Quotes from Rem Koolhaas on New York

“Manhattan is the 21st century’s Rosetta Stone”

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“Central Park — A taxidermic preservation of nature that exhibits forever the drama of culture outdistancing nature; a synthetic Arcadian carpet, grafted onto the grid.”

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“The Coney Island beaches — was a situation of an inordinate number of people assembling on an inadequate acreage…it follows with mathematical certainty that the hundreds of thousands of visitors will not each find a place to spread out on the sand, let alone reach the water, within a single day.

Toward 1890, the introduction of electricity makes it possible to create a second daytime.  Bright lights are placed at regular intervals along the surf line, so that now the sea can be enjoyed on a truly metropolitan shift-system, giving those unable to reach the water in the daytime a man-made, 12-hour extension.

What is unique in Coney Island, is that this false daytime is not regarded as second rate, in fact, its artificiality becomes an attraction.  They call it, “Electric Bathing.”

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“In this branch of utopian real estate, architecture is no longer the art of designing buildings so much as the brutal skyward extrusion of whatever site the developer has managed to assemble.”

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“The city, magic and fantastic from afar, now appears as a hastily constructed toyhouse for the amusement of children.”  – Maxim Gorky, while visiting NYC, 1906

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“Roxy, (designer of Radio City Music Hall), mastermind of ‘Fantastic Technology’, begins questioning the conventional use of the air-conditioning system.  He considers adding hallucinogenic gases to the atmosphere of the theater, so that the air conditioning system would not just be injecting ventilation and cooling, but also exhilaration.

His lawyers dissuade him, but for a short period Roxy puts therapeutic O3 molecule into the air conditioning system of the theater.  A small dose puts the 6,200 audience members in a euphoric mood, hyper-receptive to the activity on stage.”

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“Rockefeller Center is not Greek, but it suggests the balance of Greek architecture.  It is not Babylonian, but it retains the flavor of Babylon’s magnificence.  It is not Roman, yet it has Rome’s enduring qualities of mass and strength.  Nor is it the Taj Mahal, which it resembles in mass composition, though in it has been caught the spirit of the Taj — aloof, generous in space, quieting in serenity.”

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“Manhattan is the product of an unformulated theory, Manhattanism, whose program — to exist in a world totally fabricated by man, i.e., to live inside fantasy — was so ambitious that to be realized, it could never be openly stated.”

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