In a City of Bygone Glory, a New Chapter of Drab Architecture
The development of New York's biggest spot of open land seems to turn into another urban planning failure.
On Wednesday, March 26th, real-estate company Tishman Speyer was selected by
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority to develop the Westside Railyards, a
10.5 hectares (26 acres) industrial area on the west side of Manhattan. The decision
followed a lengthy process in which five companies competed for this biggest patch
of undeveloped land in Manhattan, which is about twice the size of Ground Zero.
Ironically, the final decision was not based on the best urban vision for the
area, but because the other four contenders dropped out of the race because of
a lack of funds to subsidize the project due to the current financial crisis.
If you thought that architecturally, it couldn't get any worse than the final
plans for Ground Zero, then you'll realize that the situation now has obviously
bottomed out. The towers designed by Murphy/Jahn are completely unimaginative
blocks whose only creative aspect is that they come in sets of two which are rotated
180 degrees to each other. The high-rise buildings flank the north and south sides
of the area and cut it off from its surroundings, creating a canyon that does
not integrate into the surrounding neighborhood in any way. This is as unimaginative
as it gets, and this is what you get from a developer that wants the most bang
for the buck as has no aspirations to create a stimulating urban environment.
In the past years or decades, New York has had its fair share of mislead urban
planning projects. The redevelopment of Ground Zero has become the city's most
discouraging project after the developer chopped off more and more aspects of
Daniel Libeskind's original masterplan, turning the ambitious plan into nothing
but money matter and run-of-the-mill architecture, and degrading the foregoing
architectural competition into nothing more than a public show. in Brooklyn, the
Atlantic Yards project, developed by architect Frank Gehry, is in the midst of
being shrunk to a shadow of its former self, due to a lack of funds.
It looks like New York, boasting the famous and, at it's time, trend-setting
large scale development project Rockefeller Center, uses any chance it can get
today to screw up contemporary projects of similar sizes. The plans get severely
diluted, and the architecture ends up as something that shows no intention of
setting new standards and doesn't even seem to care about its role in this city
that once was famous for its architecture.
Maybe there is a slight chance of hope though. Maybe not for Ground Zero, which
already (though that word sounds so totally ironic in this context) is in the
process of construction. But for the Hudson Yards, there are still countless years
of planning ahead. With a lot of luck, there will be a shift in the plans until
then, and the architecture might change as well during the process, as it is not
carved in stone yet, so maybe it will change to the better. But much more important
is that after all these painfully mislead projects, New York and its developers
finally have to realize their failures and change their way of thinking and —
this has to be said — shift their priorities from pure financial aspects
towards a sense of responsibility in respect to the city and its inhabitants.
They are constructing the New York of tomorrow, and they have to make sure the
future New York lives up to the fame that the old New York had. And I express
this hope even though “recent history teaches us [...] that the project
is only likely to get worse”, as written by New York Times' architecture
critic Nicolai Ouroussoff in this
article.
(I was tempted to also mention the horrid project of a developer to turn a 1920's
building's brown brick facade into a glass curtain wall, but that is a different
story and it doesn't fit into the scale of the projects described above, even
though it still shows how ignorant some developers are in respect to the historical
substance of the city. So if you want another dreadful story, read this
article)
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