Paul Laffoley
(b. 1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts)
LAFFOLEY, PAUL
Gaudeamus Igitur ( let us then be merry, let us therefore rejoice)
Homage to: Antonio Gaudi y Cornet ( 1852-1924) visionary architect
2001
Ink, Letters, Collage on Board
15 7/8 x 15 7/8 in.

In 1908 the great Catalonian architect Antonio Gaudi was retained to design a grand hotel for New York City. The location chosen was the site upon which the Twin-Towered World Trade Center would be eventually built between 1962 and 1974. This American patron of Gaudi was an extremely affluent financier who actually owned the land bounded on the north by Vesey Street, on the source by Liberty Street, on the east by Church Street, and on the west by West Street (which later became connected with the west side highway). Of course, at the beginning of the 20th century the financier’s actual landholdings were not as sharply defined by streets as the world trade center would become. Then the lower west side of Manhattan was zoned for low residential and light commercial such as shops that sold parts for wireless telegraphy and crystal sets. How the landowner came to believe he could obtain a zoning variance that would allow him to build what would have been the first really skyscraper for New York City remains only one of the many mysteries surrounding this project. Perhaps it was the fact that the American architect Cass Gilbert (1959-1934) had just finish a modest size gothic skyscraper on West Street (1905-1907) built on Broadway near City Hall Park. That became the financier’s impetus.

At first, Gaudi was extremely enthusiastic to be part of the American Dream to such an extent that he feel destined to design the hotel. He made some preliminary sketches of a structure reaching to a height of 1016 feet composed of clustered catenary formed parabolic towers of varying heights grouped together like engaged columns around a central soaring shaft. But somehow the sketch plans never progressed to the design development stage. The only possible explication for this situation is Gaudi’s method of working which he developed in Spain. From the simplest drawing he would begin construction like a master sculptor, collaborating with other designers more than him in working drawings and specifications. Acted like a conductor of an orchestra of architects and artists, as was the case his ongoing master piece the incredible expiatory church of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

Gaudi planed to travel to New York City to oversee the construction of the hotel with its huge halls, balconies and the decoration he would improvise from debris discovered on the New York City streets. He was hoping to hire, as he did in Catalonia, an army of artists and architects. In this case from New York to bring the interior and exterior detailing of his fantastic vision to fruition.
Another mystery was why Gaudi’s journey to New York was abruptly cancelled, and the project stopped with no reason given. The site remained unchanged until the early 1960’s. While the reasons of the abandonment of the project remain the ultimate enigma of this enterprise, it might be safe to surmise that the vision of Gaudi was ahead of its time.

What remains of this project today are a few sketches by Gaudi’s own hand and more fully developed rendering by Juan Matamala y Flotats (1893-1968) the son of Leandro Matamala y Pinyol (1856-9127).

Gaudi’s prime sculptor and “right arm”. Juan, also one Gaudi’s sculptors, created his drawings from memory in the 1940’s because as tell us “…Nothing is left now of the Gaudi’s studio: the studio, the casting, the archives, everything was burnt during the 1936 Civil War…” This was that catapulted the fascist director Fransisco Franco (1892-1975) to power in Spain.

What Juan had done was to begin the process of improvisation upon a very strong vision, a modus operandi so dear to Gaudi’s medieval sensibilities. Gaudi always knew that real architecture requires a group effort to bring a building to successful completion. Personal involvement in a project by others is ensured more by an invitation to become co-creators, rather than proceeding in the normal way of doing things, that is having a dictator assign a multitude of mindless and mechanical tasks to a mass of underlings. This assessment of Gaudi’s working method was first suggested by the contemporary architectural historian Georges R. Collins in a chapter he wrote about The American Hotel in a book entitled: “La vision artistique et religieuse de Gaudi” (1969). Until his recent death, (Juan) Matamala was Gaudi’s most active spokesman. It was he who, with passionate enthusiasm, convinced us of the exceptional importance of The American Project, and who enable us to devote a chapter to it here. His fervent devotion to Gaudi’s legacy enabled us to imagine the prodigious influence the artist exercised over the man who surrounded him. Thus, if in certain of the plans for the American Hotel, the vision of Juan Matamala seems rather obvious, we can be assured that the remained faithful to Gaudi’s creative spirit.

