by Eva Hagberg, published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Volume #8
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From 1970s to today, from Koolhaas to Hadid to UNStudio, this exhibition of drawings, models, and proposals for imagined and unbuilt spaces is a look inside an alternate history of our built environment … the one that could – and maybe one day will – have been.

Although architecture is not generally a numbers game, there is a very high probability of any given architect having read Delirious New York.

First published in 1978 and written by the nowseminally- ahead-of-the-trend Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, this book was introduced as “A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.”

In his relatively short and surprisingly easy-to-read tract, written long before he co-founded Volume Magazine with the theoretician Mark Wigley, long before he wrote that other great book SMLXL and introduced shopping as a critical and architectural idea, and long before he started breaking ground in then-mysterious China with his loopily geometric CCTV Tower, Koolhaas outlined the way in which cities – Manhattan specifically – developed, changed, and grew.

Delirious New York became a textbook for the next generation – always generally, often literally, and it put this young Dutch architect on the critical and practical world map. Over the next thirty years, Koolhaas’s Rotterdam-based firm OMA became a touchstone for young architects, any employment there a stamp of approval not only of their creative capacity but also of their infinite patience for endless hours in the model shop and serious hardcore work ethic. And, over the next thirty years, Delirious New York, particularly its dreamy, dark renderings by the early-century illustrator Hugh Ferriss, became canon.

It is only fitting, then, that it is a speculative project of Koolhaas’s – the watercolor Plan of Dreamland, created the year before Delirious was published – that sparked this small and wonderful exhibition until March 2, 2009 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. A tightly edited group of imagined architectural projects, shown in both drawing and model form and ranging from the 1970s to today, Dreamland is a reminder of the cultural and creative value of unrestrained architectural play, especially in today’s saturation of skeptical unveilings and launches of buildings that will never be constructed.

The show opens with Buildings in the Modeling, produced in 1924 by Ferriss and part of a series of images he created in response to the 1916 introduction of New York City’s zoning laws. These laws, created as a way of ensuring more light and air on the sidewalk, introduced a setback principle. To avoid turning Manhattan into a dense grid of upright columns, the zoning laws required that a skyscraper’s profile retreat further and further from the lot line the higher it went, producing a series of “wedding cake” tiers. Ferriss’ renderings took these setback regulations to – and past – their extremes, showing a world in which zoning codes resulted in almost pyramid-shaped structures, sometimes leavened by a ziggurat-style detail. Ferriss’s idealized buildings are not, as the laws ostensibly were, about light, and air, and the quality of the sidewalk. They are about monolithic structure, and brutality, and power. It is a loaded picture, full of the extreme possibilities of unleavened architecture, but it is, given its visual punch, a perfect start.

The introductory wall text is similarly loaded, explaining that “Dreamland features the architectural process of rendering visions and drawings that are, in some cases, made real.” That teaser, the prospect that some of these might be made real, is what makes this show of ideas – which range from imaginary towers by the Austrian-born architect Raimund Abraham to a seemingly scaleless model of Peter Eisenman’s crunchy-doughnut Max Reinhardt House – the mouth of a funnel through which to look at not only our architectural history, but at our architectural historiography.

Seeing how we have created and then treated these follies in the past is a way of re-examining our critical eyes today. It is tempting to look at every project solely through the lens of now, to almost dismiss a drawing because it seems so obvious, or so canonical, but the time-stamp next to every piece is a reminder not to indulge in doing so.

The exhibition is organized pretty much chronologically, starting with a remarkable poster by Klaus Pinter and Gunther Zamp Kelp, which was produced for the opening of the Haus Rucker Studio, that looks almost like a straightforward photograph of an unremarkable mid-rise building that got a bit scratched up in transit … what with the blobby sort of business going on in the top left. A closer look shows a parasitic bubble growing its way up out of the top of the building and breaking off into smaller bubble subsets, a wacky sort of imaginary hat. The date, 1971, explains the subtle psychedelism of this simple print.

Just to the right, 1972 introduces Koolhaas’ early projects. The most inspiring of these is a drawing, done along with Madelon Vriesendorp, entitled The City of the Captive Globe Project, New York, New York. It depicts a Corbusier-referencing grid of skyscrapers that from far away looks eminently plausible but becomes weirder and weirder the closer up you get. Set on pedestals, these would-be skyscrapers take the form of blocks and pluses, but also of skull-like blobs and, in one case, just emptiness.

