Image courtesy of the Department of Design + Construction.

Contemplations of New York City’s past, present and future are everywhere this spring. The League’s new exhibition The City We Imagined/The City We Made, now in its second week at 250 Hudson St., is an opportunity to reflect on the most recent chapter of New York’s development history (2001-2010). On Monday 5/17, the second in a series of public programs related to the exhibition will take place, this time exploring the city’s Design + Construction Excellence program, initiated in 2004. Panelists, including Charles McKinney (Dept. of Parks and Recreation), David Resnick (Deputy Commissioner of the DDC), Thomas Balsley (Thomas Balsley Associates), Scott Marble (Marble Fairbanks) and Jennifer Sage (Sage & Coombe Architects), will explore how a policy of emphasizing design quality has influenced the planning for, commissioning of, and shape of public architecture during the past six years. Tickets still available!

An analysis in exhibition form of another period of urban transformation is on view at the Museum of the City of New York. The Times and Places both look at America’s Mayor: John Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York.

Meanwhile, Newsweek is imagining what the city’s future might look like. They commissioned Cooper Robertson & Partners, Richard Meier & Partners, and HOK to speculate on how we will live, work, commute and play in New York City in 2030. Taking the conversation national, The Atlantic has produced what they call a “special report on the changing national landscape,” entitled “The Future of the City.”

Panorama, Queens Museum. Photo by Flickr user bankbryan.

In order to plan more effectively for New York City’s future, a new map is in the works, and an incredibly detailed and technologically-advanced one at that. The City and CUNY have partnered to use Lidar (light detection and ranging) laser technology to collect data about the topography and structures of the five boroughs over a series of late-night flights last month. According to The New York Times, the project is “expected to yield the most detailed three-dimensional picture of New York City to date, with an emphasis on structures, elevations, sun and shade, and nooks and crannies relevant to the city’s emergency response system and its environmental goals.” Rohit T. Aggarwala, Director of the NYC Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, compares the project to Robert Moses’ Panorama (a favorite of the Omnibus team), just “more accurate and digital.”

If you prefer your city planning virtual, with a hefty dose of real-life problems, you might be interested in IBM’s new “serious game” CityOne. Fast Company takes a look, calling the game “much like Sim City, only the problems are scarily real, ranging among energy, water, banking, and retail.”

The History Channel is currently airing a 12-episode history of the shaping of the United States called America: The Story of Us and this Sunday’s installment chronicles the rise of the early industrial city. In ‘Cities,’ “Americans conquer a new frontier–the modern city–with Carnegie’s empire of steel as its backbone. Skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty are symbols of the American Dream for millions of immigrants. Urban life introduces a new breed of social ills, set against the backdrop of stunning skylines and ambitious innovations.” (via Planetizen)

Do cities need a creative director? Of course, Tyler Brûle thinks so. The Urbanophile has a more sober analysis, likening such a position to that of a high profile czar with limited ability to change anything, and makes a revealing comparison to the White House Office of Urban Affairs, the leadership of which was recently vacated by former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión, Jr., leading some to claim a major opportunity for a coordinated urban policy at the national level has been wasted.

Don’t forget – Sunday, 2pm, Roosevelt Island. See you there!


The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

New York Times Headline. March 13th, 1888.

122 years ago today, on March 11th 1888, it started snowing. When the snows finally came to a stop three days later, over forty inches were reported in New York and New Jersey and some snowdrifts grew as high as 50 feet. All major cities between Washington and Montreal were completely isolated from each other. The damage was so severe – collapsing wires caused fires, melting snow caused floods, at least 400 people lost their lives – that as soon as New Yorkers dug themselves out of what came to be called “The Great White Hurricane” they went about ensuring that no future weather event would cause as much injury, death or destruction to property and livelihoods. One of this legislative regime’s longest-lasting legacies is its effect on mass transit.

The Great White Hurricane of 1888. The New York Historical Society

Among the laws enacted that year, one prohibited catenary in Manhattan, meaning no more overhead lines were permitted to transmit electricity to trams, trolleys and buses. Some argue that the storm is what pushed Northeastern cities to finally move ahead with plans to start building public transit underground (Boston’s subway, the first in the nation, opened nine years after the storm). That law is still in effect, which still hampers the City’s ability to install light rail or certain kinds of electrical bus systems.

