Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City has seen several major disasters in recent memory, a fact that was not lost on the presenters at Thursday’s topping-out ceremony of the area’s new SeaGlass carousel. “This community, you cannot bring us down,” said Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, who spoke at the ceremony. “You can attack us, flood us… but we are about building and creating.”
Borough President Scott Stringer speaks at the SeaGlass topping-out ceremony.
The carousel, designed by New York firm WXY, will be the centerpiece of the newly redesigned Battery Park. Several speakers at the ceremony lauded it not just as a new neighborhood landmark and beautiful work of design, but as a symbol of the resilience and strength of a community that has endured both the 9/11 attacks and hurricane Sandy.
Attendees admired the completed exterior. Inside, banners were placed to indicate the scale of the carousel seats. (more…)
The view looking up nearly any avenue in Manhattan is more or less the same: buildings line a ruler-straight street all the way to the horizon. But the view up Park Avenue, south of 42nd Street is cut short. Grand Central Terminal, the city’s iconic train station sits over the avenue, which leads up to it like a grand boulevard. Its preeminence in the physical landscape accurately reflects the terminal’s preeminent place in New York’s cultural landscape as well. Grand Central has remained in this spot for one hundred years; it almost seems as though this is the only way it could have been.
But the longevity of Grand Central Station did not always appear so inevitable. When it was completed in 1913, Grand Central Terminal replaced the earlier Grand Central Station, itself built to expand the original Grand Central Depot. Three rail stations in under half a century? This made the new terminal seem likely to be as ephemeral as its predecessors had been. Yet, Grand Central has stood for one hundred years, and in New York City that is no small feat.
In commemoration of its centennial the New York Transit Museum has released a new book, Grand Central Terminal: 100 years of a New York Landmark. Rather than try to offer a comprehensive history, the book takes a close look at various moments in the terminal’s life. Through these vignettes, we’re reminded that it was not the functionality of the station, or the magnificent architecture alone that gave Grand Central its staying power. Rather, it was the Grand Central’s ability to carve its own special place in the city, and come to represent so many different things to different people. Imagining New York without Grand Central Terminal now is like trying to imagine it without a Central Park or a Wall Street. (more…)
Indulge me.
I once wrote a poem called “Profession of Mission” in which I attempted to write a personal mission statement. The poem rambled a bit, begged for clarity in my life’s purpose and ended with the word “crossroads” – no punctuation or finality – intentionally open-ended.
I wrote the poem in 2009 at age 44 – clearly the beginning of Mid-Life Crisis. Yes, young’uns, even older folks wonder what to do with the rest of their lives.
One week ago, at age 47 – no closer to an answer or closure – I took myself to Manhattan.
If I can “figure it out here, I can figure it out anywhere,” right?
I’m pleased to report that I found clarity in Chelsea … without a stitch of help from any of Woody Allen’s analysts.
But I did have help.
I attended a daylong workshop called “Design the Life You Love” created by New York-based product designer Ayse Birsel.
Ayse became a friend after I heard her speak at a user conference put on by a client of mine, Swedish design-software company Configura. Born in Turkey, Ayse is Pratt Institute-educated, a Fulbright Fellow whose work is in the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, both in New York City.
She is perhaps best known for designing Herman Miller’s Resolve office system and Moroso’s M’Afrique collection. She and partner Bibi Seck own Birsel+Seck, a design studio that also works with Johnson & Johnson, Hasbro, Hewlett Packard, OfficeMax, Renault, and Target. Ayse designed a potato peeler for Target that’s just $7.99, she says. So, even if you never make it to MoMA or Cooper-Hewitt, you can see (and buy) her products at a Target near you.
Ayse has taken her product design methods – which she calls Deconstruction:Reconstruction™ – and developed the “Design the Life You Love” workshop with concepts and exercises that even non-designers can easily grasp.
The workshop has become a mission for Ayse: “Our lives are our most important project,” she says.
Storms and hurricanes are nothing new for New York City. Some four decades after the European founding of the municipality in 1625, a severe storm was chronicled in Manhattan. Subsequently, the Great Storm of 1693 rearranged the coastline, likely creating the Fire Island Cut. Many more significant storms followed over the centuries. To underscore the lessons of super storm Sandy, there are people alive today who can remember the great hurricane of 1938.
What’s new in recent decades is the relentless development of the coastline, haphazardly accelerated with apparent disregard for protective natural buffers, such as wetlands and dunes. As recently as the 1980s, development exploded in today’s storm ravaged Staten Island, even filling and building on marshland.
Also new to many people is the realization of the human contributions to climate change through our modification of atmospheric gases, a warming climate, and the attendant increases in sea levels, storm frequency and severity, droughts, heat waves, and more. These meteorological changes are real and measurable.
