Paul Rudolph, Isometric drawing of overall project showing the HUB including people-mover, c. 1967-1972, Color slide. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Few figures invoke the tensions of urban planning in New York City like the larger than life Robert Moses. But it is another iconic figure, Paul Rudolph, who may have the last word on the project that Moses hoped would seal his legacy — the Lower Manhattan Expressway. An important new exhibit at Cooper Union, organized by the Drawing Center, provides a much-needed reminder of Rudolph’s breadth of vision for Lower Manhattan.

In 1967, following Rudolph’s tenure as dean of the Yale School of Architecture, the Ford Foundation commissioned him to do a study of the Lower Manhattan Expressway project. The idea for an expressway connecting the Holland Tunnel with the east side of Manhattan was, of course, nothing new. City planners had conceived of such a project in the ’30s and Moses, with his broad brushstrokes across the New York City canvas, envisioned three major expressways in Manhattan: the Lower Manhattan Expressway, using Broome Street as a corridor; an elevated midtown route that would punch through skyscrapers; and a third expressway uptown coursing through Central Park. Moses attempted to break ground several times throughout the next three decades. By the 1960s, however, with a trail of condemned lots, razed blocks and miles and miles of new highways behind him, the City and Governor Rockefeller had finally grown tired of his particular brand of public works and, perhaps, his hubris. In 1961, Jane Jacobs published her famous tome about preserving the social fabric of the city, very much in reaction to Moses, and this contributed to and reflected his waning influence. In 1968, Moses was removed from his position and his LoMEX project was demapped and eventually canceled.

Into this atmosphere of Moses disfavor and a nascent, outspoken preservation movement entered the Gropius-trained, modernist Paul Rudolph. From 1967-1972, with the continuous financial backing of the Ford Foundation, Rudolph devoted himself to this study.

Paul Rudolph, Plan of overall project prior to the HUB development, 1970. Ink and graphite on mylar, 36 x 68 inches. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Rudolph was known as one of the best architectural draftsmen, and it is through his drawings that the Lower Manhattan Expressway has come to life, at first to Brett Littman, director of the Drawing Center, and then to us, in the exhibit Littman organized with Cooper Union and Ed Rawlings’ architecture office.

It is only recently that any attention was paid to Rudolph’s original drawings for the study and it is their “rediscovery” that fueled this exhibit. In 2008, after years of fermenting curiosity about the LoMEX study, Littman went to the Library of Congress to look at Rudolph’s drawings. According to Rachel Liebowitz, a curator at the Drawing Center, “It was the first time anyone had looked at the drawings and until we came, the Library of Congress hadn’t catalogued and photographed [them].” It is because of Littman’s interest, and the work on this exhibit, that the Library of Congress has now catalogued, scanned and uploaded this portion of the archive.

View looking west toward the HUB showing depressed roadway with Broome Street corridor in the background. Photo by Barb Choit / The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union.

Using 31 reproductions of drawings found in the archive, the curators, Ed Rawlings and Jim Walrod, recreated the vision of Lower Manhattan Rudolph developed over those four years. The drawings on display range from skeletal sketches that he must have used as notes to himself, to immense, colorful perspectives of the project that don’t seem to have possibly been made by a human hand. At the center of the room, anchoring the exhibit, is an amazing 33’ × 16’ model built by the curators and students from Cooper Union and based on the archive material and on some pictures of a film Rudolph made of his project (the script of the film is also on display, though no copy of the film could be found). You can spend a long time surveying that model, and, after understanding the project further by studying the drawings, you will surely return to it with renewed curiosity. If you have lived in New York for any significant amount of time, the moment you fully comprehend what it is you are looking at in the exhibit, the drawings become utterly jarring. There is one drawing, just in front of the model, that looks east across Manhattan Island with the Williamsburg Bridge in the distance. For some reason that image, possibly because it is the most contextualized, makes Rudolph’s vision seem most real.

Paul Rudolph, Perspective rendering of vertical housing elements at the approach to the Williamsburg Bridge, 1970. Brown ink on paper, 29 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Rudolph’s conception of the LoMEX took some inspiration from Moses’ plan but mostly used it as a point of departure for his own vision of tomorrow. His study consisted not just of a super expressway and a massive central HUB, like Moses’ plan, oriented by traffic flowing to and from the Holland Tunnel in the west and the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges to the east. His was a completely integrated world where the flow of cars existed in tandem with life in the residential towers above. This included monorails, people movers, and a surreal vertical expanse of multilevel parking lots that are likewise integrated into the buildings, leaving space surrounding the structures. The basic unit composing this megastructure was Rudolph’s “20th century brick,” which can be added infinitely and in various ways, unifying the whole structure while also providing variety, like a large modernist Lego.

