The myth of Ithaca
Conspiratorial Theory orTheoretical ConspiracyThe Myth of IthacaAn Introduction to Palimpsestuous Ithaca by Sébastien MarotSébastien Marot launches us into an incredible theoretical epic, reviewing the history of contemporary architecture and suggesting that “everything may have been played out” in Ithaca, NY — the small mythic city nestled in the north-east corner of the United States and indelibly linked to the prestigious university known as Cornell.In this labyrinthine rhetorical exercise, he stirs up a putsch against conventional urban theory, which he gleefully turns upside-down in his discourse on “suburbanism.”Tapping into both the history and artistic imagination of that city, Marot expands and aestheticizes the intellectual landscape of his thoughts, to the point of turning his very serious thesis into an investigation worthy of The Back Dahlia.•••In 1978, Rem Koolhaas published Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. That simultaneously theoretical and poetic masterpiece, which may be considered the manifesto on contemporary sur- or superurbanism, describes a project in which programming leads to the creation of a site. My ambition is to illustrate a form of poetics that is the opposite of suburbanism (the site creates the programming) by proceeding to the laudatio urbis of an earth island — the small city of Ithaca, home to Cornell University, in the rural heart of New York State — which is the geographical opposite of Manhattan (lake/island). A fluke of history saw to it that this tiny city was founded by the creator of the Manhattan grid (geographer Simeon De Witt) and that Koolhaas moved there in 1972 to begin to weave his Manhattanesque legend. By overexploiting that detail, my aim is to suggest that superurbanism is only one moment in suburbanism. My argument is developed in three stages.The first is a geographical thesis, setting the scene of Ithaca’s vertical landscape. It is, in particular, devoted to the University’s three founders — Ezra Cornell, a self-taught engineer; Andrew Dickson White, an architecture aficionado; and Liberty Hyde Bailey, an extraordinary botanist and ruralist, today considered one of the fathers of American environmental pragmatism.Then I move onto an urban-planning antithesis, closely following the trajectories of three European architects — Colin Rowe, Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas — up to the moment when each came to construct the theoretical intrigues of their respective manifestos in Ithaca. The goal of this comparative genealogy of Collage City, “Berlin as Green Archipelago,” and Delirious New York — all three of which were published in 1978 — is to pinpoint the ingredients of a comparative manifesto on suburbanism, which chose to play itself out on the very landscape all three men flew over, en route to their dream — one from Rome, another from Berlin, and a third from Manhattan.The study concludes with a poetic synthesis devoted to a few great figures from the art and literary worlds, each of whom found their Northwest Passage in “Cornell country” — earth artist Robert Smithson (whose work came to maturity in Ithaca), “anarchitect” Gordon Matta-Clark (the best student Colin Rowe ever had at Cornell), and Vladimir Nabokov (who took inspiration from Ithaca to create one of the most fascinating hyperlandscapes in contemporary literature).In short, the gist of this undertaking may be summed up in an enigmatic line of dialogue delivered by the eponymous hero of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, “I am planning something geographical.”
