New York City’s plan to close Times Square to vehicles looks like a triumph. The chaise-lounges [or chaises-longues, depending on whom you ask - Ed.] the city dropped at the Crossroads of the World on May 24th have stayed popular throughout the week, like day-glo brigadiers in a battle against delivery trucks. (I saw two tourists taking pictures of their feet on the pavement on May 26.) At the same time, the luxuriant plans that Gehry Partners concocted for developer Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project are failing to keep the project financially credible – and the latest rumor is that a no-fuss plan from Ellerbe Becket for the project’s focal basketball arena may bump Gehry’s bundle of crumples.

So: plastic chaise-lounges win a wave of rear ends, while titanium arenas leave the court with a hobble and nary an ovation. What’s the takeaway for urban design? I say it’s an axiom: people want to be together. If they come together under a roof shaped like a hoopoe bird, fine. But in an era of lean government budgets, the plan that gets people together quickly and cheaply should guide policymaking.

A New York that depends on fickle corporations, part-time residents and private partners for big chunks of its tax base should make itself a fun place to be. Happily, fun translates intuitively to ‘free of car fumes,’ ‘planned with clear sight lines,’ and ‘open to the public.’ Most of the city will necessarily remain a web of conduits for goods, executives en route to wherever, and musicians looking for a gig. By bracketing parts of the city as pure public space, the Bloomberg administration has made a pithy argument about why global corporations and jetsetters should stay here. They should stay here, the chaise-lounges say, because they can tinker with what “here” is. That’s a more democratic premise than the ones driving light-rail in Denver or ersatz Mayberry in Florida. It’s also a more replicable strategy than the one behind Atlantic Yards.

Mind you, the Times Square project also succeeds for having a narrow writ. Nobody will blame the chaise-lounges for failing to trigger consumer confidence or to inspire a rush of mixed-income housing. But they do reinforce an urban-design principle we can see shining through all the stunted construction sites: if you reconnect people without obliging them to shop or watch jocks, you can make a convincing start toward reinventing a city.


As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Alec Appelbaum writes about how cities can become greener and fairer for the New York Times, the Architect’s Newspaper and others. He lives on the Lower East Side.

Like most of my colleagues, I tip my hat to Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council for devising a plan to make landlords retrofit older buildings. And like the cleantech advocates who stood beside me on a Rockefeller Center terrace to hear the mayor outline the plan on Earth Day, I shrugged when I tried to gauge which engineering recipes will help landlords meet the requirements. And now, I’m biting my nails a bit.

Landlords tend to hate mandates, in part because it’s bedeviling to legislate engineering: no two buildings respond optimally to the same efficiency fixes. A building’s optimal tune-up depends on what its tenants do, how frequently they move in and out, where the building faces, and so on. But the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan requires energy audits and upgrades from all  landlords in big buildings, and lighting fixes from all their commercial tenants. Bold and properly so. But maybe we would get greener sooner if the mayor had offered incentives to a subset of landlords whose huge portfolios make investing in efficiency a surer bet than nitpicking over why they shouldn’t have to.

“It speaks volumes to see who isn’t standing with the mayor,” a City Hall staff member confided on Earth Day. The landlords’ lobby has clamored for slow-track changes to their buildings since the mayor’s focus turned green in 2007. I now worry that the mandates in the new plan – five year paybacks, full benchmarking, code compliance after even minor upgrades – will embolden the small landlords to cry “oppression in a Depression!” and swoop us all into a political Punch and Judy show. Hey, it happened with congestion pricing.

So what do urban enthusiasts do about it? Focus. The audacity that brought us Rockefeller Center, Dumbo and the High Line crackles through the mayor’s plan – except that the stakes are much higher. Before the mayor spoke on Earth Day, I turned and paused to geek out at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The next few years will ask us to choose economic constraints to free us from a flood of climate-related disasters. If we tell our landlords, our pension funds, our architects and our mayors to keep thinking big, we will build something as sublime as Rock Center. If we listen to the silence of landlords who worry about short-term costs, the bright cheer of recent days will fade to a painful echo.

Alec Appelbaum writes about how cities can become greener and fairer for the New York Times, the Architect’s Newspaper and others. He lives on the Lower East Side. Photo: Spencer T. Tucker / City of New York, Office of the Mayor

The nonprofit where my wife works had a stake in the hearing, and I’d wanted our daughter to sense the excitement of city politics, so I brought her out on the elevated J train. When she got restless, she asked: “Why am I here?” I told her she should clap along with the chanting, which she cheerfully did. Parents and politicians came to this dreary room, as they reliably do, to state their case and then hunt for an equitable resolution. I hope one day she feels how profoundly such meetings matter. But what will she understand about my work?

You’d expect those of us who “see” urban design to highlight projects that foster dialogue and blunt climatic calamity.Yet too often we acclaim renderings that airbrush conflicts out of urban scenes – like Rem Koolhaas’ mischievous new midrise, or Steven Holl’s constellation-like Shenzen experiment. Who will flag insidious design choices – like the temperature in that basement- and challenge them?

Urban design is “good” when it makes public space vibrant and makes efficient engineering seem exalted. 20 years from now, my daughter may ask why we let storm surges swallow Coney Island or let the Bronx’s waste-burning dumps shackle a generation with asthma. So I want to highlight designs that guide city residents to face each other and reuse natural resources. I’d hate to tell her that architects’ sublime renderings or elegant wording let me forget why we’re all here.

This is the third in an ongoing series of posts that ponder the state of architecture criticism. To read all posts on this topic, please click here.



As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Alec Appelbaum writes about how cities can become greener and fairer for the New York Times, the Architect’s Newspaper and others. He lives on the Lower East Side.