. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979.
Koolhaas, Rem Delirious New York. New York: The Momacelli Press, 1978
Barthes, Roland Semiology and the Urban Rethinking Architecture. London: Routledge Press, 1997
Agrest, Diana Architectural Anagrams Architecture From Without. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991
Pedersen, William The Bow and the Lyre Kohn Pedersen Fox, Architecture and Urbanism. New York: Rizzoli Press, 1993