Paul Rudolph, Final rendering of the interior of the HUB including people mover, c. 1967-1972. Color slide. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Rudolph’s design differs from Moses’ in another significant way. Moses planned his expressway to career down Broome Street and, as he had made plain before, buildings and neighborhoods in his path posed no obstacle. Simply condemn and raze. Perhaps as a token gesture to Jane Jacobs and other preservationists, Rudolph’s expressway would use the back gardens between Spring and Broome as its corridor, though the scale of the project would still disrupt the street life of any neighborhood it passed through, even if one block removed. Like Moses, and many other utopian modernizers of the post War era, Rudolph designed with the automobile in mind. As the curators described the HUB in their wonderful essay, “It is automotive transit fetish at its most decadent.” The other mid-century modernizer’s imperative – slum clearing – also characterizes Rudolph’s approach and he designed his tall towers to house a mass of people and also provide each one with an outdoor terrace.

For various reasons, projects of this scale and vision, at least in New York, might be a thing of the past. Futuristic utopian solutions have fallen out of favor (indeed they had already fallen out of favor when Rudolph created this) and the public does not have the appetite to appropriate public funds for such large scale projects. Ratner’s Atlantic Yards is minuscule in comparison. However, Norman Foster, who studied with Rudolph, just recently unveiled his own megastructure in Abu Dhabi, the same week this exhibit opened. It even includes people-movers, elevated buildings and an underground world, much like the LoMEX. And as one of the curators pointed out, Mayor Bloomberg’s demapping of streets in the heart of the city is very much related to Rudolph’s vision of our world.

Several interdisciplinary projects, like MoMA’s and PS1’s Rising Currents, have recently attempted to address New York’s 21st century infrastructural needs. The time seems ripe for novel approaches to New York’s urban fabric, and this exhibit is a brilliant way to further tap into that creativity and stoke the imagination.

Paul Rudolph, Plan diagram of the HUB area showing transportation networks, 1970. Graphite and color pencil on paper with taped overlays of the same, 24 x 32 inches. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Paul Rudolph: Lower Manhattan Expressway

On view: October 1 – November 14, 2010

Yael Friedman writes about art and culture, and often about sports. She lives in Brooklyn and grew up in Tel Aviv and Rockaway (Bauhaus heaven and unapologetically homely beach town, respectively). You can check out more of her stuff at Ida Post.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Sometimes taking a look at how we used to see and imagine the city is as valuable as looking ahead to its future, and we often do both. With SepiaTown, a user-generated map of wonderfully washed-out historical images from around the world, looking back in time and reflecting upon the city’s past has become much easier. Anyone who visits the site can contribute vintage photos, mapped to the places they depict, creating an expanding visual archive that includes the collections of libraries, historical societies, and mementos from your attic scrapbooks. Or you can just waste hours looking around at how your frequented spots looked over a hundred years ago.

While we’re still waiting for a historical sonic map of the world, many are looking ahead to how our cities will sound in the future. As we discussed last week, going on a slow walk through the city can make you attuned to just how noisy it really is. Enter design for a “vibrant calm,” as proposed by acoustic engineer Trevor Cox. With the possibility of very different sounding streets as internal combustion engines are phased out, Cox proposes we work out what we want to hear, rather than continue to simply abate noises. We tend to like a bustling city full of activity, so crafting our soundscapes in a similarly “vibrant” fashion — with attention to the aesthetic and affective dimensions of sound — could make for a better urban experience for all.

Studio Mumbai Architects, Mumbai, India – In-between Architecture from Victoria and Albert Museum on Vimeo.

The current spill in the Gulf of Mexico is on a scale of its own, but New York City does have its under-acknowledged comparisons. Oil and other contaminant spills in and around Newtown Creek, estimated at 17 to 30 million gallons over the past few decades, have had a subtle but major impact on the waterway and industrialized area between Brooklyn and Queens. With Superfund status for the area in sight, as reported by the New York Times, a cleanup of the area in its entirety could last for up to a decade. In the name of ongoing industrial clean-ups, yesterday Bloomberg announced the nation’s first municipal brownfield cleanup program, as part of PlaNYC. The program will enable the recovery of thousands of acres of contaminated land, coordinated for the first time by the City rather than the State Department of Conservation and the EPA.

