SHEA BUTTER

HUMANITIES II
SPRING 2014
DELIRIUM:
AN ACUT E ME NTAL DI S T URBANCE
CHARACTERIZED BY CONFUSED THINKING
A N D D I S R U P T E D A T T E N T I O N
.FRENZIED EXCITEMENT




RETROACTIVE:
TAKING EFFECT FROM IN THE PAST

MANHATTANISM: TO EXIST IN A WORLD TOTALLY FABRICATED BY MAN

The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so
that it absolutely coincides with his desires. The Metropolis is an addictive machine, from which there is
no escape, unless it offers that, too...

Movie stars who have led adventure - packed lives are often too egocentric to discover patterns, too
inarticulate to express intention, too restless to record or remember events.
Ghost writers do that for them. - Rem Koolhaas

As Manhattans self-proclaimed ghost writer, Rem Koolhaas sets out to encapsulate the citys urban
biographical story through a Retroactive Manifesto. In order to rationally convey the perpetual irrational
state Manhattan embodies, Delirious New York mimics the structure of its protagonist. Content and form
simulates Manhattans Grid, a collection of blocks, where proximity and juxtaposition reinforces identity
and provides each their own separate meaning.

Koolhaas covers a span of five blocks. The first four blocks; Coney Island, The Skyscraper, Rockefeller
Center and Europeans, narrates the transitions of how Manhattanism embraces and exposes how
human density coexists and thrives on the invasion of new technology in urbanism. Each Block
demonstrates the aggressive progression Manhattan experienced in order to remove itself as far away
from any state that possesses natural properties to a hyper, density state of fabricated experiences.
Manhattans program forces itself to generate its own form of urbanism, a civilization capable of relishing
the harsh, surreal conditions of manmade living, an urban planning capable of unconditionally
surrendering to the needs of the metropolis. Manhattan becomes the blueprint for a culture of
congestion still searching for its own specialized architect to further develop the promise of the
metropolitan condition.

The fifth block serves as the books appendix; juxtaposed as a fictional conclusion allowing Koolhaass to
impose his own form of paranoid critical method. The appendix must not be interpreted as the end but
rather a continuation of the program told through calculated architectural projects that continue mapping
the transition of Manhattanism as a deeply irrational experience
FANTASTIC TECHOLOGY: THE APPLICATION OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE FOR FALSE REALITY

"Coney Island," he declares, was "a fetal Manhattan," where modern culture discovered its desire "to
live inside a fantasy" in a fabricated, fully urban environment that was the product of compression and
density.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud addresses the conditions and consequences of mans
reconciliation between himself, civilization and the machine. While civilization is built out of the
conceptual wish-fulfillments of the individual, it is constructed on a physical environment of potential
hostility.

Throughout the evolutionary development of
human beings, early people strove to survive in
a difficult and harsh world where there is three
distinct sources of danger:

1. Danger from the external world
2. Danger from the limitations and
deterioration of the body
3. Danger from other human beings.
Freud states, a persons initiative and intuitive purpose is to seek the greatest amount of personal happiness
and avoid pain as much as possible. However in attempt at keeping order among society, civilization
imposes ideals that can cause the individual to experience various levels of frustration. Fraud believe the
inability to tolerate ambiguity, and relentless presence of uncertainty, will cause the individual to develop
neurosis. Freud concedes if mans primary goal is to seek pleasure, then society must make compromises in
its ideals in order to fulfill its primary goal of bringing people into a cohabital union. Civilization is more likely
to progress when its ideals of control, beauty, hygiene, order, and especially for the exercise of humanity's
highest intellectual functions
1
are realized and materialized. Despite all the advancements and
contributions civilization has provided for humanity, do the demands of civilization result in a net loss of
happiness for the individual? Does what the individual gives up to civilization in order to get its benefits
outweigh the benefits themselves?
2


1
Freud, Sigmund, Civilization And Its Discontents, Translated from the German by James Stranchey.
New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1961. 92 pages.
2
http://www2.webster.edu/~corbetre/personal/reading/civilization.html
Coney Island addressed this paradox by providing the individual with a synthesized and amplified reflection
of the world. Pleasure was no longer an attribute that had to be internally obtained, it was now offered
through the convenience of modern technology through theatrical artificiality.


