Author: Bill Millard

Event: Paris/New York: Two Metropoles in Flux
Locations: “The Metropolis as Urban and Social Space,” Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, New Academic Building, Cooper Union, 11.16.2009; “Planning the Metropolis for Sustainability and Diversity,” Center for Architecture, 11.17.2009
Speakers: (11.16.2009) Anthony Vidler, Assoc. AIA — Dean & Professor, Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, Cooper Union (introduction); Kareen Rispal — Cultural Counselor, French Embassy (introduction); Jean-Louis Cohen — Professor, New York University Institute of Fine Arts; Mireille Ferri — Vice President, Conseil Régional d’Ile de France; Amanda Burden, FAICP, Hon. AIA – Director, NYC Department of City Planning & Chair, NYC City Planning Commission; Pierre Mansat — Deputy Mayor in charge of the Paris Metropole project, Mairie de Paris; Christian de Portzamparc, Hon. FAIA — President, Groupement International des Architectes pour le Grand Paris; Sherida Paulsen, FAIA — 2009 AIANY President & Partner, PKSB
(11.17.2009) Sherida Paulsen, FAIA (introduction); Alexandre Chemetoff — Urbanist & Architect, Alexandre Chemetoff et Associés (opening keynote); Barbara Chénot Camus — Urban Planner; Emeline Bailly — Project Chief & Urban Planner, Mairie de Paris; Catherine Barbé — General Director, Sustainable Cities Institute; Djamel Klouche — Architect, l’AUC, & Participant, Grand Paris; David Mangin — Architect, Seura, & Participant, Grand Paris; Rick Bell, FAIA — Executive Director, AIANY (moderator); Rohit Aggarwala, Ph.D. — Director, NYC Mayor’s Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability; Adrian Benepe — Commissioner, NYC Department of Parks & Recreation; David Burney, FAIA — Commissioner, NYC Department of Design and Construction; Thomas Wright — Executive Director, Regional Plan Association; Alexander Garvin — Professor, Yale University (closing keynote)
Organizers: French Cultural Services; AIANY; La Maison Française of New York University; AIANY Global Dialogues Committee; Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University; The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and the Department of Architecture and Design; Museum of Modern Art

“Great cities learn from each other,” as Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe suggested, and a pair of cities that are great in markedly different ways can each learn quite a bit from structured dialogue. New York and Paris have followed sharply contrasting historical paths, reflecting different values, geographic conditions, and political traditions, yet they now face common problems, and in certain respects they are converging on solutions of mutual interest. In Paris, questions of density, mobility, social justice, center-periphery relations, economic incentives, and quality of life evoke responses relying more on planning and central governance; New York, like the U.S. generally, has relegated more (though by no means all) authority over these decisions to market forces and local entities, with little direct federal guidance or assistance.

Yet the two cities do offer certain parallel or overlapping strategies. French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Grand Paris plan calls for expansion and unification to eliminate disparities between the central city and its troubled banlieues (outskirts), while Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC, as Rohit Aggarwala emphasized, responds to urgent demographic and ecological realities through targeted growth (zoning to steer new residents toward density and transit) and accelerating green-design approaches. Despite differing emphases, both cities’ leaders recognize sustainable urbanism on a fully metropolitan or even regional scale as an imperative — ideally, with increasing citizen engagement in design processes, despite the persistence of what Pierre Mansat called “the peculiar situation of Paris, secluded in an administrative straitjacket,” the corresponding forms of organizational sclerosis here, and the social imbalances found in both cities. The French term for sustainability, durabilité, carries connotations of broad long-range thinking that deserve to cross the language barrier.

The proceedings were in no way a competition, but the most attention-getting physical projects (at least in New York eyes) were presented by the French visitors. Christian de Portzamparc, Hon. FAIA, used the symbolism of the hearth-goddess Hestia and the messenger-god Hermes to analyze Paris’s developmental epochs and the evolving relations of place and movement. Alexandre Chemetoff’s evolutionary and participatory scheme (he disdains the term “master plan”) for redevelopment on the Île de Nantes, incorporating the forms and memories of the island’s rough industrial past, offered a series of case studies that New York developers might usefully study. His project’s guide maps, tellingly, present both existing and projected plans; “the map,” he said, “is the relationship between the two.”

