The Architect’s Newspaper:

“ ANYTHING NY CAN DO, LA CAN DO TOO

Sam Lubell asserts that LA’s next mayor must step up with ambitious design plans for the city.

Sam Lubell Feb 6, 2013

Having lived in New York and Los Angeles for more than six years apiece, I’ve learned that while they have plenty in common—they’re obviously both huge cities with a level of cultural dynamism and diversity that dwarfs most American metropolises—they’re also utterly different places.

In the design world perhaps the most important division is this: New York has a number of important, powerful, and effective design champions, among them mayor Michael Bloomberg, planning director Amanda Burden, and transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. The results have been, by all measures, impressive. The city has transformed itself through design, creating an elite new collection of parks, buildings, and master plans, including the High Line, Brooklyn Bridge Park, dedicated bike lanes, and iconic buildings by most of the world’s most celebrated architects, including Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Renzo Piano, BIG, DS+R, and so many more.

Los Angeles is sorely lacking any such unifying galvanizers. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, while a stunningly effective promoter of transit, and leader of a recent triumph (despite heavy lobbying) on the Sixth Street Bridge, is still often subservient by legislative design to warring city council members and various agency heads. The planning director, Michael LoGrande, appears to have a rather tepid vision for long term, proactive planning. And few in the community seem to have taken the lead to fill the created vacuum. Instead of true design champions we have Eli Broad, who builds with little regard for public input or (despite hiring the best) even the input of his architects. Another is Metro, which has been enriched through recent measure R. But despite the valiant work of planning director Martha Welborne, the agency has shown little design savvy in its recent transit projects and transit oriented developments.

So who will step up for Los Angeles?”

Photo: Ben K. Adams/Flickr

polis: 

Poverty Below the High Line

Sahra Mirbabaee. Feb 1, 2013

Of all the factors that contribute to urban livability — including public health, education and infrastructure — policy is often focused disproportionately on economic growth. In pursuit of this assumed prerequisite for prosperity, municipal governments around the world are investing in urban design. At the same time, this investment is fueling inequality and displacement. The allocation of public funds to places of high economic potential favors the rich, creating an unfair playing field for all tax-payers. One of the most striking examples of this trend is the High Line in New York City.

Built on an elevated former railway, the High Line park runs 1.45 miles along Manhattan’s West Side. Since the 1990s, the surrounding neighborhoods have changed from a downtrodden post-industrial area to a hot spot in the city’s social and cultural scenes. They’re now home to many bars, galleries, restaurants and shops like Barneys, Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney. Past neglect created the conditions for profitable redevelopment, as evident in “Alphabet City” and many other Manhattan districts over the past 20 years.

Since its opening in 2009, the High Line has been hailed as an inspiring use of architecture for urban renewal. It has a large fan-base, including the municipal government. In fact, the High Line has thrived “within the confines of the community of money” because of strong government support. The first two installments cost areported $152.3 million, and the third is projected to cost $86.2 million. Funding sources comprise $112 million from the city government, $20.3 million from the federal government, $400,000 from the state and $44 million from private donations. Operating costs are estimated at $2-4 million per year. With over half the High Line’s budget coming from public funds, concerns over the return on this investment are more than justified.”

Photo: Elitism

 The Atlantic Cities:

“A Bold Concept for Post-Sandy Manhattan

Roy Strickland. Dec 28, 2012

In New York City, the wreckage caused by Hurricane Sandy has created the unique opportunity not only to plan for the protection of the city, but also to re-imagine it. Rising water tables and increasingly frequent “100-year storms” are big challenges. New York City needs to respond in a big way.

Following Hurricane Irene, a team of young architects, landscape architects and urban planners from the University of Michigan’s Master of Urban Design Program, where I teach, gathered to develop an innovative concept to keep Manhattan safe from climate change.

The concept took the long view – 25 to 100 years out – and emerged from a set of assumptions. These included decreases in regional climate stability; global decreases in the availability and affordability of oil; increases in Manhattan’s population; and increasing emphasis on health, education, research, technology and tourism in the city’s economy. The team did identify an important constant: the power of the street grid in organizing Manhattan’s urbanism. It also understood that the concept’s capital costs – in a city where the new Second Avenue subway line is expected to cost $17 billion – would be high but when placed against the New York area’s contribution of nearly 10 percent of the nation’s GDP (as quantified by the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto), would be worth it.”

Image:  Concept Plan: Highlighting waterfront reconfigured with marshes, tidal defense berms, hydroponic farms and floating neighborhoods; areas for highest density development outside of flood plains; and thoroughfares turned into soil channels providing water run-off, new public spaces and light-rail routes. University of Michigan. 

The New York Times:

“Vetoing Business as Usual After the Storm

By Michael Kimmelman. Nov 19 2012

Not a month after Hurricane Sandy there’s a rough consensus about how to respond. America is already looking to places like London, Rotterdam, Hamburg and Tokyo, where sea walls, levees and wetlands, flood plains and floating city blocks have been conceived.

New York clearly ought to have taken certain steps a while back, no-brainers after the fact. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority ought to have installed floodgates and louvers at vulnerable subway entrances and vents. Consolidated Edison should have gotten its transformers, and Verizon its switching stations, out of harm’s way, and Congress should have ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to study the impact of giant barriers to block parts of the city from the sea.

Scientists, architects, planners and others have, of course, been mulling over these issues for years. They’ve pressed for more parkland and bike lanes, green roofs and energy-efficient buildings, and warned about the need for backup generators, wetland edges along Lower Manhattan and barrier islands for the harbor to cushion the blow of rushing tides.