Over the past few months, the City has been looking at a number of different options – including light rail and streetcars – for improving mass transit service in Midtown Manhattan. And in last week’s roundup, we relayed the news that the DOT plan for Midtown includes dedicating a bus lane, or transitway, along 34th Street river to river. By invoking the precedents of Curitiba and Bogotá, we implied that this move signifies Manhattan’s first foray into the world of Bus Rapid Transit, or BRT. Yonah Freemark at The Transport Politic has a comprehensive analysis of why, for better or worse, BRT is not the most accurate way to characterize the transitway, and he also makes reference to the 1888 law about overhead wiring. To be sure, the plan will speed up the journey considerably. But the project says more about the priority DOT places on improving pedestrian experience of the street than it does about the DOTs willingness to experiment with more efficient modes of transit. “Despite the fact that the DOT has been on an all-out crusade to improve bus service, has no money for more subways, and has demonstrated little interest in light rail or streetcars, it evaluated all four in its recent study for the 34th Street corridor.” Its recommendation to create a dedicated bus lane, which is cheaper than the alternatives (”between $30 and 125 million, versus $250 million and up for light rail or several billion for a full-scale subway line”), is not about making bus service rapid. “With 13 stations end to end — roughly every 800 feet — buses will average a miserable six miles per hour, hardly faster than a person can walk the route.” It’s about improving “the streetscape for pedestrians, who until recently have been put in last place by New York City decision-making.”

Earlier this week, the Omnibus continued its look at how standards and codes, inflexible by nature – such as the code prohibiting living units in cellars – may be developed in the public interest but are often enforced at the public’s expense. In other words, if we don’t continuously evaluate how technological, cultural and demographic shifts change the way people live, urban development will continue to outpace governance. I’m not saying we should insist on a return of overhead wires. But we should certainly arm ourselves, as concerned urban citizens, with the knowledge of where the laws that limit urban innovation originate.

Map of proposed bus transit along 34th Street, from New York City DOT.

The value of conceiving criticism in this way, it seems to me, is that it allows for and acknowledges that certain buildings and projects may be perfectly elegant or beautiful solutions to perfectly trivial questions (think Meier’s tower on Grand Army Plaza) and, conversely, that there may be difficult or unsuccessful designs which nevertheless engage questions that have much greater relevance or significance to the values the critic prizes. Because criticism is perforce a statement of values; it is in that sense that criticism is at root a utopian venture and a bully pulpit. If we weren’t interested in remaking the world it wouldn’t matter much what we said about it.

In this vein, it is also important, from time to time, to write about bad buildings and failed projects, to use them as counter-exemplars and to explicate what it is in their design and realization that makes them a negative standard. This is difficult for a profession bred on the false politesse of ‘if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything’. We need to understand what makes bad buildings bad, and what the steady accretion of poorly conceived, boring, venal and badly built projects does to our cities and our souls. We need to name names. Or else, give up altogether.

There is also an element of time in all this; Henry A. Millon, one of the best critical historians of his generation, used to say that history could not be written before 50 years had passed, the implication being that the circumstances which frame a project’s gestation could not themselves be looked at historically until a certain contemporaneous reverberation had dissipated. The prerequisite of history is distance and a consequent lack of immediate familiarity; context must become strange again, or more precisely, we must become estranged from it, for the methods of historical analysis to be deployed. By this standard we are only just able to begin to analyze the projects of the 1960’s, to look seriously at Saarinen’s TWA terminal for example. And, in fact, this is exactly what is happening, the Museum of the City of New York’s revisionist Saarinen exhibition and the current reappraisals of Rudolph and Stone following by a few years the welter of texts and exhibitions that had us look afresh at the icons of the previous decade, Lever House and the Seagram Building, etc. (to look only within the limits of Manhattan for examples).

Criticism of course is but the first draft of history, not the thing itself. It is journalistic in the original Latin/Francophone sense of the word — ‘of today.’ Its historical aspirations, such as they are, can only be to serve as the raw material of some future, more dispassionate, analysis. But in exchange criticism can — must — make full claim to passion, to the convictions, enthusiasms and biases that animate discussion today, now, in full understanding that once our passions are spent they too will become the subject of more broadly contextual and quieter historical methods. Deprived of any pretense to history, criticism has nothing left but bias: without bias criticism is worthless.

This is the sixth 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.

Stephen Rustow is the founding principal of SRA/Museoplan, a consulting practice working with arts institutions and design professionals on the presentation of cultural collections.  An architect and urban planner, he is also a Professor of Architecture at Cooper Union and has written criticism for Praxis, JSAH and other publications. He lives in Manhattan.