KOOLHAAS URBANISM
The Skyscraper: Envelope of Juxtaposed Fantasies
If Coney Island operates as an environment of the Irresistible Synthetic, the model of the skyscraper, and more specifically the Downtown Athletic Club, is hierarchically nested in such an environment. Here, the advent of the elevator allows for radical multiplication and juxtaposition of artificial fantasies, the building itself becoming merely a featureless “envelope” containing such them - “all of them supported with complete neutrality by the steelframe rack.” This gives rise to such unlikely novel situations as the iconic "Eating oysters with boxing gloves, naked, on the 9th floor" depicted in the vignette to the right. Koolhaas writes, “Through the medium of the Skyscraper, each site in the Metropolis accommodates - in theory at least - an unstable and unforeseeable combination of superimposed and simultaneous activities whose configuration is fundamentally beyond the control of any architect or planner.”
The conglomeration of skyscrapers in one place - in say, the modern city - results in a multiplication by the hundreds or thousands of these sites, each containing its own colossal, disparate collection of fantasy worlds. The modern city, Koolhaas argues, is of a complexity that “outwits all attempts at capturing the city, exhausts all ambitions of its definition, ridicules the most passionate assertions of its present failure and future impossibility, steers it implacably further on its flight forward.”
“Through the medium of the Skyscraper, each site in the Metropolis accommodates - in theory at least - an unstable and unforeseeable combination of superimposed and simultaneous activities whose configuration is fundamentally beyond the control of any architect or planner.”
Coney Island: Fantasy Sets
Koolhaas chronicles several fantasy sets of the Culture of Congestion in his retroactive manifesto, starting first on the fringes of the Manhattan metropolis. He describes mechanisms of fantasy first on Coney Island, an ideal retreat forced to accommodate the overspill of the New York - wherein due to the intensity of use, “all the natural elements that had once defined the attraction of the Island were systematically replaced by a new kind of machinery that converted the original nature into an intricate simulacrum of nature, a compensatory technical service.” For example, the beach at Coney Island became so crowded that lights were installed so that users could bathe at night. Koolhaas writes that “this illumination was not seen as a second-rate experience, but that its very artificiality was advertised as an attraction in itself: Electric Bathing.” This attractive artificiality, or what he labels “the Irresistible Synthetic,” evolves and densifies to become the chief operating force in the metropolis.