On the brighter side of reclamation: dumpster pools! Next Saturday, as part of the third annual Summer Street initiative, you can dive into one of three long-awaited ‘deluxe’ versions of the water-filled dumpsters that premiered last summer. The portable (and clean) pools will be found on a car-free stretch from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park.

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

45-47 Park Place. Image: Google Street View.

Tuesday morning, I attended the final vote of the Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing on whether or not to confer historic protection to 45-47 Park Place in Lower Manhattan. The commission voted unanimously (9-0) against protecting the site. For this site, unlike many of the other buildings brought to a vote, the stakes far exceeded any simple determination of historical significance in architectural or cultural terms. The site in question is proposed for an Islamic cultural center and mosque whose proximity to Ground Zero has sparked a controversy that has motivated passionate, and often inflammatory, commentary from national and local politicians (Palin, Gingrich, Lazio), civil rights groups both for (ACLU) and against (Anti-Defamation League) the project, neighbors and community leaders. For a brief overview of the controversy and yesterday’s public hearing, read Javier Hernandez’s report for the New York Times City Room here. More coverage can be found on Gotham Gazette.

The Press assembled at Pace University's Schimmel Auditorium after the Landmark Preservation Commission's vote was announced

Speaking to CNN on Monday, Landmarks Preservation Commission spokeswoman Elisabeth de Bourbon reminded the public that the “purpose of [the] vote is to decide whether the building has a special character or special historical or aesthetic interest or value as part of the development, heritage or cultural characteristics of New York City, New York State or the nation.” And, indeed, Commissioners cited such architectural ornaments as cornice moldings and the fact that the building’s architect is unknown in their testimonies. But this clarity of focus did little to diminish the perception (at least among hearing attendees) that the vote was a direct ruling on whether or not the mosque should be built at the site in question. Public comments were not allowed. Nonetheless, attendees made their opinions known. Those in support of the mosque project (myself included) applauded when the vote was announced. A few opponents shouted “disgrace” and “shame on you.” The first of these outbursts challenged the commissioners with the question “Did any of you lose anyone on 9/11?” Another opponent, who burst into tears when the vote was announced, held a hand-painted placard that read: “Islam builds Mosques at Sites of their Conquests and Victories.” Another sign read “Don’t Glorify Murders of 3,000; No 9/11 Victory Mosque.”

Developer Sharif El-Gamal, whose company Soho Properties owns the adjacent site, responding to reporters questions after the Landmarks Preservation Committee public hearing

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I was raised in a secular Muslim household with strong interfaith tendencies. We attended mosque (20 miles and four suburbs away), a couple times a year, on holidays. And we attended church (across the street from our house) on Christmas. From a young age, I have identified as Muslim. I have not regularly attended any particular organized prayers since moving to New York, in part because I am not especially observant and in part because the congregants at the mosque a few blocks from where I live in Brooklyn tend to espouse a more conservative and restrictive interpretation of Islamic theology than my own. For this reason, I was heartened to learn the Cordoba Initiative, a progressive organization dedicated to improving relations between Muslim and non-Muslim communities, was one of the groups behind the project to bring a Islamic cultural center to Lower Manhattan. And I followed the project closely as it won community board approval and Mayoral support before becoming engulfed in controversy that seemed, at times, to characterize religious freedom and honoring the dead as mutually exclusive goals. Very little of the media coverage looked beyond this false binary to highlight the fact that Lower Manhattan has, since September 11th, seen its residential population increase almost 140% (from 22,961 in 13,046 units in 2001 to 55,000 in 27,881 units today, according to the Downtown Alliance) without a commensurate increase in publicly accessible community facilities, faith-based or otherwise. Very few of the voices speaking out for or against the project — with the significant exception of Mayor Bloomberg — noted the appropriate limits on the role of government in determining how a private landowner can use her property.

If I were not so emotionally invested in the outcome of the public hearing, I might say that the scene made for riveting political theater: the commissioners, the press, the protesters. Simply hearing how commissioners frame their arguments for or against the granting of landmark status helped me to understand the priorities of a city agency with considerable influence over development in New York City. Tuesday, however, my curiosity about city process was secondary to a deep sense of bafflement that, once again, a battle about the politics of memory, tragedy and religious tolerance found itself waged in terms of architecture.

The aftermath of September 11th put architecture on the front page of newspapers worldwide. But, to my mind, what people were debating was not architecture in and of itself, but rather architecture’s capacity to act as a container for public memory, to provide meaning. This capacity is precisely what the Landmarks law of 1965 was intended to enshrine. The mission of the city agency that resulted from the law is to “Safeguard the city’s historic, aesthetic, and cultural heritage; help stabilize and improve property values in historic districts; encourage civic pride in the beauty and accomplishments of the past; protect and enhance the city’s attractions for tourists; strengthen the city’s economy; and promote the use of landmarks for the education, pleasure, and welfare of the people of New York City.”

