Over Manhattan

Over Manhattan If Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century, then surely Manhattan was capital of the twentieth: an economic and cultural machine perfectly coincident with its epoch. And like Paris, Manhattan, its century passed, is now complete, and therefore dead. Manhattan is no longer suitable for anything but preservation—scrubbed clean and solidified into the static image of its perfect self. Manhattan, in the twenty-first century, is now ready to be embalmed, to lie in state as a museum of the twentieth. This project proposes doubling the Manhattan grid, while inverting the figure-ground relationship of the original plan. In the new grid, the streets become buildings, and the blocks are left open. This infrastructure is lifted six stories above the streets of the old city, and shifted such that its linear buildings pass above, and through, the centers of the existing Manhattan blocks. New developments—hotels, pied-a-terre apartments, recreational and entertainment facilities—are displaced into the elevated city, which caters to the seemingly limitless sources of tourism and capital that flow into Manhattan. In accordance with tourist maps of New York, pieces of this new grid are removed where they would intersect the great monuments and public spaces of Manhattan—its parks, skyscrapers, and museums. The new city is thus ideally organized to observe, and preserve, the old.

The vertical stratification of the city allows the most important datums in the image of Manhattan, street level and the skyline, to be preserved. Only the unremarkable middle is touched by this new city. The introduction of the new grid, an optimized inversion of the old, produces a simultaneous city, a doubling through which old and new, static and developing, are allowed to coexist in a parallel and productive relationship.

Manhattan is dead. Long live Manhattan.