Manhattanisms : RAM(s) vs. REM

This essay offers a new lens through which to view two media-celebrated architects, Rem Koolhaas and Robert A.M. Stern. Implicit in this pairing is a provocation and polemic about the unstated reciprocity and commonalities within this unlikely duo. Both architects, while widely discussed in critical and popular domains, have managed to evade and rise above comparison that may elucidate and shed light on unexpected findings. Superficially speaking, these are two architects who are interested in building at a global scale without hesitation. Yet, further comparison opens up a series of vexing questions about their respective attitudes towards late capitalism, globalization, postmodernism, and the architect as brand. The purpose of such a comparison and investigation is to initiate and craft our own contemporary position in regards to these two bookend positions.

AN UNLIKELY COMPARISON:

Robert A.M. Stern serves as a potent example of a contemporary architect engaging issues of globalization, yet his architecture, R.A.M.S. + capital A, does not conform to the cliché stereotypes. Typically when architects and urban designers bemoan globalization they cite newly constructed projects that supplant the local heterogeneity of character in a region, or nation with a new, foreign element that neglects specific political, social, and geological concerns. Despite an initial skepticism in regards to what Stern’s architecture offers to the current generation of young architects, particularly those steeped on Koolhaas and his blasé attitude towards architecture’s internal narratives, there is a striking similarity when one considers that both Stern and Koolhaas leverage globalization as a profound jumping-off platform in their respective practices.

Koolhaas’ stream-of-conscious text “Junkspace” encapsulated neither a cynical denial nor an embrace of globalization, but instead offered an account of the inevitable acceptance of what architecture (or what was once architecture) must face. While he claims that modernism for most architects seemed like the “reading a footnote under a microscope hoping it would turn into a novel”[3], Koolhaas has built a career out of combining and re-using canonical Modernist tropes (primarily from Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier) with the dirty realism of the built world. As Jeffrey Kipnis has aptly stated:

"no practice has made more cunning use of the differences between Corb’s free-plan and Mies’s stage-plan than OMA, which has synthesized the two into an architecture that, in its critique of the two, posits a fundamental shift in the liberal project from the Modernist pursuit of democracy as a collective ideal (in the future) to a contemporary desire to instantiate individual freedom (in the present)."[4]

The remnants of modernism and its various forms of social order function for both Koolhaas and Stern as a point of salvation and refuge from the contemporary disarray and profound change on the world of globalization. The vast similarities of these two (fully branded) positions and where they came from offer a mirror in which each can find the other yet recognize an overlapping initial terrain: Manhattan.

Both Stern (b. 1939) and Koolhaas (b. 1944) find their conceptual foundation in Manhattan. After completing their studies in architecture the hyper-conscious pair of postwar offspring arrive (or arrive back, for Stern) in New York at roughly the same time. They both become infatuated with the city’s turn-of-the-century history, growth, and life style. Stern’s historian persona is most interested in architectural development between 1870-1940 through the development of architectural modernism as a product of modernity. Thus his history truly begins in American architecture of the period that capitalized on a borrowed Anglo-Saxon Beaux-Arts tradition. American capital was producing the symbolic bedrock of an American (eclectic) style with Manhattan as its epicenter. Koolhaas also recognized the quality of possibility and American optimism, but found the impetus of his study in the democratizing effects of Manhattan’s infrastructure and ‘its attendant revolutionary metropolitan lifestyle.’[5] Focusing on the formal organizational logic of the city grid, transportation infrastructure, and the mechanical passenger elevator, Koolhaas could detach the diagrams of social order as a model for the new Metropolitan world. From Manhattan, Stern found the history to begin to appropriate the face of American pluralism, while Koolhaas’ internal focus on program allowed him to steal the guts of democracy.

PERSONAS:

Stern’s work, persona, and even aura point to a terrain that manages to juggle simultaneously the categories that define the architect as cultural figure. Stern manages to exhibit a bizarre combination of layman’s common sense (witness his appearance on multiple PBS television programs) and an expert’s connoisseurship (knowingly and ungraciously elitist). These two divergent personality traits co-exist as an symbiotic mixture in the man who has come to exemplify the cliché notion of “having your cake and eating it too.” Stern has succeeded in academia, private practice, and business - without truly fitting into a single category. In order to investigate Stern’s work, we can look to his “self-conscious self-fashioning”[6] as a multiplicity of independent yet interconnected voices. Each of these voices (ie. academic, developer, historian, theorist, craftsman, spokesman, architect, planner, preservationist, etc.) takes up a different relationship to architectural history. As architect, Stern behaves as what Yale Art Historian Vincent Scully refers to a a “physical historian,”[7] a practicing architect motivated by history as the primary vector through which one can engage the discipline of architecture. As architectural historian, Stern has worked on five tomes on the history of New York City, his hometown, and the place of his fantasies, dreams, hopes, and eventual legacy.

