Democracy of Coney Island and the Oligarchies of the Downtown Athletic Club
In Rem Koolhaas’ article on the “Culture of Congestion”, he gives two illustrations of metropolitan life: Coney Island and the Downtown Athletic Club. Each of these manifestations of metropolitan life carry the image of congestion but working in different ways.
In the case of Coney Island, the whole landscape is littered with elements of fantastical pursuits, in order to help the common man escape his day to day reality of being a mere cog in a machine. He, with countless others, is seduced by the lure of technological pass times which would have formerly been spent either in the public house or his own household. It seems that man has to flee his enduring boredom, which many philosophers have argued have been the characterising feature of modern man. These pursuits have no intrinsic value to him other than giving him a pause from the grind of his everyday life. He is able to forget for the time being what Schopenhauer called “The two enemies of human happiness”: pain and boredom.
The Downtown Athletic Club is a similar fantasy, where technology has liberated man. For this fantasy, it remains a selective group of rich white bachelors, who can enjoy their pastimes separated from the congestion that surrounds them. This has a note of irony as the solution to escaping the congestion of the city is to congest the programs of the building into a single vertical structure. Whereas the democratic Coney Island spread its congestion over a larger area, the Athletic Club stacks its diversions in its ivory tower, keeping it from being tarnished or accessed by the commoner. It neatly hides its hedonistic reality behind its monolithic facade contrasting with Coney Islands honest display of wild pursuits.
In both cases, technology becomes the catalyst for ensuring that the dreams of both the common man and the rich oligarch are achieved. They both take on a congestion of sorts, but differ in their physical manifestation of space, one taking a horizontal approach and the other vertical. Why is it that democracy has a sort of horizontal spread, while oligarchy shows itself as building towers as if to defend itself?
Your points on this time period when people were thought of as cogs in machines and a need to escape their everyday reality is valid. I appreciate your inclusion of the Great Gatsby cover. I know we have all read it and that brought to light the lifestyles lived in that time period to bring a better understanding of what was happening. Do you think these technological interventions were a success? To me all of it seems to gimmicky but I also see that we do the same with our amusement parks these days. The note of the rich build towers and the poor spread horizontally was enlightening. It is evident today that this thought process is still around, here I am thinking about the slums in India and the massive towers of Dubai or even closer to home in the states.
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