Gaudi’s concept of the American Dream include not only the melting pot of all races, religions, ethic groups and classes, but also the nexus of multi-opportunity to most Europeans at the turn of the 20th Century this idea translated in terms of architecture into the 18th Century vision of the utopian city.

New York City, nevertheless, had by itself bypassed this image of utopic space with any conscious effort. Edward Bellamy (1850-1898), born in Chicopee Massachusetts wrote in 1887 a very influential future vision of the city of Boston in the Year 2000. But the Manhattan of 1908 made this book purporting to reveal modern life 113 ahead totally obsolete as the artists and architects of Italian Futurism discovered. Thus Bellamy’s book “looking backward: 2000-1887” turned out to be ironically correctly titled.

From 1900 on those American who were Gotham Bound from other parts of the United States would seek utopic space not in the city itself but in its hotels. These were (and are) worlds of their own, The forerunners of the mega structure and multi-use architectural proposals of 1970’s. And now these hotels are often the only manifestations of this thinking that remain.

One can only imagine the mixture of joy and envy Gaudi must have felt while reading about existing hotels in New York City as part of his research for the project. This must have been especially true when he read the description of the most famous hotel in Manhattan at that time, the original Waldorf Astoria. It was located in 1908 on the site of the present Empire State Building, on Fifth Avenue between 34th and 33th Streets. The hotel was designed in 1893 by Henry J. Hardenbergh, architect, then demolished in 1929. During the early 1930’s the current Art Deco version of the Waldorf was built on Park Avenue between 48th and 49th Streets and backed by Lexington Avenue. But the original Waldorf was owned by colonel John Jacob Astor. As a result, the hotel became one of the gathering places of the New York 400 besides Madison Square Garden. But unlike the Garden which was an exclusive club, the Waldorf was open to the public day and night. The Hoi Polloi, therefore, were able to mingle with the elite in the lobbies, ballrooms, concert Halls, the Theatres, the banks that had up to the minute contact with the stock exchange downtown.

The huge dining rooms, the various shop, the mezzanine where a full orchestra played from morning to night, the Lavis Corridors and the open air restaurant in the summer which was the 17th floor and the roof of the hotel. It was only on the 1500 rooms and 1200 baths where one could find complete privacy, the rest of the structure was free for examination. It must have seemed to its patron and visitors as if they had entered in live-in museum where all the interior accoutrement was either selected or made by the best symbolized immigrants by the Statue of Liberty was seen up close and realized by the Waldorf. To the people who entered this world, it became a visit to the end of the proverbial rainbow complete with privilege, urbanity and culture.As an example of the drawing power of opportunity base on this hotel, one need only to be remind of a famous immigrant to American soil Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), the electrical genius who literally created the 20th Century. He arrived from Croatia to the Castle Garden Immigration Office in Manhattan. It was 1884, the year the people of France presented the United States with the Statue of Liberty. Tesla had with him twenty-five cents American and a letter of recommendation to the American inventor Thomas Alua Edison (1847-1931). When the inevitable rift occurred between these two promethean inventors, Tesla began to frequent the fabulous Palm Room at Waldorf. It was here he would eat and mingle with the giants of American industry in hope of finding the venture capital to launch an independent career. Eventually, he did as soon as his personal situation improved, he began to take up residence at the Waldorf. Of all the strange twists and turns and turns his long career took, Tesla admitted at the end of his life there were only two things that gave him the hope he needed to fulfill his dreams, his American citizenship and the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

For Gaudi, it was the hotel with which he wished to complete not America itself. If he could but capture the attention of New York with a hotel so physically large, so grand in accommodation, so lavish in décor that he would surpass all existing designs, even future attempts, but not like the traditional European palace which attracts and expresses the class system and the unobtainable , or the cold uncaring bureaucratic building which repels and is simply a wall against the masses, he would have fulfilled his task.
What Gaudi designed was a building that was eight feet less than the height of the Eiffel Tower on Paris , in terms of the basic structure. But with the addition of the observatory he called “ the sphere of all space”. It added another 62 feet making the entire height of the grand hotel 1086 feet, making it 282 feet less in height than the World Trade Center.

Directly under the space tower, Gaudi planned an enormous exhibition hall of 375 feet of vertical space. It would have been as height as the tower of the Sagrada Familia. The space boasted a first and second circumferential gallery both interior and exterior. The space was to be lit by huge stain glass windows. The hall was supposed to contain giants statues of all the presidents of the United States with enough pedestals remaining to take America into the third millennium.