In that light, I find the way some of the project’s opponents proposed to use landmark designation in order to prevent a feared future rather than preserve a shared past to be, at best, ironic. Obviously, historic preservation is as often used as a tool to inhibit change as it is to celebrate history. And in this case, opponents of the project found no means to stop the project on legal grounds, so a law that can be interpreted on subjective grounds became a means of last resort. The attempt to commandeer the notion of architectural significance as a legal mechanism to obstruct a building project on privately owned land may not be new, but it still strikes me as inconsistent with the spirit of preserving cultural heritage and encouraging civic pride.

For some people, the debates about Ground Zero were about the prospective power of an imagined architectural future that might honorably replace and memorialize what has been lost. For some people, debates about 45-47 Park Place were about the proscriptive power of subjective (yet legally binding) readings of architectural history to stop a building project some people don’t like. In both cases, architecture seems to be incidental to larger questions about civic memory and how to make one particular version of that civic memory invulnerable to change.

Throughout, Mayor Bloomberg’s support for the project has been forceful. After the vote, he held a press conference on Governors Island and spoke of the development at 45-47 Park Place in the context of upholding what he called “the most important” of our civil liberties, the right to worship as we wish.

[Landmarks'] decision was based solely on the fact that there was little architectural significance to the building. But with or without landmark designation, there is nothing in the law that would prevent the owners from opening a mosque within the existing building. The simple fact is this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship.

The government has no right whatsoever to deny that right – and if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question – should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

His speech — delivered on Governors Island “where the earliest settlers first set foot in New Amsterdam, and where the seeds of religious tolerance were first planted,” in view of the Statue of Liberty, flanked by an ecumenical group of political and religious leaders — was, like the debate, loaded with symbolism. Unlike the debate, Mayor Bloomberg’s symbolism invoked American culture as political philosophy and constitutional legacy. Arguably, this legacy has informed, and will continue to inform “the development, heritage or cultural characteristics of New York City, New York State or the nation,” which are precisely what Landmarks is empowered to safeguard. In other words, the symbols Mayor Bloomberg invoked were about rights and freedoms, not bricks and mortar. And certainly not cornices.

Cassim Shepard is the project director of Urban Omnibus.

Urban Omnibus: Tell me about these images.

Linda Pollak: For a long time, in research and practice, I have been focusing on what I call constructed ground. This focus enables inclusion of living systems in my research and design work without segregating them into an exclusive domain of “nature.” The idea of constructed ground registers the fact that the ground of any site is not background; it isn’t flat; it isn’t a tabula rasa — it is always already constructed.

Some of the specific thinking behind these images emerged in 2004, when I was fortunate to be in Rome as a Fellow at the American Academy. My project, which initially focused on individual palazzos and villas, had to do with interrelationships of geometry and topography in architecture. I also began to look at these interrelationships at a more granular scale, focusing on infrastructure rather than buildings. I took hundreds of photographs of the remarkable drains and channels in streets and courtyards, which speak to the role stormwater can play in shaping urban space.

It’s archaeology without physical excavation: the cuts and patches register different eras of construction and settlement, the movement of water, the movement of pedestrians.When I returned from Rome, initially I felt as if there wasn’t much to photograph in New York City. A few years ago, I was struck by the way in which what seemed to be defunct small manhole covers were fit into granite sidewalks in downtown Manhattan. Without knowing their function or name, I called them “cuts and patches,” in reference to their shared properties: a hole cut into pavement, with a patch over it. What interested me about these artifacts was the narrow channel incised in the paving, which acknowledged, framed, and situated the hole, articulating it as more than a casual disruption in the ground. The outline of the channel varies: some are like teardrops or balloons or hair-do’s, some like little pitched roofs, some like targets. Some float in the middle of the sidewalk, others reach the curb. Some are amazing, with a lightness of spirit that is not usually associated with infrastructure.

These images make tangible not only the fact that the ground is constructed, but also the particularity and diversity of urban places, including the fact that, in some previously industrial areas of the city, the ground is hollow, with vault spaces of the buildings beneath the public sidewalk.

UO: When you speak of the ground as something constructed, I feel like you are also talking about how diverse urban elements perform in response to various forces at play in the urban landscape. Tell me about your interest in forces and performance and those infrastructures that engage, acknowledge, amplify or resist forces.