They are nothing, though, compared to a brilliant 1979 video directed by Jean-Pierre Jacquet. Terrifyingly once-lost to the thrall of dusty archives, it shows the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building eponymously Caught in the Act (Flagrant Delit). It’s essentially a porno. Starring two towers. And it is tremendous. Cue radio tower whipping and setback sixty-nining.

The film is hard to compete with but a quick palate-cleanser of a few more cartoonishly colorful early-Koolhaas drawings leads to a pair of Tschumi drawings. Red like his signature scarf, they are a group showing the multidisciplinary Italian designer/artist/architect Gaetano Pesce’s underground lair – a catacomb- and coffin-like proposal for, it turns out to be, a Church of Solitude. Seen in the context of Pesce’s contemporary work – which favors the mistakes of the handmade and the colorful imperfections of the possible, the Church of Solitude is a strikingly articulated series of three drawings, a surprising contribution from such a now-playful creative.

It is at this point in the show that the present begins to overtake the past, that the funnel between history and today and the overlap between speculative projects from twenty and thirty years ago and real projects of today widen. The surprise of Pesce’s drawings is one sign. Paul Rudolph’s proposals are another. This brutalist architect is known and beloved for his Art & Architecture building at Yale University and his Government Service Center in Boston, both chunky monoliths of volume and space. Yet, he also produced speculative projects like the Lower Manhattan Expressway Project, a surprisingly delicate construction of layered houses designed for downtown New York City, and his 1981 Beach Road II Office Tower Project for a site in Singapore. Its jenga-like construction of slipped-in blocks seems completely implausible if the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron hadn’t just unveiled a similarly jenga-like tower for Lower Manhattan, one that will – if all goes well! – actually be built. The references start coming faster. A rendering of Raimund Abraham’s Times Square Tower, produced in 1984, is impossible to look at without thinking of the competition entries – from Cesar Pelli, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry (for a minute) and the winner Renzo Piano – for the new New York Times Building, all just as forward-thinking as Abraham’s tall skinny tower.

This immediate overlay of the fantastical architecture of the past onto the realized architecture of the present, while it has its tendencies towards the unimaginable, is a sign of how far we’ve come in terms of what we’re willing to look at.

The overall acceptance of Zaha Hadid’s traveling space pod – technically Chanel Mobile Art – and the way in which we like to look at paper projects as much as realized ones, shows that at least one of the roles of speculative architecture can be to begin breaking ground for the future.

Hadid’s 1998 rendering of her project for Hong Kong’s Peak is part of the contemporary group, most of whose dreamland architecture is shown through models, all displayed in the center of the room on a superblock of a pedestal, the exhibition style itself mimicking this exhibition’s desire to drop conceptualist design into a standard environment.

Eisenman’s centrally suspended doughnut of a house anchors this group of models, which range from an equally stylized group of peaks from the Spanish duo Mansilla + Tuñón to the now-classic Slow House, Diller + Scofidio’s 1990 experimentation with the picture window-turned-picture-television.

The models are, while very good and exciting to look at, less entrancingly idealized than the drawings. It is easy to imagine Raimund Abraham or Paul Rudolph or Daniel Libeskind or Lebbeus Woods, another architecture school touchstone, hunched over a drawing table, fervently sketching the products of their deepest dreams. It is difficult, on the other hand, not to immediately conjure up sleepy teams of bright-eyed recent graduates working on SHoP’s slickly constructed resin-and-plexiglass Museum of Sex model, or a tired intern inserting LED lights into the model for Acconci Studio, Ruy Ohtake, and Enric Ruiz-Geli’s glowing Hotel Habitat.

It’s a dose of reality that might not come to all. Perhaps those who haven’t spent time in the trenches of model-making might not see these as so distracting, and instead enjoy the pure pleasure of the finally-unveiled structure of UNSTudio’s mysterious Moebius House, or the surprising strength of Lindy Roy’s Sagaponack project. These last few are all architects working today, turning their renderings and dreams into reality. And, seen against the context of the imaginations that came before them, their models are a sign that if you dream it long enough, well enough, and purposefully enough, it will come.

And, more importantly, that even if it doesn’t, it will have been worth it.

This article was published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Volume #8. It was written by Eva Hagberg.