Hurricane Sandy, aside from its tragic aftermath, has done us a huge favor, providing a loud and unequivocal “I told you so!” in the nation’s densest population areas and most developed coastline. The visible devastation of New York City and the Jersey Shore brings tangible urgency to our efforts to take all possible measures to alter the lifestyle and behaviors that have brought us to this critical juncture. We need a paradigm shift in our land-use patterns and energy consumption. Most fundamentally, we must change the ways we interact with the natural systems of the earth. Massive sea gates and walls might protect against some storm surges, but what will they do to fisheries, sediment transport, water quality—to mention but a few potential repercussions? We need an integrated approach to climate adaptation and mitigation that uses natural systems as ongoing guides.
Wetland Restoration and Mitigation, image courtesy of appliedeco.com
Experiencing a sense of community – belonging to a successful network of human alliances – is one of the great pleasures of the places we build. And at village or at city scales we dedicate an enormous share of our resources to accommodate and symbolize the group’s protection, effectiveness, and cohesion. Facing the propensity for destruction and violence that’s inherent in person-to-person competition, we strengthen bonds and loyalties with places to meet, act out our agreements and shared stories, resolve the inevitable conflicts and plant symbols of our “social contract” – the places to eat together, judge, worship, trade, play, and celebrate with shared movements, ideas, voices. and action – and finally in the burial grounds that record the continuity of the shared gene pools.
“The Greek theater where a city saw and heard itself being a community – sharing its myths, passions and history”
Civil society’s most honored monuments are the places where a community can read the stories of individual competitors surviving and prospering together – stories of victories, resolved conflicts, bonds of loyalty, generosity and philanthropy, and the favor of a deity. It’s seen in the bold, arrogant commercial and town hall towers of medieval Europe’s newly independent cities – with their symbolism of wealth and power that’s inherent in penetrating a skyline. Today we do the same. We announce our stability and pedigree in the neo-classical languages of power – in finance, universities, and governments – or the engineering of grand transportation infrastructure and waterfronts that tell stories of still larger geographical alliances. And the most moving are the places where citizens see – and hear – themselves being a community, sharing the passions stirred by their myths, arts, and on-going history – the Greeks in their intimate theaters or today’s crowds in museums or performing arts venues. And it can happen in parks, plazas, and arenas where spectacles, music, or sports – at small and large scales – evoke feelings of solidarity, working or fighting side-by-side as a team or as a gang, making connections just as binding – at least for the moment – as genetic kinship. These places where we reinforce and celebrate – respond to – our prospering alliances are the settings where we experience what we call “sense-of-place” and “authentic” communities.
Alienation
In any mix of diverse and mobile populations, under any social structure, the built environments, the public faces of places financed and occupied, naturally express the victories, values, religion or status of the winners. When, for better or worse, they also become symbols of exclusion and oppression, they become physical targets for the outsiders – called, naturally, barbarians, rebels or terrorists. They have been throughout history. And in our globalizing, urbanizing settlements we can expect continued destructive responses to the places we build. The alienation is just as deeply felt as “belonging,” and the winners are responding as they always have, with hardened perimeters and surveillance – refuge and prospect.
It’s a warm summers day on Governors Island in 2015. Tourists doze in gently rocking hammocks while a lone musician softly plays to the clinking of coins in his guitar case. Basking in the shade of a nearby tree, a teenager sprawls on the grass pretending to read history while two ballet dancers practice in the long shadow of Liggett Hall. It’s numerous stone balconies full of workers on laptops, the archways and warm lighting fill the heart of Governors Island with quiet contemplation.
Liggett Hall is a former military office and barracks, designed in 1929 by McKim, Mead & White in the Georgian Revival style. Encompassing 400,000-square feet of space, this elegant building of stone and brick serves as an iconic gateway between the park on the south side of the island, and the largest adaptive reuse project in the country.
Liggett Hall, photo courtesy The Trust for Governors Island
Education, art, music, business. These are just some of the pieces of the puzzle of opportunity that is the RFP (Request For Proposal) on Governors Island. With a $260 million investment in park amenities–potable water, 21st century electrical and telecommunication systems, and improved access–New York City is betting on Governors Island as a premier destination for tourism, culture, and business.
Liggett Terrace, rendering courtesy The Trust for Governors Island
Last month I went on a private guided tour of Governors Island. A short 10-minute ferry ride took me from the southern tip of Manhattan to the waiting Leslie Koch, president of the Trust for Governors Island. Two minutes off the ferry and I’m whisked off in an armored gulf cart for a vision filled tour of the future. Koch’s enthusiasm and excitement filled my head with beautiful landscapes, restored relics, creative uses of historic buildings, resilient park spaces, art, culture, advanced business, and great opportunities.
