Devious New York: A Radical Collective Experiment from a Phantom City

Abstract

In 1978, Rem Koolhaas wrote a retroactive manifesto for the peculiar urban development of the island of Manhattan. Delirious New York depicts the development of a virgin land dictated by the monotony of an urban grid and its ensuing Culture of Congestion. It describes an experimental vigor for design that encouraged the feverish output of radical, architectural experiments and an inherent urban nature insinuated by the skyscraper. The growing metropolis was lost in a transformative delirium, as its ever changing skyline brought a contagious character to the city. Manhattan has since fallen into a state of tenderness. A growing paranoia for terrorisit attacks since 9/11, as well as new zoning regulations and urban design controls have induced a security driven temperament that dampens the city's initial state of innovation and production described in Delirious New York. The avant-garde ideas of today's design world remain unbuilt works on paper. In an exploration of Manhattan's Phantom City, Devious New York embraces a subculture of architecture, unraveling the imaginary ideas that consume Manhattan's collective unconscious. It reinterprets the skyscraper typology as a means of re-contextualising a progressing Culture of Congestion. Devious New York aims to produce an architecture that accommodates the unforeseeable programmatic shifts in society. It is an experiment for a manipulated urban existence that generate fluid, transparent, programmatic relationships and spatial conditions that transform the metropolitan citizen. Devious New York manifests itself in the Chelsea Club, a radical collective experiment where strategies taken from the Phantom City are applied to offer an alternative reality of Manhattan. Motivated by the recent regeneration of the High Line into an urban park, the Chelsea Club capitalizes on this clever act of opportunism to generate a creative frame for the project, presenting itself as a crafted utopia on an urban escape. The awareness of a deviant alternative suggests potential directions for the growth of Manhattan's urban condition, and the improvement of the metropolitan resident.