Below the hall was to be a monster theater and lecture room 100 feet high utilizing both amphitheater and proscenium staging. Immediately below that was to be a 30 foot high room to display the intricacies of the structure of the building which was to involve double layer reinforced concrete shells, steel columns, and compressive catenary generated forms. After that were to be a series of six dining room 50 to 60 feet in height, they would be able to accommodate at least 400 hundred people at once. While they dined they would have been able to hear the sounds of full symphony orchestras. With a capacity of 2400 patrons, it is unlikely that anyone would be denied seating. The ceiling were to have mythological themes representing the galaxies. If the hotel were built today the ceiling of the dining rooms would undoubtedly be decorated with the spectacular imagery universe obtained from the Hubble space telescope. Five of the rooms were to have wall décor symbolizing the five continents of the earth: Asia, Africa, Oceania, Europe and America.

On the entrance level one would have experienced a lobby and reception rooms varying in height from 80 to 100 feet. The actual hotel rooms would have been confined to the smaller paraboloid structures that nestle around the gigantic main shaft like children around their mother.

The exterior of the building was to be sheathed primarily in alabaster, giving it a pearlescent luster, along with some of its forms being accented in different colored marbles and carved granite at the lobby level. Finally the surfaced was to be bejeweled with bits of building debris, terra cotta sculptures, minerals fragments of glass and tiles. This very late style of continental gothic, the Flamboyant, was to be illuminated at night the way most New York City buildings are today.

The final mystery concerning the project involves the suicidal attack on the Twin Towered World Trade Center by terrorists in September 2001. Why they destroyed the towers and murdered thousands of innocent civilians and service people going about their daily tasks is: on the one hand, an act of envy by those who have experienced the American Dream up close and realized that the Twin Towers are the icon of what they covet; and on the other hand, the particular day. The eleventh of September is the birthday of Christ, the most hated day of all by the terrorists. Current scholarship, combining history and archaeology with astronomy and computer astrology has determined the birth of Christ to be September 11, 3 b.c.e. And according to numerologists eleven gives warning off hidden dangers, trial, and treachery from others. The architect Yamasaki, who was afraid of heights, built the world’s tallest eleven into the New York City skyline. The first airplane to strike the north tower was American Airline flight 11. The second plane , united American Airline flight 175 ( added numerologically it equals 13 the number of up heaval and destruction) crashes into the south tower and is the first to collapse. 23 minutes later her sister the north collapses also. The resulting image of the ragged head of rubble at ground zero reminds one of the same fate of one of Yamasakis’ earlier buildings, the Prutt-I Goe public housing project of St Louis, Missouri (1950 1958). Only on this case the destruction was international due to the project’s negative social impact on its neighborhood. According to the self styled apologist of post modernism , architect Charles A. Jencks, the dynamiting of the Prutt-I Goe building on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 pm central daylight time worked the official ending of the heroic phase of modernism and the ushering in of postmodernism. In like manner the beginning of the third phase of modernism , sometimes called post- post-modernism, transmodernism, neo-modernism, or the Bauharogue can, in my opinion, be marked by the ironic symmetry of this architectural and personal tragedy of September eleven, 2001 at 8:45 to 9:03 am eastern daylight saving time. This phase of modernism will be characterized by the utopian impulse of the Bauhaus School united with the theatricality of the baroque. Historically it will transcend science-fiction. Time travel will occur and all instrumentality will be actual living structures.

Now that ground zero is but a gaping wound on the body of New York City and on the soul of America, many have speculated as to what to do with the violent laceration of our nation. I believe one thing is clear, anything that is placed there to begin the healing process can not proceed from the same living ego impulse that motivated Minoru Yamasaki (1912-1986). That is why I feel Gaudi’s Grand Hotel would be the appropriate solution:

First, the Hotel was planned there in 1903;
Second, Gaudi has been dead for 75 years,
Third, the Hotel would function as a celebration of life for which New York City is famous;
Fourth, it could act as a permanent memorial for all those who lost their lives in the disaster;
And fifth, it would take the combined efforts of the entire artistic and architectural communities of New York City and other areas to bring the building into being.