Brief

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“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.”

-Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York

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This studio exploits Manhattan’s congestion through operations of lamination at multiple scales. At the scale of material: dimensional lumber is stacked and glued together in successively perpendicular layers to form cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels. At the scale of the building: CLT floor “plates” proliferate vertically into prefabricated housing systems defined by notions of laminated space. At the scale of the city: buildings replicate and stratify into blocks, 254’ x 900’ autonomous organisms hyper-rationally arrayed across Manhattan - an island of laminar and petrified potentials. We simultaneously deploy, historicize, and performs cruel experiments upon the 1978 book Delirious New York as a repository of questionably actionable architectural theories. Celebrating here and criticizing there, we delight in mocking Koolhaas’ jokes into a 21st century Manhattan stunned and struggling to stay afloat in a post-pandemic lobotomy concussion.  As its streets sink and subways flood amidst wave after wave of hydrological disasters, the island exposes the East River waterfront as liminal territory where earth meets water: a boundary that sucks and pulls, shoots and spills, negotiating ancient waterwork infrastructures with the immense, foul, undeniably poetic and eternally murky flows of the East River. Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, and FDR Drive are the key elements of our site scenography, becoming-ruins of iron-oxide stains and dis-aggregating concrete. As millions of people refuse to return to work in Lower Manhattan’s office buildings, the island’s pedigree for limitless capital accumulation stalls into an uncertain future. Vacant yet present, an aura of sublime hollowness looms, pregnant with possibilities for a different type of program. Instrumentalizing this collective brain fog as a productive principle, we ambiguously laminate 24-units of housing with a new notion of “work” and hyper-dialed visions of “fun” to produce architectural auras of hybridity, compositeness, and compressed fragmentation. Guided by the delirious optimism of Dr. Frankenstein and the exquisite corpse, we re-animate Manhattanism from postmortem to postcarbon. By electrifying vibrant architectures into dead urbanisms, we bring new life to Koolhaas’ fictional conclusions. We embrace our new and awkward mixed-use housing monsters as they lunge at us with grotesque intimacy. This is our ecological thought.

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Selected Course Bibliography:

Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, by Rem Koolhaas

Blank: Speculations on CLT, by Jennifer Bonner & Hanif Kara

Building Codes Illustrated, by Frank Ching and Steven Winkel

Building Construction Illustrated, by Francis D. K. Ching

A History Of Housing In New York City, by Richard Plunz

International Building Code 2018, by International Code Council

The Sphere and the Labyrinth, by Manfredo Tafuri

Timber Construction Manual, by Thomas Herzog, Julius Natterer, Roland Schweitzer, Michael Volz, Wolfgang Winter

Water-works, by Kevin Bone

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Course Catalog Description:

Continuation of Arch 301, examining housing in the urban situation; diverse scales of use and occupation within the city as shaped by cultural tendencies. Projects examine collective and individual identities related by the condition of adjacency, the ability to consider varieties of scale within a project, and a further development of critical and technical methods.

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