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Paris, David Mangin noted, is the natural home of “make no little plans.” The 10-architect Grand Paris endeavor is the latest in a long series of sweeping civic renovations, some implemented (Baron Haussmann’s), some partially built (Henri Prost’s 1930s scheme for radioconcentric highways), and some remaining unrealized (Corbusier’s Plan Voisin and Ville Radieuse). Since New York has a roughly similar area and density, as Catherine Barbé illustrated, and is also organized around a center built in pre-automotive times, the question logically arises why our region has been relatively short on comprehensive public visions. Even influential ones like the Regional Plan Association’s original 1929 plan, executive director Thomas Wright allowed, haven’t overcome the American “history of ceding planning to the private sector” (including the private RPA). Today’s challenges of sprawl, mobility, and environmental repair, Wright and others argued, make this tradition obsolete. Badly needed public works like the Second Avenue subway, the Access to the Region’s Core transit tunnel, the East Side Access project, and particularly Moynihan Station remain vulnerable to a political culture that Wright called “checks and balances on steroids.”

Alexander Garvin’s summation illuminated aspects of the respective influences of Haussmann and Robert Moses that require nuanced appreciation. Received wisdom associates Haussmann’s boulevards primarily with geometric rationalism, military strategy, and social control, forgetting not only the grim conditions (hygienic and epidemiologic) that made them necessary, but the fact that during Paris’s bouts of social upheaval, “you can shoot in both directions” through a long straight space. “It’s impossible to think of Paris without cafés,” Garvin added, “and those cafés would be impossible without Haussmann.” Likewise, outrage at Moses’s motoristic assaults on urban neighborhoods rings hollow outside the context of his remarkable record of projects, including dozens substantially benefiting the underprivileged. While paying respect to these achievements, Garvin cautioned that grand projets, linear cities, and regional subcenters, ideas recurrent in both Parisian and New York history, have less effect on daily life than the kind of local incremental measures we are already seeing. “Both Paris and New York are in the change business, all the time,” Garvin concluded, “but it’s not initiated by architects. Those changes are initiated by people working hard on improving the public realm, the streets, and parks. That’s where change occurs, not by rethinking the city.”

Bill Millard is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in OCULUS, Icon, Content, The Architect’s Newspaper, and other publications.

Event: How Do We Design Successful Cities? Challenges and Solutions
Location: Center for Architecture, 10.27.09
Speakers: David Burney, FAIA — Commissioner, NYC Department of Design and Construction (DDC); Richard Plunz — Professor of Architecture & Director, Urban Design Program, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, & Director, Urban Design Lab, The Earth Institute
Introductions & Responses: Michael Plottel, AIA — Project Executive, DDC; Anna Torriani, AIA — Partner, Atelier Pagnamenta Torriani
Organizers: AIANY Public Architecture Committee

This discussion of possible urban futures began with Director of the Urban Design Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation Richard Plunz’s recent fact-finding trip to China with Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia’s Earth Institute. Plunz, admitting his own lack of preconceived knowledge about China, described what he found there as “fascinating and terrifying.” To these observations NYC Department of Design and Construction (DDC) Commissioner David Burney, FAIA, expressed a degree of skepticism about the implications of the evening’s official title — a literal discussion of how to design successful cities, he noted, presumes that anyone actually can — and some points for comparison based largely on the experiences of New York and London. In the West’s premiere cities, the economic base, built environment, and cultural accommodations that add up to forms of successful urbanism have evolved over centuries. Plunz and Burney both suggested that China’s effort to do something similar, but larger and faster, is unpredictable, risky, and impossible to ignore.

Plunz got the impression that “the Chinese are very proud of their problems,” but also that they are serious about confronting them. China’s urbanization strikes him as not only unprecedented in scale and speed — Shenzhen, for example, grew from a town of 35,000 to a city of 9 million in three decades, and the nation now has over 100 cities of a million or more — but somewhat unformed. “In many ways,” he said, “Chinese urbanization is relatively primitive in the sense that the cities are really examples of the first phase of something.” No one within or outside China has a clear idea how to establish a reasonable quality of life for such a population, from basic questions of food production, and distribution (despite a projected 23% drop in arable land by 2049) to the preservation of cultural identity. Identifying five major representative challenges for Chinese urbanism, Plunz terms them urban implosion (the problem of rapid growth), urban equilibrium (the urban-rural disjunction), urban fabric (the problem of preservation), cultural transformation (the problem of consumption), and education for innovation (the problem of advancement).