Meanwhile, Koolhaas has crafted a particular niche in which the architect is seen as a ‘public intellectual.’ Through a combination of highly rhetorical, ironic texts and deft cultural commentaries, Koolhaas has sculpted an image of the contemporary architect as equal parts incisive provocateur/ intellectual bricoleur. Koolhaas’ first contribution to architecture was the book Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, a narrative re-telling of the history of how Manhattan came to be and its particular forms of social and collective intercourse. Since then, Koolhaas’ career has succinctly challenged and questioned the dogmas, clichés, and orthodoxies of architecture to purge the discipline of its moralist, sentimental, and naive tendencies. His image in the media presents a world-traveler, more comfortable dashing through airports and attending conference calls. In some ways, his own lifestyle is an experiment for the architectural future that his work attempts to usher forward.

BRANDING | SELF-FASHIONING:

It is useful to see the current phenomenon of Stern’s work traced back to his boyhood admiration for the lights and energy of the metropolis across the river from his Brooklyn beginnings. All of this simply means that the study of Stern’s construction of ‘self’ is a collage of competing internal forces, except for the fact that his internal composition is the scene of far more disparate differences, each fighting for a form of expressed identity. Each of these relationships to history require a new lens when considering Stern’s role as a globalized architect — ie, Stern’s product(s), ‘Robert A.M. Stern, Architect,’ a brand of symbolic capital (as Pierre Bourdieu would call it[8]) that has been successfully created, recreated, and recreated again in multiple locations as near-replicas or copies of the original version with virtually no outward signs of dissonance between the new context or the image that Stern so successfully puts forth. This is not necessarily a criticism or moralization, unlike Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism, which serves as one example among many that try to resuscitate a discourse of place or genius loci in a world where globalization seems to make any such notion hopelessly lost or retrograde in the contemporary world of late capitalism. Instead, this view of Stern’s modus operandi is best portrayed through the dealing of the image, persona, and the brand of Stern himself.

One can view Stern’s work as myth-making through a manipulation of history and traditional tropes, akin to the process of writing fiction where once stood fact. Stern has a specific interest in an Anglo-American hybrid that joins the pastoral traditional of craftsmanship (myth) with an emerging monumental scale addressing new technology. Using the emerging stylistic pluralism found in the budding America, democracy in built form becomes a look of collected history. Stern is also taking aim at the failures of modernist agendas, but his work is not as much concerned with the inability of architecture to attain social ends, but that he is against the break with history and modernism’s attempt to cleanse and begin anew.
Self-fashioning is but one response among many to the pressures of globalization in today’s contemporary late capitalist[9], celebrity-centered consumer culture. Rem Koolhaas’ own reflections on the international work of superstar architects in S, M, L, XL claims that globalization “scrambles the chronology of individual architects’ careers”[10] and results in work that is “produced by architects not remotely connected to the context for which their works are intended - an ignorance that leads to a new purism.”[11] Despite the healthy level of cynicism implied by Koolhaas rhetoric, he, too, has shaped a multi-faceted identity around activating architecture’s disestablishing and liberating potentials.

POSTMODERNISM:

The relationship between history and the self is a complicated one, but particularly so in the case of Stern, as his efforts to theorize postmodernism in architecture was not the same postmodernism put forth by Robert Venturi and others.[12] Venturi’s tendencies to reference and utilize commercial and populist sources were meant to engage a wide audience and simultaneously function as a counter position to the hegemony of the International Style (which had come to exemplify the burgeoning economy at that time as a symbol of corporate success and excess). In that sense, Venturi’s postmodernism can perhaps be best understood as part of the erosion of the distinction between high culture and mass culture/ media that occurred during the 1950s and 60s, and ended up in architecture in a later phase as an evocation of populism and as an attempt to speed-up architecture’s language to participate in contemporary life. Stern’s own definition of postmodernism swerved away from the of “Main Street, USA”[13], and instead sought to activate architectural history’s own canons and thus couch itself in the manipulation of history as an infinitely deep well of source material (which had as its audience a much more ‘cultured’ clientele). For Stern, postmodernism became a self-aggrandizing, self-propagating force backed by a desire for a (personal) style, and even a personal lifestyle (a discussion picked back up by Ed Mitchell, Bob Somol, Sylvia Lavin, among others)[14]. It is critical to note that Stern began by critiquing the then- stultified style of the high Modern masters, which when passed down and institutionalized, left little or no room for personality, individuality, and ultimately, a potential to be recast anew. What became more important for Stern’s brand of postmodernism was the relationship between the architecture and who the architect was referencing, and the potency of its quotations. In a certain sense, one can see this as the result of the influence of Venturi’s project but adapted to uphold the values and moral gravity of Scully’s insistence on the timelessness of architecture.

