Assistant Professor; Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Media Studies and Film
Between Media and Architecture
Media Space/Public Space

“How to write a manifesto … in an age disgusted with them?” Rem Koolhaas thus begins Delirious New York, acknowledging that this publication – and, as he argues, the City of New York – are both conscious of their mediation, their representation in text and blueprints, photographs and films. Koolhaas, a former screenwriter who studied with members of the pop-inspired Archigram group at the Architectural Association in London, retroactively declares the principles underlying New York’s 20^th-century development: Manhattanism is a “culture of congestion” – a far cry from the commercial strip and urban sprawl celebrated in Learning from Las Vegas, to which DNY was in part a response. Describing the logic underlying the development of Coney Island, several New York skyscrapers, Rockefeller Center, and the United Nations, Koolhaas offers a montage of Simmel, Freud, Durkheim, Baudelaire, Kracauer, and Le Corbusier. DNY draws on, and often ironically subverts, these canonical urban texts. My students and I appreciate that DNY also draws illuminating parallels between the physical and mediated cities, between urban and media histories. The book addresses multiple layers of urban representation: from the symbolism of architectural form and facade, to the use of media in representing urban plans, to the integration of media technologies into modern buildings, to the prominent place of media company headquarters in the 20^th- (and 21^st-) century city.

The Manhattan Grid is a graphic projection, “the most courageous act of prediction in Western civilization: the land it divides, unoccupied, the population it describes, conjectural; the buildings it locates, phantoms…” (DNY, 19). The Latting Observatory at the 1853 Great Exhibition of Art and Industry and the Centennial Tower at Coney Island both offered New Yorkers unprecedented panoramic views of their respective islands; the imagined grid stretched out before them. The skyscraper, too, is a technology for visualizing space. By the 20^th century, thanks to steel and elevators, Manhattan skyscrapers’ façades no longer offered an external representation of their interior activity. There were tall buildings whose “physical manifestation [did] not represent… a three-dimensional readable articulation of a social hierarchy”; they became empty symbols “available for meaning as a billboard is for advertisement” (DNY, 100).

Media technologies were also structurally integrated into the modern metropolis. At the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, room service and “home kitchens” serving the residential guests “are orchestrated and coordinated by means of the telephone, which becomes an extension of the architecture” (DNY, 148). The hotel lends itself to cinematic representation; it “becomes Hollywood’s favorite subject” by “reliev[ing] the scriptwriter of the obligation of inventing a plot. A Hotel is a plot…with its own laws generating random but fortuitous collisions between human beings who would never have met elsewhere” (DNY, 148).

Those scriptwriters and their production companies were also shaping the city’s form through the design and construction of their new headquarters. Koolhaas tells us about Raymond Hood’s designs for the Daily News, McGraw-Hill, and Rockefeller Center, which, like the speculative Manhattan grid, was an “artificial domain planned for nonexistent clients” (DNY, 199). When the Radio Corporation of America moved in to Rockefeller Center, NBC’s state-of-the-art production facilities made it “the nerve center of an electronic community that would congregate at Rockefeller Center without actually being there. Rockefeller Center is the first architecture that can be broadcast” (DNY, 200). New York’s media industries continue to create global imagined communities, and to contribute to the transformation of the city’s skyline.

These examples – historical and contemporary – demonstrate the value of thinking about the city in terms of layered systems of mediation. Koolhaas knows this well; in the late 1990s OMA created a separate media arm, AMO, dedicated to “develop[ing] new models of thinking about systems and…creat[ing] clearly considered blueprints for change” (oma.edu). Yet according to William Saunders, Koolhaas’s media-savvy, and his fascination with ”gnomic fantasy,” often lead him to impose on his work “a highly unified vision that has both the power of myth and the distortion of melodrama” (63). There is much criticism of the poetic license that Koolhaas sometimes takes with history, and of his variably cynical, apologist, ironic, boosterist rhetoric in DNY and other publications – yet the variety of these critiques demonstrates that Koolhaas has multiple voices. The openness of his texts – including, for instance, the invitation to read DNY as a history of the relationships between media and architecture – delivers a hopeful message. Koolhaas “dares to hope that one can participate meaningfully, if modestly, in the forces of contemporary urban development” (Saunders, 66). In reading Koolhaas with my students, I hope to encourage such engagement.

Resources:

William S. Saunders, “Rem Koolhaas’s Writings on Cities: Poetic Perception and Gnomic Fantasy” Journal of Architectural Education 51:1 (September 1997): 61-71.Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, Rev. Ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972 / 1998).