“Building a consumer economy with 1.3 billion consumers,” Plunz says, puts China in a position no nation has ever been in, even the 20th-century U.S. as it approached its high-consumption phase. China is polluting its cities alarmingly, but it is also producing 80% of the world’s solar panels, hedging its bets in the transportation sector by producing mass transit as well as autos, and taking constructive steps in advanced technologies such as superconductors and biomass-based fuels. The intelligence of China’s leadership impressed him, and their methods of governance struck him as offering certain adaptive advantages despite the obvious objections from a democratic perspective. In any assessments made across the borders of culture, chronology, and scale, Plunz recommends circumspection: “It’s not the same game for them that existed for us over the last 50 years.”

Burney shares Plunz’s sense that continuity between prior experience and the hyper-urbanized future may have its limits, noting that even the successes of figures like Christopher Wren and Baron Haussmann have left us with no bulletproof guidelines for how to produce an ideal city. Still, certain examples do offer grounds for optimism. An almost obsessively planned district like Battery Park City and a virtually unplanned one like London’s Canary Wharf can end up closer in form than one might expect, he noted. There are certain qualities that planning and design can enhance, as the UK’s Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment has broadly sketched in its document World Class Places. Here, multiple city agencies have embedded similar principles into rezoning, steering growth toward transit-rich sites, health programs opening schoolyards as public playgrounds, and greening efforts expanding access to parks and plazas. “There seems to be some sort of consensus growing about how we define successful urban space,” Burney summarized; “I think there’s less consensus as to how we get there.”

Note: Bill Millard sat down with Burney to discuss his ideas further. To listen to the Podcast, click here.

Bill Millard is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in OCULUS, Icon, Content, The Architect’s Newspaper, and other publications.

Event: Wake Up the Cities: Recent Work by Christian de Portzamparc
Speakers: Christian de Portzamparc, Hon. FAIA — Principal, Atelier Christian de Portzemparc; Tony Schirripa, AIA, IIDA — AIANY President-elect; Rick Bell, FAIA — Executive Director, AIANY (introductions)
Organizers: AIA-NY Cultural Facilities Committee; La Maison Française; NYU
Location: Center for Architecture, 09.29.09

Event: Riverside Center: Presentation and Panel
Location: Center for Architecture, 09.29.09
Speakers: Christian de Portzamparc, Hon. FAIA; Signe Nielsen, Hon. AIANY, FASLA — Principal, Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects; Gale Brewer — New York City Council; Paul Elston — Riverside South Planning Corporation; Paul Willen, FAIA — Architect; Craig Whitaker — Coalition for a Livable West Side
Moderator: Rick Bell, FAIA — Executive Director, AIANY
Organizers: AIANY Planning & Urban Design Committee

In a rapid and thorough presentation of projects and ideas from throughout his career, architect/urbanist Christian de Portzamparc, Hon. FAIA, demonstrated the qualities that have earned him a Pritzker Prize and worldwide renown, including a coherent vision of cities’ evolution and a confident sense of form. The following morning, after presenting his plan for Extell Development’s new piece of the Upper West Side’s Riverside South waterfront puzzle, he got a firsthand look at the processes and perspectives that complicate major projects in New York. If Riverside Center defies the pattern of other recent major developments and reaches the point of realization (projected around 2017), that success will have a great deal to do with de Portzamparc’s vision of postmodern urbanity.

De Portzamparc is one of 10 architects selected by president Nicholas Sarkozy for the “Grand Paris” exercise in sustainable master planning, loosely analogous to our city’s PlaNYC. His proposal’s new high-speed elevated rail line would connect the troubled Parisian suburbs to the central city in an integrated archipelago, overcoming the disjointedness produced by the city’s ring road. Transportation and communication systems, he said, are the critical elements in a city’s evolution beyond the excessive abstractions and separations that modern cities inherited from Corbusier.

In Rue de la Loi in Brussels, the Massena neighborhood in Paris, his contribution to OMA’s master plan for Almere, the Netherlands (a mixed-use complex on an artificial meadow atop a plate concealing automotive infrastructure), and many other projects, he offers variations on a set of strategies that maximize urban variety: the open or porous block, the juxtaposition of volumes with different heights, and the welcoming the randomness of the street. In his cultural infrastructure projects — particularly the Cidade da Música in Rio de Janeiro, with a sweeping 10-meter-high terrace offering visitors a memorable vantage point amid the surrounding mountains, and the Hergé Museum in Louvain, Belgium, a shrine to the creator of Tintin, with playful colors, sweeping walkways, and comic-frame fenestration — his designs show a sensitivity to the human body. From early in his career, he acknowledged, “I was conscious that the space between buildings” had “the same importance as the building itself.”