Narrioch, Place Without Shadows was the name given by the Canarsie Indians, original inhabitants of the
appendage at the month of New Yorks harbor known today as Coney Island. The name seemed to have
ironically preordained the artificial setting and concept that Coney Island would later embody. In 1823 the
Coney Island Bridge Company constructs the first artificial connection between the mainland and the island,
allowing it to consummate its relationship with Manhattan
3
As Manhattan transformed from a city into a
metropolis, Coney Island become a natural escape from the congestion of progress. But as the demand for
escape increased; the island abandoned its program to provide nature and began its campaign to provide
intensified entertainment through controlled irrationality.

Coney Islands amusement parks Steeplechase, Luna and Dreamland took on a life of their own, each more
ostentatious, more glamorous, more monstrous than its predecessor. A self-contained utopia, providing an
infrastructure that made the island a modern fragmented version of the world. Within the confines of Coney
Island, these three parks acted as the testing grounds for a new technology, new experiences of the
fantastic, from which stem the strategies and mechanisms intended for Manhattan and its inhabitants.
Coney Island is a resort for Manhattan inhabitants and a laboratory of the new technologies that would be
applied in Manhattan. The three parks turned into a magic carpet that can reproduce experience and
fabricate almost any sensation. It sustains any number of ritualistic performances that exorcise the
apocalyptic penalties of the metropolitan condition and survive the onslaught of over a million visitors a
day. In Coney Island there was a shortage of reality of outside world and nature.




3
2 History of Coney Island (New York: Burroughs & Co., 1904) page.4-7
LOBOTOMY: A SURGICAL INCISION INTO THE PREFRONTAL LOBE OF THE BRAIN, FORMERLY
USED TO TREAT MENTAL ILLNESS

The genius of Manhattan is the simplicity of this divorce between appearance and performance. It
keeps the illusion of architecture intact while surrendering wholeheartedly to the needs of the
metropolis.

The skyscraper was a utopian formula represented by three independent urbanistic breakthroughs
converging to become a single mechanism. Each plane of a skyscraper is considered as a virgin land,
which the architects have no control over the specific programs. The skyscraper becomes the great
metropolitan destabilizer that promises perpetual programmatic instability.


1. The reproduction of the world:

The union of the elevator and steel frame provided a new approach in space designing. Construction
was no longer confined to protrude outwards, it now the capacity to ascend upwards. The elevator
generates the
4
first aesthetic based on the absence of articulation.
5


-Absent signifiers: Signifiers which are absent from a text but which (by contrast) nevertheless influence
the meaning of a signifier actually used (which is drawn from the same paradigm set). Two forms of
absence have specific labels in English: that which is 'conspicuous by its absence' and that which 'goes
without saying'. See also: Deconstruction, Paradigm, Paradigmatic analysis, Signifier Address, modes of:
See Modes of address
4


-Articulation of codes: Articulation refers to structural levels within semiotic codes. Semiotic codes have
either single articulation, double articulation or no articulation. A semiotic code which has 'double
articulation' (as in the case of verbal language) can be analyzed into two abstract structural levels: a
higher level called 'the level of first articulation' and a lower level - 'the level of second articulation'. See
also: Double articulation, First articulation, Relative autonomy, Second articulation, Single articulation,
unarticulated codes
4


-SEMIOTICS
Study of signs and sign-using behavior, especially in language. In the late 19th and early 20th century
the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce led to the emergence of semiotics as a
method for examining phenomena in different fields, including aesthetics, anthropology,
communications, psychology, and semantics. Interest in the structure behind the use of particular signs
links semiotics with the methods of structuralism. Saussure's theories are also fundamental to post
structuralism.
6



2. The annexation of the tower:
As Coney Island became the center for controlled irrationality, Luna Park became the breeding ground
for Towers, a symbol of technological progress and a self-contained universe.

4
http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/sem-gloss.html
5
Koolhaas, Rem (1978) Delirious New York: A retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Academy Editions, London;
republished, The Monacelli Press, 1994, page 82
6
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/semiotics
3. The block alone:
Each new building occupied a block.
Each striving to be a city within a city.
All potentially at war with each other.

The block itself is equipped with technology paraphernalia that manipulate and distort existing
conditions beyond recognition, establishing private laws and even ideology in competition with all the
other blocks. The block offers and aggressive alternative reality intent on discrediting and replacing all
natural reality.
7


Less and less surface represented more and more internal activity.
Manhattans Architecture stumbled on a model of unprecedented freedom equivalent to a lobotomy.

lobotomy [luh-bot-uh-mee, loh-]
noun

1. A surgical interruption of one or more nerve tracts in the frontal lobe of the brain
2. A surgical procedure used in the treatment of intractable mental disorders
3. Disconnecting thought process from emotions

The architectural equivalent separates architectural form of the interior from the exterior. As the austere
faade of the monolithic skyscraper no longer had to dictate the inner workings of its internal
environment. This self-contained universe, becomes a shell,capable of now housing infinite layers of
possible realities.