South Battery, rendering courtesy The Trust for Governors Island
In our previous post, “Tree Tag…You’re It”, we let you in on the details of what landscape architects call “tree tagging,” as well as my spring experience with tulip poplars, and some of the challenges we face in the field during the selection process. Here we discuss the post-tagging process.
The landscape architect’s job doesn’t end when she leaves the nursery. The trees we’ve selected must be maintained, cared for, and prepped in anticipation of delivering them to the project for installation. This multi-step process involves digging up the trees from the field, preparing each tree by its root condition, packaging, delivery, and finally, installation.
Tulip poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera) tagged in spring 2012 were alive and well at the nursery in the fall . . .and had grown over an inch in caliper in five months!
Digging Times
Digging trees is dictated by the calendar year and season, as well as by planned installation schedules, and even specific plant types.
Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichtum) trees tagged in the field are dug and balled in burlap by machinery in early spring, prior to the planting season.
A tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera), for instance, isn’t a picky tree, but others certainly are. Trees we call “fall dig hazards” drop their leaves well into the season—they don’t go dormant until very late in the fall. These finicky species include hawthorn, sweetgum, cherry, and pear trees. (more…)
One December day seven years ago, I was just about the only person driving around Gulfport, Mississippi. Hurricane Katrina had hit three months earlier, and the downtown and neighborhoods nearby still looked like Armageddon—house after house had been crushed or split open by the storm surge. Nobody was fixing anything. People were waiting on the government to draw up new flood maps so they would know what might be insured if they were to rebuild.
By now, a lot of people have rebuilt their houses in Gulfport. Many of them are quite close to the water, just like they were before Katrina. If you look at the street views on Google Maps, you see houses rebuilt, as if no 24-foot storm surge could ever happen again. There was a rule: If less than 50 percent of your house was damaged, you could rebuild at the previous elevation. If more than half was damaged, you had to build above a 17-foot elevation. People who rebuilt low to the ground in the surge zone either squirreled under the 50 percent threshold or they don’t have insurance. Many of these people can’t afford the high cost of insurance, the city’s director of economic development, David Nichols, told me recently. They may have had their house passed down through family, so they have no debt but no money either, and nowhere else to live. Redevelopment in Gulfport generally has been suppressed by unwillingness or inability to rebuild to the mandated elevations, or by a lack of insurance—there are still also plenty of empty sites in town. But for many who have rebuilt, you can see a disaster setting up all over again.
One December day seven years ago, I was just about the only person driving around Gulfport, Mississippi. Hurricane Katrina had hit three months earlier, and the downtown and neighborhoods nearby still looked like Armageddon—house after house had been crushed or split open by the storm surge. Nobody was fixing anything. People were waiting on the government to draw up new flood maps so they would know what might be insured if they were to rebuild.
By now, a lot of people have rebuilt their houses in Gulfport. Many of them are quite close to the water, just like they were before Katrina. If you look at the street views on Google Maps, you see houses rebuilt, as if no 24-foot storm surge could ever happen again. There was a rule: If less than 50 percent of your house was damaged, you could rebuild at the previous elevation. If more than half was damaged, you had to build above a 17-foot elevation. People who rebuilt low to the ground in the surge zone either squirreled under the 50 percent threshold or they don’t have insurance. Many of these people can’t afford the high cost of insurance, the city’s director of economic development, David Nichols, told me recently. They may have had their house passed down through family, so they have no debt but no money either, and nowhere else to live. Redevelopment in Gulfport generally has been suppressed by unwillingness or inability to rebuild to the mandated elevations, or by a lack of insurance—there are still also plenty of empty sites in town. But for many who have rebuilt, you can see a disaster setting up all over again.
Photos by Paul Clemence.
From Phoenician caryatids to Richard Serra’s assemblies, architecture and sculpture share a single, twined history. Now, British artist Antony Gormley — winner of the 1994 Turner Prize — has created a series of urban installations that throw an unnerving and beautiful light on a long and complicated relationship. Called “Event Horizon,” the series has migrated from London (2007) and Manhattan (2010) to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo (2012) and now on to Brasilia (through January, 2013). Along the way, it has stunned tens of thousands of city dwellers into more acute and conscious contact with their built environments.
“‘Event Horizon’ hopes to activate the skyline in order to encourage people to look around,” Gormley himself has written. “In this process of looking and finding, or looking and seeking, one perhaps re-assesses one’s own position in the world and becomes aware of one’s status of embedment.”