Koolhaas’ take on postmodernism is less reactionary than Stern’s but also less widely known. While Stern was able to have a choice to return to history and pull from the archives because of certain liberties given by the booming American economic climate and political freedom, Koolhaas understood the limitations of institutional forces, as he emerged out of an activist-based culture of pushing against intellectual oppression of the 1960s academy. He understood that the use of the now- corporate, institutionalized modernism was a way to take on the institutions using their own language. For Koolhaas, Venturi’s seminal text allowed him to look to the founders of this aesthetic (Corb and Mies) and infuse them with the messiness necessary for social identification and commercial life. By applying a wide range of cultural decoration, textures, curtains, wallpaper, landscaping, continuous wood flooring, etc. (with the help of Petra Blaisse and others) to the structures of modernism, he proposed an edgier and more authentic version of the contemporary condition - without the moralized agenda of fixing societal problems.

The city as an organizing model became the starting point for OMA’s metropolitan diagram which aimed to create the most power-free constructs possible. With an understanding that completely unorganized systems, such as those in pure anarchy, will have ideals of freedom but inevitably will evolve their own hierarchical strategy, Koolhaas has assumed that the two elements to be designed are the surface of the ground and public infrastructure. OMA’s diagram reads the current human condition experienced though using infrastructure (the subway, the elevator, stacking floor plates, building systems) as a means of constructing one’s own version of the world. By the act of popping in a hole -- being disoriented and transported to another destination -- popping out to do the next act, and continuously repeating this process, one constructs the networked pattern of fragmentary experiences that produces one’s routine of life. In Koohaas’ work, a continuous resetting of the means of infrastructure to allows different type of living and an attempt to find new ways to render each destination is a method to resist an architecture that becomes an authority.

DETOURNE:

For Stern, Venturi’s manipulation of these quotations did not go far enough. Stern expands on this project by making his architecture literally reenact and incorporate a nostalgic recapitulation of historical styles and moments from the past, selectively re-imagined to become a form of mythic fantasy as opposed to remaining in the world of legibility and symbolism. Stern’s relationship as purveyor and arbiter of history allows him to parse through the weight of the past in order to deal with the contemporary moment, whether in the case of a corporate hotel or a smallish Shingle Style New England vacation residence. In effect, Stern functions as proxy for history itself, sorting and delimiting what should be kept, regarded, and valued as opposed to disposed, thrown away, and ignored. In this sense, his role is akin to something relegated to governments or national archiving. History becomes a way of positioning architecture as a discrete product that can be understood by a client and more importantly, a public body. Stern’s use of quotation runs the risk of being almost formulaic, not only in its proportions, but in its planning, where precedents with certain historical legacy or effects, good town planning or building proportions are copied to fit in or retain a character of a place at a past time. There is a reverence here that is reliant on accuracy and skilled emulation, but not as much reliant on cultural knowledge or recognizability.

In response to the failures of Utopian modernism and corporate copying, Koolhaas’ cunning use of the iconoclasts of stylistic-modernists are put to use to agitate stagnation with recombinations. In many of Koolhaas’ projects we find the formal diagrams of Mies being literally recapitulated through the diagrams of Le Corbusier, ie. the Miesian plinth and long-span pavilion is found as a liberator and connector to the floating boxes of Le Corbusier’s five-points. Koolhaas’ projects take on a quality of bricolage, which, according to philosopher Gilles Deleuze, can be understood as “the characteristic mode of production of the schizophrenic producer.”[15] Koolhaas’ knowledge of the meanings behind these diagrams creates new historical text that can be read as new wholes. But these new works do not rely on the interpretation, misuse or indifferent usage of certain precedent. Similar to  the early work of Frank Gehry, their own collage language and incoherent whole creates effects of their own. Koolhaas uses quotation to critique and simultaneously create new combinations of urban and historical form as a way to use the past to generate form for new social organizations.

