Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan c...ondition--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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan's builders to deve...lop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid's two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Manhattan has no choice but the skyward extrusion of the Grid itself; only the Skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of ...a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Manhattan has generated a shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion to its defiant lack of self-hatred, has ...been respected exactly to the degree that it went too far.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Otis's apparatus recovers the uncounted planes that have been floating in the thin air of speculation and reveals their superiorit...y in a metropolitan paradox: the greater the distance from the earth, the closer the communication with what remains of nature (i.e. light and air). The elevator is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy: the further up it goes, the more undesirable the circumstances it leaves behind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »