DELIRIOUS NEW YORK 15 Delirious New York: The Revolutionary Revision of Modern Architecture FRANCES HSU Georgia Institute of Technology INTRODUCTION the Surrealist’s revolutionary project and the ar- chitect who declared, “It is a question of building In Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas views mod- at the root of the social unrest of today; architec- ern architecture from a Surrealist perspective ture or revolution. The artist and the architect rep- through the paranoid-critical method of Salvador resent the two faces of the avant-garde Modern Dali. Pcm is basically the systematic encourage- Movement: its canonical, elitist, authoritarian tra- ment of the mind’s power to look at one thing and dition on the one hand and its concern with the see another, and the ability to give meaning to irrational, exotic other on the other. This dilemma, those perceptions. A visual analogy-seeking mecha- of the Modern Movement’s split between the urge nism that exploits the mind’s ability to hold two towards heterogeneity and the drive for autonomy contradictory images at once, pcm was used by and self-referentiality, was also already voiced by Dali in his paintings that read as double images. Walter Benjamin: As such, pcm is a kind of dialectical thinking. Koolhaas’s adaptation of pcm can be defined as a way of directing coincidental oppositions into con- “To win the energies of intoxication for the tradictory assemblages, i.e. chance encounters. His revolution—this is the project about which pc activity involves systematically making multiple Surrealism circles in all its books and reinterpretations of the fragments of Manhattan. enterprises...But are they successful in welding this experience to the other revo- Koolhaas presents pcm by narrating Dali’s and lutionary experience we have to acknowl- Corbusier’s trips to Manhattan in the 1930s. The edge because it has been ours, the “encounters” of artist and architect are juxtaposed constructive, dictatorial side of revolution? as a polemic adventure in which the protagonists In short, have they bound revolt to revo- are the personification of confrontation between lution? How are we to imagine an exist- the unconscious, irrational fantasy of Surrealism ence oriented solely toward Boulevard and the conscious, rational didacticism of Modern- Bonne-Nouvelle, in rooms by Le Corbusier ism. Dali is the model; paranoia, the method. and Oud?” Koolhaas reveals how Le Corbusier’s conflation of New York and Paris in the Ville Radieuse recalls Koolhaas manifests the confrontation between Dali’s method of alternative reading. He derives avant-garde, revolutionary art and architecture his notions of Manhattanism and retroaction from through techniques associated with Stucturalism, pcm. He subjects Manhattan to the Dalinian gaze the revolution of poetic language. He moves from in order to look at the “modern architecture” from Surrealism to structuralism as he assembles his different angles simultaneously. paranoid visions with a logic resembling the plu- rality of binary oppositions found in the work of Koolhaas got to Dali through Le Corbusier and his Roland Barthes. Just as linguistic theory decoupled rivalry with Surrealism in the sixties, when he in- the basic dual relationship between a word an ob- terviewed Le Corbusier for the Amsterdam-based ject where the former stood somehow for the lat- weekly news magazine, the Haagse Post. He makes ter, so is Manhattan a multiple bipolar structure, a the conjunction, in Delirious New York, between 16 THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE/THE SCIENCE OF ARCHITECTURE language of relations based on the common de- the same time the European avant-garde is ex- nominator of (apparent) opposites. Architecture is perimenting with automatic writing.”3 pluralised at the level of concepts, buildings and poetic devices, consciously and in an expanded THE PARANOID-CRITICAL METHOD (PCM) frame. Pcm is an interpretative and creative methodology REALISING SURREALIST GOALS conceived by Salvador Dali that begins with the simulation of paranoid delirium. Koolhaas uses pcm With Delirious New York Koolhaas realises the Sur- to intellectualize, objectify, his work and give it realist dream of discovering symbols and myths in meaning. While Delirious New York is a work of Manhattan. When the majority of the Surrealists history on the places and skyscrapers of the ver- arrived in New York after the war, they found nacular Manhattan, it is also the affectation of para- America alien and as a whole a “land without myth.” noia and delirium to ground his work in the Looking for icons and symbols to give meaning to framework of the critical avant-garde. The chapter their environment, they found nothing in the city “Dali and Le Corbusier Conquer New York” demon- that would fit into the modes of thinking that they strates and explains Koolhaas’s adaptation of pcm. had brought with them from Paris and elsewhere. The fifth chapter of Koolhaas’s book was initially New York “lacked precisely that which gave