Week 10: Hood’s Manhattanism

In what turned out to be my favorite reading of the semester, Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, was an engaging narrative of an ambitious architect rising at a time when a seismic shift , lead by his French contemporary Le corbusier, of which he was 6 years his senior, was looming hard in the world of architecture. The story’s protagonist is Raymond Hood, and I am deliberate with my language because it was a very pro-Hood narrative, which painted him as something of a hero, if not an innovator, in its telling. I’m not entirely sure it would be considered stream-of-consciousness, but the writing style was a drastically different tone from the rigorous academic rhetoric we’re accustomed to, and that seemed befitting of his unique place in the timeline of our studies. Of particular interest to me was the Iceberg metaphor, by which Hood’s McGraw-Hill building was described as “the raging fire inside of an iceberg: the fire of Manhattanism inside of the Iceberg of modernism” (Koolhaas, 171). The metaphor is an elegant recognition of Hood’s ingenuity in the face of greater movement he did not partake in. Perhaps one could argue that Hood is simply the last of what was soon to be rendered an obsolete class of Art-Deco-ists–or whatever style you might categorizes 20’s and 30’s NYC architecture by–but I side with Koolhass’ statement, because I view Hood as someone who isn’t perpetuating a style which is necessarily bound to give way to another, but because I believe Hood is that fire raging inside of an iceberg which, despite the status quo’s icy tendency to freeze his creative energy, he operates under his own conditions in just the same manner as an creative titan in the industry, regardless of how consequential the theory of his architecture ends up being for his successors. “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposite ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function” as Fitzgerald says, and we see that born out in Hood’s “schizophrenia, that allows him simultaneously to derive to derive energy and inspiration from Manhattan as an irrational fantasy and establish its unprecedented theorems in a series of strictly rationally steps”.