NOSTALGIA & PASTICHE:

While Fredric Jameson’s theories on nostalgia film discuss an entirely different artistic moment and genre, there is a strong similarity between the sentiments he expresses about history and the engagement of nostalgia in architecture. Jameson observes that:

"it seems to me increasingly symptomatic to find the very style of nostalgia films invading and colonizing even those movies today which have contemporary settings: as though, for some reason, we were unable today to focus our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our current experience. But if that is so, then it is a terrible indictment of consumer capitalism itself—or at the very least, an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history."[16]

Does this not equally apply to our sketch of Stern’s architecture? The relationship of Stern’s work to New York can be seen as both a temporal and spatial displacement and importation of New York circa 1920s. New York made into a copy, repeated, re-assembled, as Baudrilliard would want us to believe, “the cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.”[17] This image of the past as fiction seems to satisfy both the Hegelian desire for totalizing coherency (to answer the question: what do buildings look like today?) and the commonsensical desire for familiarity (to answer the question: how does one understand the buildings of today?) Stern’s work quietly posits that today’s buildings are the old as new. Or better yet, as Jameson remarks that “we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about that past which itself remains forever out of reach”.[18] For Stern, this ‘reach’ is a pleasing and seductive struggle, as opposed to a forced and difficult reach for something unattainable.

To return again to Jameson’s theories of postmodernity as a cultural phenomenon, pastiche is defined in relation to parody, irony, and other literary devices but here the nuance is critical. Stern’s particular brand of postmodernism closely aligns with Jameson’s description of pastiche in what he calls “late capitalist emergent social structures:”

"Pastiche, like parody, is the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language, but it is the neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive... Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor, pastiche is to parody what that curious thing, the modern practice of a kind of blank irony."[19]

Ironically, as Jameson tells us “the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve.”[20] Stern’s work may fit all too well into this critique of today, but one may arrive at the question: can a language of architectural fantasy supersede history in economies of late capitalism?

COMPARE AND CONTRAST:

On the other hand, Koolhaas is also nostalgic for a set of lost values, but in an entirely different mode. His own nostalgia is perhaps located in moments past where architecture had the ability, or naivety, to insidiously affect its users. One thinks of constructivism, Soviet social condensers, collective housing, informal urbanism, etc.- all of these share in common the notion that architecture is constituted by scenarios and situations which opportunistically create and afford individual or collective social desires, allowing for unpredictable, unmeasurable possibilities. In that sense, life, with all of its complexities and contradictions, always exceeds the limited scope and vision of form as conceived by the architect. Yet despite wide differences formally and superficially between the two architects, each activates a particular form of nostalgia relative to their own projects. Through the exercise of compare and contrast, Stern’s work perhaps seems more aligned with the populist idea of the masses once so central to Koolhaas’ democratic Manhattanism. Koolhaas’ manipulation of key modernist-historical tropes aligns with Stern’s ambition to activate history as something other than historicist, to put history to work, ie. to use it rather than reference or emulate it. While Koolhaas may attempt to avoid the sentimentality of history for history’s sake, perhaps seen through this lens, interestingly, he is not so unlike Stern. What is it to be gained in this exercise is more than just an elucidation of two tangentially related positions within architecture today, but a launching platform for understanding and unpacking central architectural dispositions that have been shaped by, and will shape, the American cultural landscape.

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[1] "The Saturations of Self: Stern's (and Scully's) Role in (Stern's) History," Assemblage : A Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture No. 33, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, (1997), 7-21.

[2] Koolhaas, Rem. “Junkspace.” Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba et al, eds. Harvard School of Design Guide to Shopping. Taschen, 2002.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Kipnis, Jeffrey. “Moneo’s Anxiety,” Harvard Design Magazine, Fall/Winter 2005, William Saunders, Ed. GSDPress, Cambridge 2005.

[5] Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious NY: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. Thames and Hudson, 1978.

[6] "The Saturations of Self: Stern's (and Scully's) Role in (Stern's) History," Assemblage : A Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture No. 33, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, (1997), 7-21.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice, 1984.

[9] Mandel, Ernest. Late Capitalism (London: Humanities Press, 1975).

[10] Koolhaas, Rem with Bruce Mau edited by Jennifer Sigler. Small, Medium, Large, Extra-large: Office for Metropolitan Architecture; 2nd ed. Rotterdam, Netherlands: 010 Publishers; New York, N.Y.:Monacelli Press, 1998.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, The Museum of Modern Art Press, New York 1966.

[13] Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977.

[14] See for example Ed Mitchell’s “Lust for Lifestyle” in Assemblage 40, 1999, R.E. Somol’s “Yes Is More” in Under the Influence, and
Sylvia Lavin’s Form Follows Libido.

[15] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Continuum edition. London: Continuum, 2004 (1972). p.7-8

[16] Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

[17] Baudrilliard, Jean. Simulations. NewYork: Semiotext(e), 1983.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

[20] Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.