Week 7
Typology and Morphology: Koolhaas: Manhattanism vs Atlanta
Questions:
In what way do contradictions of cities like Atlanta and Manhattan enhance our experience of the city?
How does the morphology of a grid layout impact the movement of people, and how does that impact the experience of the urbanism?
In Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, he engages the readers through his review and criticism of modern urbanism and architecture. He explores the city of Manhattan as an urban experiment and a field for man made experiences and a platform to the modern life. He demonstrates the concept of “Manhattanism” as a manifestation of urbanism of hyper density created by the man made urban conditions. The first chapter of the book gives the …show more content…
He talks about it in regards to rendering the charcoal (shown at daylight sky), very evocative drawings of romantic images of 1920s New York. Koolhaas focused on the private elements and he is more interested in the grid as uniform and unifying system more than he is interested what that means for the private realm. As for the grid, he sees it as equalizing the territory - where he starts starts to invent new typologies from that grid, push the boundaries of what that grid can be elastic to. Moreover, he thinks that the efforts to alter the grid by looking at the Rockefeller Center and the UN building, which makes it more walkable, it adds more cross streets, and arranges buildings around that and subway systems and it does intriguing things both in plan and section. The layering of the programs both horizontally and vertically creates a very dynamic interaction of spaces. The morphology of Atlanta as described by Koolhaas is about the object and landscape more than it is a morphology of …show more content…
Beyond the differences of approaches when it comes to analyzing both cities, one of the points that I found intriguing and personally quiet surprising as someone who is from a non-American culture, being from a reserved culture, reading about the contrasting lifestyles of Manhattan - the city of work, business and the elite - and Coney Island - the city of parties, rollercoasters, sexual intensity - was an interesting read. To see completely different contrasting sides of two parts of the city within the same state, going from one extreme to the other, and talking about the island’s artificiality becoming the attraction and becoming the new metropolis. This puts both the city of Manhattan into a category of a congested business
Typology and Morphology: Koolhaas: Manhattanism vs Atlanta
Questions:
In what way do contradictions of cities like Atlanta and Manhattan enhance our experience of the city?
How does the morphology of a grid layout impact the movement of people, and how does that impact the experience of the urbanism?
In Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, he engages the readers through his review and criticism of modern urbanism and architecture. He explores the city of Manhattan as an urban experiment and a field for man made experiences and a platform to the modern life. He demonstrates the concept of “Manhattanism” as a manifestation of urbanism of hyper density created by the man made urban conditions. The first chapter of the book gives the …show more content…
He talks about it in regards to rendering the charcoal (shown at daylight sky), very evocative drawings of romantic images of 1920s New York. Koolhaas focused on the private elements and he is more interested in the grid as uniform and unifying system more than he is interested what that means for the private realm. As for the grid, he sees it as equalizing the territory - where he starts starts to invent new typologies from that grid, push the boundaries of what that grid can be elastic to. Moreover, he thinks that the efforts to alter the grid by looking at the Rockefeller Center and the UN building, which makes it more walkable, it adds more cross streets, and arranges buildings around that and subway systems and it does intriguing things both in plan and section. The layering of the programs both horizontally and vertically creates a very dynamic interaction of spaces. The morphology of Atlanta as described by Koolhaas is about the object and landscape more than it is a morphology of …show more content…
Beyond the differences of approaches when it comes to analyzing both cities, one of the points that I found intriguing and personally quiet surprising as someone who is from a non-American culture, being from a reserved culture, reading about the contrasting lifestyles of Manhattan - the city of work, business and the elite - and Coney Island - the city of parties, rollercoasters, sexual intensity - was an interesting read. To see completely different contrasting sides of two parts of the city within the same state, going from one extreme to the other, and talking about the island’s artificiality becoming the attraction and becoming the new metropolis. This puts both the city of Manhattan into a category of a congested business