“The city must permit the game of urbanism, which is a permanent fight between private energy and the cleverness of public organizations,” he stated; “every urban decision is the result of this fight.” In the current Riverside Center scheme, de Portzamparc’s mixed-use, varied-height towers and Signe Nielsen’s practical workarounds for landscaping a difficult site (complicated by sharp grade changes as well as proximity to rail lines, the West Side Highway, and a Sanitation Department station) add up to an improvement over the row of recent towers to the north. Community representatives, however, question: will de Portzamparc’s intent to create genuine public park space, not a private enclave, be honored by the developers in the long run? Is the view to Con Ed’s historic IRT Powerhouse to the south a valuable enough feature to override Extell’s interest in profitable square footage? Are the measurements of green-space proportions meaningful or misleading?

Paul Elston, current chair of the Riverside South Planning Corporation, offered an alternate plan premised on relocation of the highway (approved at federal and state levels, but in search of funding). Paul Willen, FAIA, one of the original architects of Riverside South, proposed removing one tower from the Extell plan to improve sunlight and public access. Craig Whitaker, cautioning that certain developers have been known to retain impressive architects only as long as administratively necessary, would prefer a square-one rethink beginning with park space and amplified street frontage, not with a “beauty pageant” of towers. The Uniform Land Use Review Procedure begins soon and should be lively.

De Portzamparc, who cited a relevant quotation from Lao Tzu as a personal influence (“My house is not the wall; it is not the ground; it is not the roof; it is the emptiness between these things, because that is where I am dwelling”), will once again need to negotiate the balance between volumes and voids to help bring Riverside Center to fruition. In this next fight, which promises to be a long and rigorous one, he will be on the kind of formal, intellectual, and political territory where his comprehension and experience place him right at home.

To listen to excerpts of their conversation after the two events, click here: Interview: Christian de Portzamparc, Hon. FAIA.

Bill Millard is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in OCULUS, Icon, Content, The Architect’s Newspaper, and other publications.

Event: New Amsterdam Bike Slam Symposium: Global Trends in Sustainable Mobility
Location: Center for Architecture, 09.11.09
Speakers: Rick Bell, FAIA — Executive Director, AIANY; Eric Niehe — Ambassador, Netherlands Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and project leader, NY400; Walter Hook, Ph.D. — Executive Director, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy; Willem de Jager — Director of Sustainable Mobility, RABO Bank, Amsterdam; Paul Steely White — Executive Director, Transportation Alternatives (moderator/speaker); Heather Allen — Senior Manager for Sustainable Development, Union International Transport Public; Ruth Oldenziel — Professor, Eindhoven University of Technology; Eric van der Kooij — Spatial Planner, City of Amsterdam; Christopher O. Ward — Executive Director, Port Authority of NY and NJ; Janette Sadik-Khan — Commissioner, NYC Department of Transportation; Pieter de Haan — Traffic Psychologist, Institute for Shared Space; Herman Gelissen — Public Bicycles OV Fiets; Arjen Jaarsma — Balancia; Jeff Olson, Alta Planning; Pascal van der Noort — Velo Mondial (moderator/speaker)
Moderators: Paul Steely White — Executive Director, Transportation Alternatives; Karen Overton — Catalyst Coordinator, Partnerships for Parks, and founder, Recycle-a-Bicycle; Caroline Samponaro — Director of Bicycle Advocacy, Transportation Alternatives; Andy Clarke — Executive Director of American Bicyclists LAB; Nazli Parvizi — Commissioner, Community Assistance Unit, Mayor’s Office, NYC; Pascal van der Noort — Velo Mondial
Organizers & Sponsors: Transportation Alternatives, NYC; Velo Mondial, Amsterdam
Cosponsors: AIANY Transportation and Infrastructure Committee

The 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival provides the occasion for Dutch-American cultural exchange — and, as diplomat Eric Niehe said, not only celebrating but also publicly investing in future relations, fostering a common cosmopolitan environment of entrepreneurship and tolerance. Along with the gifts of 200 orange bikes and a Ben van Berkel/UNStudio-designed pavilion at the Battery, plus a competition between planning/design teams to imagine ways to make New York bike-friendlier (won by Team Amsterdam’s combination of Dutch city planners and American designers), this all-day symposium gave architects, planners, public officials, scholars, and activists a chance to trade ideas about combining infrastructure, culture, and public education to build an environment that citizens gladly navigate on two wheels.