When the lights went out in lower Manhattan on that evening in late October, darkness enveloped everything around me. A week later I was grateful to see what two New York photographers and filmmakers saw that night. Their work helped me understand the magnitude of the blackout Superstorm Sandy visited on my beloved city, of which I could see only a small sliver from my windows. Here Ruggero and Valentina Vanni write about what it was like to be out on the streets as they documented this frightening and beautiful short film, which turns out to be a cautionary tale of modern life.—SSS
“Downtown New York, October 29, 10:13 pm.–The lights had gone out. The brunt of the hurricane just passed us. The wind fell and the rain stopped. We had to go out and see.
“We have been living here for over 30 years and photographed all over the city. We are in love with downtown Manhattan and its ever-changing urban environment at day and night. We knew this time it will be different. We could not imagine how different.
Hurricane Sandy has invoked a lot of change. Whether it’s coast lines or politics, we have experienced first-hand what scientists, planners, and architects have been warning about for years, that a storm like Sandy was going to happen.
“Sometime between now and 2100, a storm will dump 18 feet of seawater into lower Manhattan, flooding much of the financial district, Battery Park, and most of the subway stations south of Rector Street. Six hundred oil tanks in Bayonne, New Jersey, will be inundated. And all but a nub of Liberty State Park, the landfill opposite Ellis Island, will disappear into the harbor. That’s the grim forecast for New York.”
The above quote comes from Suzanne LaBarre in her 2010 blog post, Hope Floats, where she describes MoMA’s Rising Currents exhibition “as an optimistic rebuke to the government’s stopgap approach to public infrastructure. Whereas the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers erects concrete dams and levees, these architects favor broad solutions that reconfigure the social, economic, political, and natural landscape.”
An image from the MoMA Rising Currents exhibition,
Courtesy of Scape Landscape Architecture
LaBarre rightly calls out how the Rising Currents exhibition took sustainable and creative approaches to dealing with cataclysmic storms like Sandy. The ideas in the exhibition illustrated concepts that would help create resilient communities; communities that are not only physically safe from the water’s wrath, but stronger socially, economically, and environmentally
We spent a semester designing–and redesigning–our project for the Highbridge Pool and Recreation Center, located in the Washington Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan. Now we’re ready to build it. The only thing that remains is…more designing. We now know that making architecture requires a perpetual zoom in and zoom out of our work, in a constant dance of reexamining the relevance of each move, from several perspectives. It is at this fine-tuning stage that the design team finds itself hovering over plans and computer screens debating a handrail, among other things. This attention to detail is crucial. We know that it will pay off in the end.
This summer the Parsons Design Workshop, a group of 7 grad students and 1 undergrad enrolled in The New School’s architecture programs, under the leadership of director Alfred Zollinger and instructor Joel Stoer, is working on enclosing the lobby at the historic Highbridge Pool and Recreation Center. The project is part of the school’s ongoing pro bono architectural and construction services to nonprofit organizations. In the process we get hands-on experience with how buildings are made and with designing a real project for a community. In this instance, we worked with the NYC Parks & Recreation Department and the City Parks Foundation to design and construct Highbridge in flux.
In recent years, young designers have flocked to Brooklyn for more affordable work spaces and for the lively, burgeoning creative scenes. Here, we’ve listed showrooms, shops, restaurants, museums and institutions, and galleries in a few Brooklyn neighborhoods, particularly Williamsburg and Dumbo. We’ve also included a few spots in Manhattan, Queens, Long Island, and beyond, for when you find yourself outside of dense design areas.
Check back each weekday before Design Week to see highlights from New York’s most design-forward neighborhoods. And look for the printed version of the Metropolis Design Guide around the city, especially in Chelsea at WantedDesign, in Midtown at the Architects & Designers Building and the Decoration & Design Building, in Flatiron at the New York Design Center, and at the newsstand at ICFF at the Javits Center.
Keep an eye out for what we “like” during NY Design Week. Around the city, you’ll see our lovely signs, produced by 3M Architectural Markets using 3M™ Crystal Glass Finishes, at all of our editors’ favorite, must-see spots. Throughout our neighborhood listings, you’ll also see a 
next to our favorites.
METROPOLIS LIKES BRIGHT LYONS
This downtown Brooklyn curiosity shop features an owner-curated mix of midcentury-modern furniture from the likes of Herman Miller, Knoll, and Laverne; contemporary artwork and prints; and vintage art, architecture, and design books.
For more information, see Bright Lyons listing below (image credit: Julienne Schaer).
It’s hard to believe that spring is here. Almost more surprising than being able to wear shorts in March is the fact that the great concrete jungle that’s New York City actually has a wide array of brightly colored native plant life, such as the red columbine and southern magnolia. Already in bloom, the gardens at Brooklyn Bridge Park‘s Pier 1 give those of us who can’t get out of the city for a day the opportunity to find the beauty of nature just across the water from the financial district.
