“The most [...] literal proposal to solve the problem of congestion comes from Harvey Wiley Corbett [...] Ultimately, Corbett calculates, the entire surface of the city could be a single traffic plane, an ocean of cars, increasing the traffic potential 700 percent. "[...We see] a very modernized Venice, a city of arcades, plazas and bridges, with canals for streets, only the canals will not be filled with real water but with freely flowing motor traffic, the sun glistening on the black tops of the cars and the buildings reflecting in this waving flood of rapidly rolling vehicles. From an architectural viewpoint [...] the idea presents all the loveliness, and more, of Venice. There is nothing incongruous about it, nothing strange..." 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 the 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 [... Corbett and the authors of the Regional Plan] have invented a method to deal rationally with the fundamentally irrational. [They know] that it would be suicide to solve Manhattan's problems, that they exist by the grace of these problems, that it is their duty to make its problems, if anything, forever insurmountable, that the only solution for Manhattan is the extrapolation of its freakish history, that Manhattan is the city of the perpetual flight forward.” New York CityTrafficManhattanPublic PolicyCongestionCity PlanningRem Koolhaas Book:Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan Source: Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan
“The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan's builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid's two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.” TwoValuesThreeForceCitiesBalanceDisciplineLessonsStrategyChaosArchitectureBlockDistinctionAnarchyFormalIrrelevantFluidManhattanBuilderGridsMetropolis Author:Rem Koolhaas
“Manhattan has generated a shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion to its defiant lack of self-hatred, has been respected exactly to the degree that it went too far.” Has BeensSelfDegreesDirectHatredArchitectureProportionManhattanSelf HatredShameless Author:Rem Koolhaas
“Manhattan has no choice but the skyward extrusion of the Grid itself; only the Skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.” MenMadeChoicesSpaceSkyOffersWestWideFrontiersManhattanGridsSkyscraperOpen SpacesWild WestWide Open Spaces Author:Rem Koolhaas
“Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition—hyper-density—without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan's architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion.” CultureModernConditionsLosingBasesMiseryArchitectureIdeologyFedsConceptionExploitationDesirableParadigmManhattanSplendorHyperDensityMetropolitanModern CultureCongestionLosing Faith Author:Rem Koolhaas
“Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.” HappensDisasterAccumulationManhattan Author:Rem Koolhaas