The Dutch love bicycling, but not just because their land is flat, because of some aversion to obesity, or because their practical modern design prizes qualities associated with bikes (energy efficiency, health). Like other industrial nations, the Netherlands went through a period in the mid-20th century when bike use was declining; reviving a flagging bike culture took conscious effort. From the 1970s onward, public and private officials have made a bike renaissance a priority, and today the nation has more bikes than people.

RABO Bank’s Willem de Jager reported that many leading Dutch corporations have jointly agreed to remove 10% of the cars from the rush-hour roads. Taking a bottom-up, voluntary approach and embracing alternative transportation (bikes, walking, and public transit), flexible hours, telecommuting, encouraging employees to work closer to home, and greened-up corporate vehicle fleets, these firms have not only made a dent in congestion levels costing roughly $7 billion annually in lost productivity and health expenses; they’ve become more desirable employers. Balancia’s mobility consultant Arjen Jaarsma emphasized that there is no such thing as cycling planning in isolation; it is part of an integrated approach to traffic safety, legal/regulatory mechanisms, air-quality policy, and related concerns. Sustainable mobility, Velo Mondial’s Pascal van der Noort summed up, needs a political choice for a long-term balance among “emission-rich, emission-poor, and emission-free” modes of movement. “The car with petroleum,” he said, “remains in the 20th century.”

Surprise appearances by the Port Authority’s Chris Ward and Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan ensured that local visions weren’t overshadowed by the Dutch experience: Ward ventured several ambitious predictions about ways New York’s infrastructure may adapt to a future where intellectual and cultural production, not the troubled finance industry, is likely to be the region’s chief driver of economic growth. Sadik-Khan recounted the city’s widely emulated recent achievements in transforming streets from vehicular corridors to spaces for people, earning applause from the audience by declaring, “I don’t look at biking as alternative transportation. I look at it as transportation, period.”

This philosophy is well-aligned with the Netherlands’ low-key, utilitarian bike culture, which treats bikes as a matter-of-fact transport-mode choice by members of the whole population. As global bike-culture hero Gil Peñalosa (Bogotá parks commissioner and brother of mayor Enrique) has said on a number of occasions, cycling facilities are adequate only if they are safe enough for eight-year-olds and 80-year-olds. The predominantly male, risk-tolerant riders who were out in force at Sunday’s NYC Century Ride bring enormous energy to local sustainable-mobility efforts, but they cannot be the sole constituency for urban cycling infrastructure if New York is to reach Dutch levels of non-automotive mode share. We’ll need more protected lanes, practical bikes suited to moms rather than messengers, efficient and affordable bike-rental programs like the smart-card-based OV Fiets system, ample secure bike parking (the 2009 Bicycle Access Bill being a good start), and law enforcement against vehicular violence (the Dutch legal approach, several panelists mentioned, recognizes all users’ equal right to the roads and protects the most vulnerable by presuming motorists are at fault in auto-bike crashes).

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Most of all, we’ll need widespread acculturation. Implanting a cycling culture that’s essentially absent, historian Ruth Oldenziel noted, is harder than reviving one that just slipped for a few decades. And as Walter Hook, Ph.D., pointed out, the challenge of helping populations discover the advantages and joys of sustainable transportation is not a matter of leisure but a matter of global urgency. He predicts climate-change negotiations are likely to break down as developing countries resent developed countries’ expectations of sacrifices that the developed countries never had to make, but cycling and other low-impact transport options are among the most useful strategies the First World can learn from the Third. Some ideas moving in the opposite direction are counterproductive: China once built the world’s best bike facilities, then tore them down in the 1980s. Dutch planners like Hans Monderman (inventor of the signless, informally negotiated “living street” or woonerf) are joining colleagues elsewhere, particularly Copenhagen’s Jan Gehl and the New Yorkers who draw on his ideas, in building industrial-world cities that will be more constructive examples to nations that are now on the brink of industrializing — and, if they repeat our carbon-spewing habits, of rendering all our green commitments moot.

Ultimately, a sustainable mobility culture will have to arise from individual perceptions as well as collective decisions. AIANY’s Rick Bell, FAIA, observed that cycling is “also a way of looking at how things happen in the world,” connecting the rider with principles regarding urban space and time such as eurhythmy, symmetry, and symbiosis. That last concept — stressing one’s embeddedness in the wider urban organism, not isolation from it — seems well worth keeping in mind as cities and their residents consider ways to disengage from the 20th century’s technologies and move purposefully into the 21st.

Bill Millard is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in OCULUS, Icon, Content, The Architect’s Newspaper, and other publications.