LP: I think that performance and forces are both terminologies that have to do with how something works or what something does. All of these carved channels are working to do the same thing: to divert water away from a hole. While the function of the hole itself is no longer necessary, the channel around the hole continues to direct the movement of stormwater running across the sidewalk to the street.

As traces, these cuts and patches allow us to perceive physical and social dynamics of an urban site over time. Looking at them together, they are like a kind of archaeology without physical excavation: they register different eras of construction and settlement, the movement of water, the movement of pedestrians.

UO: What other studies have you done along these lines?

LP: While working on the Queens Plaza project, I was impressed by the monumentality of the steel curbs. I began photographing these curbs in different parts of New York City, seeing how they were formed and installed. My interest in curbs relates to my research into boundaries as places of encounter, where two or more things come together, with different possibilities for mediation or engagement.

If you think exclusively in architectural terms, a joint between two things – for example, a sidewalk or a curb – is something you need to fill, to make watertight, in order to restore the integrity of the surface as a single, solid, built thing. But if you think beyond architecture, it is possible to consider this joint as a space in which something can happen: a dynamic interface between constructed and living systems, between pedestrian and vehicular space. Once you understand that boundaries can operate as transformative locations, there is an opportunity to look at all of this coming together not only defensively, in support of conventional maintenance, but also to think how to reinvent it, in support of a longer-range sustainability. Ecologists have shown us that processes of disturbance—events that significantly disrupt the structure or function of a system– are fundamental to natural systems.

As a designer, the more you can make sense of the diversity of the physical environment, the more chance you have to enable others to make new sense of it.The urban topographies—the cuts and patches shown here, the curbs, and others, are part of what I call the Atlas of Invisible Places, a project I am working on with Nancy Levinson for Places. Versions of the cuts and patches and curbs matrices also appeared in Ecological Urbanism, a new book edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty, which engages and frames some of the issues we are discussing here.

UO: The inherent tension in the imagery, I think, is between pattern and uniqueness. How does analytical observation of pattern and uniqueness inform your own process as a designer? What other benefits does this type of observation and this type of representation of systems, patterns and forces offer to designers?

LP: For a designer, everyday spaces constitute materials. When you alter a site you make sense of these materials in new ways. Looking at urban space at the granular scale and finding beauty in the overlooked supports this kind of design process. Making inventories or sampling reminds us that the visual patterns that we can observe in the existing conditions of a site are the registration or traces of processes. These processes, whether environmental or social or both, are part of systems. Studying the patterns of water flows that are part of a hydrological system is a step towards integration of these flows in a design solution that builds upon dynamic relationships between systems.

To understand a site in relation to the multiple processes that affect it requires pulling these processes apart. In undertaking this kind of analysis, the matrix format of these images allows us to identify significant variations between different instances of an artifact while sustaining enough consistency for the artifact in question to be legible as a type. In the context of a design project, in combination with other forms of representation, this kind of inventory makes it possible to portray processes in a site that you couldn’t describe through any single means.

UO: It’s kind of like making your own pattern book.

LP: In a way, yes. Looking closely at things like curbs or tree pits or sidewalk sheds reveals a kind of urban bricolage: countless inventions to accommodate countless specificities. As a designer, the more you can make sense of the overwhelming diversity of the physical environment, the more chance you have to enable others to make new sense of it.

A fine-grained understanding of the conditions of a place makes it possible to design and make something at the scale of, say, a tree pit or a channel for storm water runoff that also contributes to a successful social space. We have such a long way to go in terms of making cities sustainable. We don’t know yet how or if we are going to get there, or what that “there” would look like. But we can be sure it will require an integrated approach to an infrastructure of everyday space that includes nature.

An integrated approach to diverse urban components and systems—stormwater, vegetation, movement, social spaces– makes it possible to construct environments that are consistent and memorable and operative and economical. We need to be able to understand relationships between phenomena in order to build productive frameworks that engage and support those phenomena, in spaces that enable interaction of social and environmental processes.

U.S. Northeast. Screen grab from NASA's "world tour" of cities at night.

This week brought news from both the Brooklyn waterfront and the NASA space shuttle, and talk of both construction and demolition.

An agreement has been reached between the Port Authority, New York City and State officials and WTC developer Larry Silverstein that will allow further development of the World Trade Center site after a year and a half of financial negotiations. The deal allows for construction of Towers 3 and 4 to move forward, but the fate of Tower 2 is still up in the air (the site will be built up to ground level until the economic climate improves). Nothing is final yet: Silverstein will need to rustle up private funding and tenants for Tower 3 in order to access the hundreds of millions of dollars of public financial assistance being offered. Beyond that, the agreement itself isn’t even finalized yet — the Port Authority board won’t review the proposal for final approval for another 4 months.