reso- submitted as an article entitled “Theft of New York” nance to the places from which they had come. to Oppositions and appeared in Architectural De- Those sculptural and architectural icons that ful- sign (1978). filled the need for unifying symbols, the streets, buildings and squares resonant with the ever- Dali began to be interested in paranoia as it be- present past, had few counterparts in the urban came a popular subject for medical research in environments of the new world.”1 For Koolhaas, Paris. Paranoia was a term already in use in classi- America must have seemed surreal. A European cal Greece to mean delusion or derangement that who had dreamed of New York as a child and ob- could occur after an anxious or terrifying dream. served it from afar, he saw many things that a It was recognized in 19th century as a form of psy- native-born American might never have noticed. chosis in which all kinds of unrelated experiences, Delirious New York is an examination of Manhat- images and events were associated and perceived tan during the time the Surrealists were there. It to have causal connections or relations to one cen- is as if Koolhaas experienced and recorded the “in- tral idea, becoming an obsession that was coher- terpretive delirium [which] begins only when man, ent for the subject of the delusion but meaningless ill-prepared, is taken by a sudden fear in the for- to an outside observer. Medically, it was defined as est of symbols.”2 a condition “lending itself to the coherent devel- opment of certain errors to which the subject shows The notion of structuring through polarities is based a passionate attachment,” in which the “errors” are on the surrealist chance encounter. Surrealism used typically worked into an organized system. the chance encounter to reconcile the contradic- tory conditions of dream (the unconscious, irratio- Dali recognized that paranoid delirium, when simu- nal) and reality (the conscious, rational). They and lated, had potential as a method of critical inter- other historical avant-garde artists used the pretation. Pcm was to be the “critical exploitation readymade as the linguistic expression of the col- of the unconscious.” The logic of the paranoid state lective unconscious. It was a mass-produced ob- of mind could be exploited, as “a form of mental ject that reflected the condition of modernity. illness which consists in organizing reality in such Koolhaas refers to this condition when he connects a way as to utilize it to control an imaginative con- 4 the Empire State Building to automatic writing, the struction.” Paranoid delirium was determined by practice used to reveal unconscious desires. The the desire of the paranoiac. The delirium would Empire State Building is a readymade built by become critical, he proposed, after the fact—when “anonymous” contractors: “The last manifestation the subject deliberately subjected a chain of asso- of Manhattanism as pure and thoughtless process ciations that was determined by desire to analy- ... an automatic architecture, the surrender by its sis. For Dali, this was a way to elaborate and collective makers, from the accountant to the maintain his own neurotic complexes, which he plumber, to the process of building taking place at called “irrational knowledge.” In this context his DELIRIOUS NEW YORK 17 well-known statement “The only difference between mulative pull, so, through unstoppable, myself and a madman is that I am not mad” takes systematic and in themselves strictly ra- on more specific meaning. Echoing Dali, Koolhaas tional associations, the paranoiac turns the “proposes a tourism of sanity into the realm of whole world into a magnetic field of facts, paranoia.”5 all pointing in the same direction: the one he is going in. The essence of paranoia is AUTOMATISM VS. PCM this intense—if distorted—relationship with the real world.”9 Dali conceived pcm as a critique and transforma- tion of automatism. Although pcm was in effect a “Paranoid-Critical activity is the fabrication of evi- kind of automatism, the identifying practice of the dence for improvable speculations and the subse- Surrealist movement founded by André Breton, Dali quent grafting of this evidence on the world, so took great care to distinguish paranoia from the that a “false” fact takes its unlawful place among hallucination provoked by automatic writing: Para- the “real” facts. These false facts relate to the real noia was voluntary and active as opposed to auto- world as spies to a given society: the more con- matic writing, which was a passive mental state.6 ventional and un-noted their existence, the better The significant difference between pcm and auto- they can devote themselves to that society’s de- matic writing resides in their respective attitudes struction.”10 towards reality. Automatism was a form of real- ism, the recording of “mental facts” that expressed THE DALINAN GAZE the “true functioning of thought,” a part of Surrealism’s “future resolution of dream and real- Dali linked vision to particular states of mind.