Gaudí New York

Väike kirjeldus lisaks eelmisele postitusele, mille ma leidsin Rem Koolhaasi teosest "Delirious New York":

"In 1908 a delegation of American businessmen visits Antonio Gaudí in Barcelona and asks him to design a Grand Hotel in Manhattan. No site is known for the project; the businessmen may merely want an initial sketch, to raise money on and match later with a location. It is unlikely that Gaudí is aware of the quantum leaps and breakthroughs Manhattanism has produced; the businessmen themselves must have recognized the affinity between Gaudí's hysteria and Manhattan's frenzy.

But in his European isolation, Gaudí is like the man in Plato's cave; from the shadows of the businessmen's descriptions and requierments he is forced to reconstruct a reality outside the cave, that of an ideal Manhattan. He synthesizes a premonition of the true Skyscraper that applies both the lobotomy and the mutant branch of interior design not only on the ground floor but in layers throughout the interior.

His hotel is a sheaf of stalagmites, combined to form a single conoid that is, unmistakably, a Tower. It inhabits a podium or island, connected by bridges to the other islands. It stands aggressively alone.

Gaudí's design is a paradigm of floor-by-floor conquest of the Skyscraper by social activities. On the outer surface of the structure, low floors provide individual accomodation, the hotel rooms; the public life of the hotel is located at the core on enormous interior planes that admit no daylight.

The inner core of the Grand Hotel is a sequence of six superimposed restaurants. The first is decorated with a concentrate of European mythologies that will be reinforced by the choice of menu and European music, played by a large symphony orchestra. Each of the other restaurants, with its own hermetic iconography, represents another continent; the stack together represents the World.

A theater and exhibition hall are superimposed over the world of the restaurants. The whole is topped by a small observation sphere that awaits the moment when the conquest of gravity will be no longer metaphor but fact."

Utoopia.