Delirious Chicago

Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York is a book specifically about New York City, but I think it goes a long way in explaining the architecture of irrational exuberance now infecting Chicago.  A depressed real estate market and an overburdened infrastructure haven't put a damper on some of the more delirious projects either active or proposed in the city, including the new Trump Tower, the Waterview Tower, the whirligig building, and most remarkably, the Chicago Spire.

Contrary to the popular belief that it takes a giant ego to build a skyscraper in New York, Koolhaas suggests it takes a bit of craziness. Koolhaas traces the origins of modern Manhattan to early twentieth-century Coney Island, which was inspired by "hopelessly obstinate desire to record and preserve a mirage." Luna Park, for instance, is the first city of towers.  The amusement park's towers, built in 1903, are pure illusion with no function other than to "overstimulate the imagination and keep any recognizable earthly realities at a distance." 

When towers finally migrate to Manhattan, they are, in a sense, functional illusions.  Their developers justify the giant buildings by claiming that businesses need them.  In this view tall buildings are inevitable, as if they were a plant native to Manhattan Island.  However, these giant climate-controlled machines for producing paperwork only appear to be rational.  Not only do skyscrapers exceed the human proportions of the Renaissance city, they also exceed the control of architects, who can no longer impose their individual wills on them.   Koolhaas sees the skyscraper as "the instrument of a new form of unknowable urbanism.  In spite of its physical solidity, the Skyscraper is the great metropolitan destabilizer: it promises perpetual programmatic instability."  The Empire State Building, for instance, has no real reason for being, and its hyper-efficient construction processes assumed a life of their own. The building is thoughtless.  "Pure product of process," Koolhaas writes, "Empire State can have no content.  The building is sheer envelope."

If the Empire State building is a kind of empty rationalism, an ego with neither an unconsciousness nor a  superego, the Rockefeller Center is an irrational fantasy realized in small, rational steps. Combining a concentrated urbanism and an artificial nature, Rockefeller Center is a collection of towers incorporating pre-modernist layers.  The towers rise from "the fabricated meadows of the new Babylon, the pink flamingos of the Japanese Garden and imported ruins donated by Mussolini." They are perfect Benjaminian objects--the sedimented, mythic past at the core of the modern.

Rockefeller Center, the "Garden City aloft," is the epitome of what Koolhaas regards as the fundamental principle of New York City: Manhattanism.  Koolhaas points out that New York architects and city planners have never really been serious about reducing congestion.  In fact, "the real enterprise of Manhattan's architects" is a "culture of congestion," which is the final expression of the inner logic of Manhattan's grid, laid out in 1807.  The traffic-clogged streets become Venetian canals, while buildings are cities within cities, islands in a modernized Venice.  New York City, like Nietzsche's Venice, is a collection of solitudes.

Manhattanism is congestion for congestion's sake, along with a pragmatism so obsessive that it becomes a kind of poetry. Manhattanism explains why Le Corbusier, the great rationalist architect of modernism, failed to realize if any of his grand schemes in New York.  Corbusier's Radiant City, which Koolhaas describes as "a majestic flow of humanist non sequiturs," is a proposal to erase all the great, crazy ideas upon which Manhattan was built and replace them with a uniform set of towers evenly planted in green spaces. He wanted to purify the city, and give its residents light and air. But he failed to comprehend New Yorkers' neurotic attraction to traffic and pollution, offering only the efficiency of banality in exchange.

Koolhaas sees architecture as an essentially otherworldly profession.  Architects are always designing for the great flood that will sweep away all of the historical clutter of cities. This may explain why Santiago Calatrava was inspired to design a 2,000-foot-tall sliver of ice in Chicago just as the Great Lakes are receding because of global warming. His invocation of snail shells in the building's design resembles the petrified remains of prehistorical global disasters.  Possibly the building's tepid and incredulous reception so far is because there's something apocalyptic about it.  Furthermore, I'm not sure that Chicagoans are ready to admit that the pragmatism of "the city that works" has reached the excessive, crazy, and poetic dimensions of Manhattan.