Flavorwire and Gothamist both have documentation of the demolition of old Yankee Stadium’s Gate 2. Fans are mourning its destruction, though neighborhood residents might be pleased to see activity on the site. The parks and public ballfields promised to local residents can’t be developed until the old stadium has been cleared away, a process that was supposed to be complete by the time the new stadium opened last year.

The Department of Transportation has announced that it will take over the community-initiated plan for a 14-mile Brooklyn waterfront greenway. $16 million in funds have been earmarked for the project, which will run from Greenpoint to Sunset Park. DOT has scheduled planning workshops throughout April, and according to the Daily News, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan has said that she hopes to have “at least a bare-bones version of the route in place within three years or so.”

You know we love maps. Now NASA has allowed us to view our cities in a new way, visualizing their boundaries using the simplest of methods: lights at night. Thanks to astronaut Don Pettit and his experimentation with a barn-door tracker camera mount, NASA has been able to compile precise, detailed images of cities around the world illuminated after dark. Yes, the photographs are visually stunning, but they also tell us stories about our urban environments. As this article on NASA’s Earth Observatory explains, these images can be used to analyze the effect of urbanization on Earth’s ecosystems, to study lighting use (Japanese cities tend to glow a cool blue-green due to the use of light green mercury vapor lamps, though newer developments by Tokyo Bay are characterized by orange sodium vapor lamps), and to illustrate street grid and infrastructure patterns that suggest cultural influences of how similar areas have grown. “At night, city lights present the space observer spectacular evidence of our existence, our distribution, and our ability to change our environment.” And with new housing in cities outpacing that of suburbs (according to a new EPA report), imagine how this images will change over time. Read the article and watch the video. (via The Map Room)

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

Fulton Street, pre-makeover, is described by Forgotten NY as a “crazy quilt of mom and pop businesses, souvenir tourist traps, historic cast iron and late 19th Century buildings.” The architectural hodgepodge and historic landmarks – plus it’s prime location and high rate of pedestrian activity – earned it a special mention in Mayor Bloomberg’s 2002 Vision for Lower Manhattan. Bloomberg conceived of a revamped Fulton Street that would serve as a “thoroughfare that stretches from river to river,” a major artery in the Financial District second only to Broadway. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation responded to Bloomberg’s vision and granted $38 million of HUD money to make it into a reality.

At the Center for Architecture, Keith O’Connor of the NYC Department of City Planning contextualized Fulton Street by speaking first of the population demographics in Lower Manhattan – primarily young, public transit-dependent male workers – and how those demographics are changing. Lower Manhattan is the fastest growing residential community in New York City; the Downtown Alliance’s figures (pdf) show a 59% increase in units of residential housing from 2003.

Ali Ruth Davis from the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Economic Development detailed the specifics of the three tiers of restorations. Notably, the lowest level allots up to $15,000 of LMDC funds without any financial requirement from tenants. Second and third tier improvements are larger-scale and do require a match of 2 to 1. With so much simultaneous and easily accessible storefront updating, Allen Swerdlowe of New York New Visions (the coalition that developed the seven principles for rebuilding Lower Manhattan) voiced a concern over “wiping the patina clean.” If the cacophony of signs is completely muted, what happens to the distinctions between Fulton Street and South Street Seaport? If they vanish, will this essential link become merely an unremarkable thoroughfare between two primarily tourist destinations?

Perhaps. But the good bones of Fulton Street’s diverse building stock protect it from becoming overly conventional. Davis’ outreach has primarily been to tenants, who only need a nod of approval in the form of a signed Letter of Intent from property owners and a License Agreement further down the road.  Wouldn’t it be strange if the tenants themselves, using government money to do all the drudge work, end up being the cause behind rising rents for the last affordable street in the neighborhood?

Fate is in the hands of the preservationists, the Tyra Banks of this revitalization/makeover. Even with a conscientious design team detailing design standards in the form of a ninety page document (pdf) and design review panels (page 6 of pdf), can complex layers of the built environment be stripped of their unsavory parts without losing all of the character they hold? What will happen once the glasses are taken off, lipstick applied, the flurry of activity ceases and the chair is swiveled round to face the mirror?