The forthcoming model of the skyscraper is the combination of three attributes: 1.the reproduction of the
site (seen in Flatiron Building). 2. The introduction of a tower (Metropolitan Life Building). 3. The
occupancy of the whole block (the Madison Square Garden). All the three form of building have their own
drawbacks: the multiplication lacks meaning, the tower has meaning but its intention of isolation is
compromised by the its location, which is just a small plot in one single block, and the sole occupancy of
the whole block, like the Madison Square Garden cannot make enough money to support itself. But when
the three ally with each other, the tower lends meaning to the multiplication, the multiplication pays for
the metaphors on the ground floor, and the conquest of the block assures the tower isolation as sole
occupant of its land.


7
Koolhaas, Rem (1978) Delirious New York: A retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Academy Editions, London;
republished, The Monacelli Press, 1994, page 82
PROGRAM: A PLANNED SERIES OF FUTURE EVENTS ITEMS OR PERFORMANCES

Any prospect or object of the Physical world can be treated in this manner, from which the proposed
conclusion is that it is impossible to concede any value whatsoever to immediate reality, since it may
represent or mean anything at all"


City under the Roof: Businessmen live in the building they go to work, i.e. the building accommodates a
comprehensive function including living and work and all the other activities in social life. All the
movement that contributes to congestion --- horizontally across the surface of the earth --- is replaced
by vertical movement inside the buildings. Given this, there would be no necessity to travel, and thus
the congestion is resolved. But his proposal doesnt really solve the problem. It only converts the
problem from on the street and in the blocks to inside the buildings, which would cause a higher level of
congestion. Problems like fire-escape would arise.

Skyscrapers dont occupy the whole block to leave some space for light and air. He wants to establish a
constant ratio between the volume of building and the street area. At the same time, the towers regain
their isolation. - Raymond Hood

Media technologies were structurally integrated into the modern metropolis, Rockefeller Center was the
panicle of this conceptualization by maximizing the level of space and light combined with maximum
congestion. Rockefeller Centre transcended this concept as an artificial domain planned for nonexistent
clients
8
. The occupants of Radio Corporation of America and its subsidiary NBC and their state of the art
production facilities became the perfect test subjects for such conditions. The saturation of Architectural
theatricality was resurrected from the ashes of Coney Island, funneled through Rockefeller Centre and
transmitted across the world making Rockefeller Center is the first architecture that can be broadcasted.


8
Koolhaas, Rem (1978) Delirious New York: A retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Academy Editions, London;
republished, The Monacelli Press, 1994, page 178
C O N G E S T I O N : H Y P E R - D E N S I T Y

Architecture is the imposition on the world of structures it never asked for and that existed previously
only as clouds of conjectures in the minds of their creators

Surrealism vs. Modernism

The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the extent to which we are dependent upon
sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge. Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in
which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim that
sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge
9


THE CONSCIOUS EXPLOITATION OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
THE SPONTANEOUS METHOD OF IRRATIONAL KNOWLEDGE
BASED ON THE CRITICAL AND SYSTEMATIC OBJECTIFICATIONS
OF DELIRIOUS ASSOCIATIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS

Salvador Dali believed that by simulating paranoia, one can systematically undermine one's rational view
of the world. The Paranoid-Critical method became the second phase of surrealism. Paranoid-Critical
activity allowed the mind to experience and acquire knowledge through an irrationally fabricated
perception induced by hyper state of paranoid reality. While Dalis quest to reclaim, impose on and
appropriate Manhattan by interpretative appropriation, Le Corbusier literally proposed to cleanse the city
of its congestion by eradicating any utopian urbanistic ideals upon which Manhattan was built and replace
them with a uniform set of towers. Le Corbusier proposed an environment free of congestion, stifled with
the banality of efficiency. There was no place for Manhattans technology of the fantastic for Corbusier.
Technology must only be applied as its purist form, as a function. Like Dali, Le Corbusier conquest of
Manhattan was Pyrrhic at best. His urban form of imposing rationalized function had little sway over a
culture reveling in its own controlled chaos.

NO MORE FABRI CATED REAL I TY
NO MORE SYNTHESIZED EXPERIENCE
NO MORE HYPER DENSITY CONGESTION
O N L Y F O R M A N D F U N C T I O N




9
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/
Rationalism vs. Empiricism First published Thu Aug 19, 2004on; substantive revision Thu Mar 21, 2013