In effect, most of the island has been shaped, rearranged, and covered over to create the urban density we have today. The island’s natural topography was irregular and filled with hills and rock outcroppings of Fordham gneiss and Manhattan schist, the same hard stones that made possible the bedrock for modern skyscrapers. The remaining upper part was delineated later and there were several minor adjustments. In 1811 the city leaders laid out the rectangular grid of east-west streets and north-south avenues for the island but only up to 155th Street. Occupying less than 34 square miles of land, its physical plan is tightly controlled, and fought over, to gain maximum benefit. Manhattan looms large in the imagination. One institution outgrows its home and needs a new one, setting off a search for a site, leaving behind an opening for another institution to move to, and so it goes, sometimes for several decades, until the institutions have resolved their architectural needs. Their genesis owes itself to the never-ending architectural Rubik’s cube that is Manhattan. Although the buildings represented in plan are not always the same project nor on the same site, they are firmly sited in an urban grid. These six drawings by Morris & O’Connor dated 1931–36 reflect that architectural matrix. It is the framework that every large-scale architectural project contends within Manhattan. In Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas described the 1811 grid plan laying out the streets and avenues of Manhattan as ‘the most courageous act of prediction in Western civilization: the land it divides, unoccupied the population it describes, conjectural the buildings it locates, phantoms the activities it frames, non-existent’. A series of precise site plans, these drawings, seen in context with drawings in other archives, document his search for a lasting solution for the new Metropolitan Opera House.

Morris’s role in this project was a highlight of his career although he has not been widely associated with it.

A recent acquisition of six drawings by the American architect Benjamin Wistar Morris reveals his long involvement with one of the most important urban projects of the twentieth century.

Seating chart metropolitan opera house