From its beginnings as a path paved by the foot traffic to the Fulton Ferry in the early 1800’s, Fulton Street has developed organically. This next step is a massive facelift, a coordinated design update overseen by a panel and executed by a team designated by the program.  But it is still primarily on the tenant-based, groundfloor level, though there is still room for the project to creep upward if more Tier 1 and Tier 2 projects are applied for and approved. The layered architecture and Fulton’s fateful location between two big commercial developments could result in a beautiful asset to Lower Manhattan and its growing residential and tourist population. Fulton Street’s mom and pop nature seems destined to change with the infusion of money invested in the street, but if it is as vacancy-riddled and unappealing as O’Connor made it sound, it may be for the best.

Neighborhoods grow and die, and in the case of Fulton Street, government monies are being forked over to ensure the former. To what end remains unclear.  Ambitions to lower vacancy rates, emphasize architectural history, help the current tenants, exist as a promenade for tourists, or serve/attract residents were all mentioned. Time will tell if it is possible for each and all of these wishes to be realized.


Rachel Aland is a project associate of Urban Omnibus. She lives in Brooklyn. Top photo: 144 Fulton Street, photo by Flickr user epicharmus.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Frank Duffy is a British architect, noted for his research and design work on the changing nature of the modern office. He is the author of Work and the City, one of five books in Black Dog’s Edge Futures series that explores the impact of global climate change on various aspects of social life, including education, transportation, community and Duffy’s own realm of expertise: the nature – and spaces – of work. Duffy’s command of this topic is rare, honed in the thirty-six years since he co-founded DEGW, an architectural firm whose emphasis on social-scientifically informed space-planning practices, organizational consultancy and post-occupancy evaluation makes it singular in the field.

In the book, Duffy argues against contemporary cities’ irrationally low use of their existing office space. In so doing, he echoes in unexpected ways Robin Chase’s call to maximize our use of excess capacity in transportation. And he foreshadows Laura Forlano’s future-facing analysis of new intentional communities springing up in self-organized work environments.

On a recent visit to New York, Duffy took Rosalie Genevro, executive director of the Architectural League, on a walk around Lower Manhattan, to reflect on our office stock and what it means in the context of our changing city.

Read an excerpt of their conversation below, followed by an audio-slideshow of their walk. -C.S.

Rosalie Genevro: Do you see any glimmer of hope in our recent and current financial meltdown?

Frank Duffy: I think the crisis might stimulate a beneficial thought process, in two principal ways. The first is related to the question of sustainability, which I think is going to work its way through the whole system. And the second of course is information technology, which is changing the nature of organizations. The building isn’t a useful unit of analysis anymore, because organizations are always bigger or smaller and constantly changing. At least half of them operate in a virtual world, in a placeless world. The crisis is going to demonstrate that there’s too much space. And a lot of people are going to be frightened by that. Hopefully that fright will lead to some beneficial realizations.

RG: It may be a very painful transition – it seems to me that we already have a lot of empty space that won’t be absorbed because it won’t be needed.

You also make the argument in Work and the City that even in terms of existing space that is occupied, we use it at an irrationally low level – it is just not inhabited much of the time.  Even for people whose interest is in making money from the built environment, that argument doesn’t seem to have penetrated.

Buildings aren’t made out of glass, concrete and stone: they’re made out of time, layers of time.FD: Actually, I think it will penetrate eventually.  I thought, twenty years ago when I spend a lot of time encouraging development, that facilities managers would bring some intelligence into the system; but instead of thinking about the supply chain, they were much more interested in their own deliverables rather than longer-term use value. The vertical silos that exist within these very large corporations pose another very important problem. We need to weave together, keeping the end-user’s point of view in mind, the organizational silos within which, say, human resources departments look after human resources departments and information technology staff interact only with information technology staff. In that context, it is very difficult to create organizations that are agile.

That being said, there are many things about the American office that are extremely intelligent that Europeans didn’t necessarily pick up on until much later. Americans were less interested in the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk and supported the skills of people like interior designers, space planners, decorators and others whose scope – within the building – was to meet the short-term needs of five- or ten-year tenants. That system was invented here. It’s a wonderful system. And it’s a perfect example of not getting everything “right in a night” but leaving scope for change and adaptation. That’s the principle that I’m trying to articulate in this conversation. Not all design decisions have the same longevity. Buildings aren’t made out of glass and concrete and stone: they’re made out of time, layers of time.

One of the things I like about New York is the juxtaposition of the old and new in the way that the blocks have been developed. That is a component of the recipe for success of long-term urban fabric: it is capable of being modified internally and externally as social and technological change develops. Older stock has been moved out of exclusive office use into other purposes, older buildings turned into apartments for example.