Hurricane Sandy was a toll paid for procrastination. The good news? We don’t need to send a bunch of Nobel laureates into the desert now, hoping they come up with some new gizmo to save the planet. Solutions are at hand. Money shouldn’t be a problem either, considering the hundreds of billions of dollars, and more lives, another Sandy or two will cost.

So the problem is not technological or, from a long-term cost-benefit perspective, financial.”

Photo: A flood barrier on the Thames, one of the ideas American experts are looking at in the wake of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy. Patrick Ward/Corbis

“treehugger

Alternative Social Housing: Prefab, Add-On Homes to Densify Suburbs

Paula Alvarado. Nov 7, 2012

As masses of people get out of poverty in developing countries, they are also getting out of slums (sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically). But as social housing is built in vacant lots in the outskirts of urban centers, it presents all the problems of suburban sprawl.

Argentine architects Adamo Faiden have created a concept which adds an interesting, controversial spin to the conversation. What if, instead of building new houses on virgin ground, we added prefabricated units on top of existing homes?”

Photo:  © Adamo Faiden

“NYR

Design from Disasters

Martin Filler. Nov 5, 2012

As we contemplate the horrific damage caused by Hurricane Sandy, the world of design may seem remote from our most immediate concerns. Yet the urgent needs that follow large-scale catastrophes—the need for shelter, clean water, alternative sources of power—can be particularly conducive to creative solutions. I recentlyobserved that breakthroughs in architecture and industrial design have emerged during wartime; now a remarkable new exhibition in Oslo shows that the same can hold true for natural disasters as well.

Presented by Norsk Form, the Foundation for Design and Architecture in Norway,Design Without Borders (the title is an obvious nod to Médecins Sans Frontières) presents realistic mock-ups of fourteen problem-solving design initiatives—ranging from post-hurricane relief to land-mine removal—in Norsk Form’s DogA exhibition space, which occupies a cavernous turn-of-the-twentieth-century power station in Oslo. For example, a life-size replica of a post-disaster shelter features insulated walls made from empty plastic beverage bottles stacked and held in place with chicken wire within wooden frameworks.

According to Leif Verdu-Isachsen, who organized the exhibition and edited its engaging catalog with Truls Ramberg,

After a natural disaster, we have about a two-week window of opportunity in which to engage the global public before its attention shifts elsewhere, so what we do has to be implemented very quickly. Furthermore, we know that on average these shelters will need to be used for about three years before permanent housing can be built, so the combination of rapid assembly and relative durability is essential.”

Photo:  proposed “greening” of Lower Manhattan to absorb storm surges, designed by Stephen Cassell, Adam Yarinski, and Susannah C. Drake for the exhibition Rising Currents, Museum of Modern Art, 2010. ARO/dlandstudio/Museum of Modern Art

“New York Magazine: 

New York’s Wet Future: How the City Could Live With the Sea Rather Than Fight It

By Justin Davidson. Nov 2, 2012

Even as the sea has grown more threatening, New York has moved towards it. A couple of decades ago, we hung back from the city’s fenced-off, polluted, and invisible edges. The low ground by the water had been left to dirty, declining businesses like shipping and manufacturing; the rest of us crossed bridges slung far above the water and gazed on rivers from the safety of upper floors. Some days, the wind blew off the Atlantic, brining the air over Manhattan and reminding us that we lived in a maritime city; otherwise, it was easy to forget.

But the storm that crashed into town this week found a sea-besotted city, one ringed with a green ribbon of leisure and luxury. Tribeca, Battery Park City, West Chelsea — these once-fallow (or nonexistent) lowlands are now premium zip codes. We have become like the New Yorkers that Melville described, people who “must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in.” Sandy won’t change that. It’s too late to roll back the Williamsburg waterfront, unbuild Brooklyn Bridge Park, cancel the development of Governors Island, or write off Belle Harbor. Instead, what if New York could become a pioneer of urban life in an era of climate change? Instead of retreating, denying, or despairing, we’d be inhabiting our fragile ledge with foresight and aplomb, reengineering the post-industrial shoreline to emulate its pre-urban state. Our best future resembles the past.”

The Guardian:

Re-imagining our cities for the 21st century

The success of New York’s High Line park has reinvigorated our imagination in the way we use existing landscapes and architecture in our cities.

Looking back on the story of New York’s High Line in 20 years time, I wonder if we’ll see it as having been the catalyst for a new era of design for our cities.

Having fallen in love with the structure of the old freight railway from the street, it was what High Line founder Robert Hammond saw when he got up on to the railway itself, that convinced him to try to save it. Here, running through the middle of Manhattan, was a mile and a half of wild flowers.

That was in 1999. Now, 12 years on, New York’s park in the sky attracted more than 3.7 million visitors last year, has generated $2bn-worth of private investment (£1.3bn) surrounding the park and is predicted to exceed $900m (£562m) in new tax revenues for the city over the next 20 years.

Such figures are not to be sniffed at. For what started out as a rescue attempt by two neighbourhood residents (Hammond and Joshua David) with no design background, no plan and no money, has created the city’s second most popular tourist attraction after the Museum of Modern Art. It is decisive evidence that it is increasingly the quality of our parks and public spaces, not the towering ambition of our skyline, that make our towns and cities stand out.”

Photo: Bootstrap Company’s Dalston Roof Park strived to push the borders on re-imagining space to create unconventional places.