Downtown Athletic Club

The Downtown Athletic Club is a skyscraper in New York described by Rem Koolhaas in the book Delirious New York. Its exterior is not quite different from any other skyscraper while its interior stores a health club. Namely it has a golf course on the 7th floor, an swimming pool on the 12th, a garden on the 17th and boxing-, squash-, handbal- and billiardsfascilities on others. Next to that there are restaurants and bedrooms all over the building. Particular is the social compression or congestion as Koolhaas adresses about the Club:

"a social condenser generating and intensifying desirable forms of human intercourse." (Koolhaas, 1978)

Another term Koolhaas adresses in the book is the 'culture of congestion'. The culture of congestion is main topic in the book and it is the status which finds New York itself in. It is congestion of urbanity which makes the skyscraper of all urban instruments the apotheosis of this phenomenon.

This Downtown Athletic Club is an example to explain 'Lobotomy', the phenomenon I named in another post. To be able to build an monument as being a skyscraper and by its serenity totally hiding the - what Koolhaas calls - instability of life in the Metropolis. To seperate the exterior and the interior completely in order to build a monumental city in the chaos of modernity.

Koolhaas, R. (1978). Delirious New York. New York: The Monacelli Press, Inc. .