RG: If we are to build fewer new buildings, how do we decide what’s worth building?

FD: Well, I think you can test that. You can think through the process of working on a floor plate or building section, thinking about what its use-potential is.  If I were a building owner these days, that’s something I’d be interested in: the future potential of existing structures, whether they’ll have to be extensively modified to cope with change or not.

I am very much involved with the Olympics at the moment in London.  The so-called “legacy” and “transitional” phases of the Olympic sites are very important.  We’re trying to do a think-over of a way of designing things that can mutate and develop into other things over time.  One of the curses of architecture is its instantaneity.  The definite statements of each individual building do not necessarily cumulatively add up to something that has got the idea of change built into it.  But urbanism should include that idea, and older cities have had that capacity to accommodate change. The mono-functionality that you see from here very clearly is vulnerable.

Another theme is that the design and use of interstitial spaces – made in the context of the knowledge economy – is becoming more important than the buildings themselves or what happens inside them. So, designing for the full spectrum of uses over a large area, having a mix of uses and then having the principle of change built into that so it can develop and mutate and move from one kind of use to another. These are the fundamental secrets of urbanism.

The building isn’t a useful unit of analysis anymore.RG: How can you design for that? That has always seemed to be the accreted nature of cities. The most interesting places tend not to be the work of one hand, of one designer.

FD: Or one financier. It’s always been difficult, but I think we’ve made it worse by the way in which buildings are financed, procured and developed. Cumulatively, over the course of the twentieth century, this has made each building more and more specific and separate in itself rather than something that adds to a more complex urban fabric.

Certainly, from an architectural and user point of view, I’d think about what different building forms can accommodate, and how ambiguity, choice and potential can be built into design over a long period. Thinking about the buildings themselves in a much more sophisticated way. But also thinking about the nature of the interstitial spaces – who owns them, who manages them, who loves them, who takes advantage of them. That’s something that we have not given enough thought to.

RG: Thinking about the interstitial spaces as providing for serendipity or accommodating the unexpected is very hard to do as a designer.

FD: Well I don’t see why it needs to be so. It’s all about scenarios, thinking through what could happen, and what is fixed.

RG: What’s the appropriate role of the public and public decision-making bodies in all of this?

FD: The city and citizens are two levels.  The city should always fight for the long-term.  The individuals always try to find ways of penetrating the system to make sure that it meets their changing needs.  There are feedback channels that should be built into much more of the urban fabric.

The fascinating paradox of the power of technology and its ability to allow people to choose when and where to work, is that it actually makes more poignant and more important the city-like things that are good at bringing people together. The more we disperse, the more we need to congregate. I think the true nature of a city is discourse, especially in a knowledge economy. It’s about places – serendipitous encounters. That’s another design principle to be brought into urbanism. Places that are valuable because they are unprogrammed and open-ended and allow accidents to happen.

For a long time there was a correlation between the patterns of work and the shape of the building. What’s happening now is that patterns of work are changing faster than the shape of the buildings. And we have models of buildings that are inherently vulnerable because they are not good at accommodating groups, they are not permeable, they make assumptions about levels of occupancy that are untenable and easily refuted. They can’t be changed into anything else.

They’re brittle – they snap, they can only do one trick.

I became aware of this in the 60s and 70s in the regeneration of the decayed industrial cities of the UK – Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham. In order to bring great stretches of the Liverpool docks back into beneficial use, we had to realize that the older buildings – because they were robust and adaptable – could be used for a wide range of purposes apart from what was originally designed. They could be used as art galleries, workshops or hotels, for example.

What’s the lesson there? The lesson is about making a building tough enough to accommodate change, to have enough volume, to have columns in the right places, attractive ceiling heights, a relationship to the sky and the outside that is tolerable. These were considered to be obsolete and useless, but they were brought back to life. So I think the difference is that these newer office buildings are so flimsy – so value-engineered – that they have only a very limited range of utility.

The reinvention of place, the pleasure of place, the use of place for talk, commerce, etc. That’s terrific. To be freed from the “8-hour day.”  These are, in human terms, recent inventions, no older than 200 years. People thought of and used time in a very different way before that.  And we’ll invent something new ourselves. This discussion about the nature of buildings is only a subset of a much broader discourse about the nature of life in what I hope will be a much better world. I don’t think the twentieth century’s my favorite century actually. I think there were one or two things wrong with it.

Click ‘Play’ button below to start slideshow

Interview conducted by Rosalie Genevro. Edited and condensed.
Photos by Cassim Shepard.