Oct. 18, 1999
See the article in its original context from October 18, 1999, New York Times
There are only three more days to see an exhibition of new designs for the redevelopment of the far West Side of mid-Manhattan. I strongly urge you to see the show, on display through Wednesday in Vanderbilt Hall, the former waiting room at Grand Central Terminal. The five proposals on view are not uniformly great, but each is packed with intelligence, energy and pure, raw city love. And one, by the British architect Cedric Price, is a gem.
The designs are finalists in a competition conceived by Phyllis Lambert, founding director of the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal. Every three years the competition (officially titled the International Foundation for the Canadian Center for Architecture Prize for the Design of Cities) will address the needs of a different city. New York was the chosen site for the inaugural year.
In addition to Mr. Price, the architects chosen to compete include Thom Mayne of Santa Monica, Calif.; Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto of New York, and Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos of Amsterdam. Peter Eisenman of New York won the competition and its $100,000 prize with a design developed with David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
The site for the competition is a 20-block strip of Manhattan that stretches from Eighth Avenue west to the Hudson River and is bound on the south by 30th Street and on the north by 34th. Included in the area is the General Post Office, formally known as the James A. Farley Building, which is scheduled to become the new Pennsylvania Station. Much of the site is occupied by a tangle of transportation infrastructure: train tracks, highway overpasses, tunnel entrances and bus parking.
The exhibition at Grand Central can be seen as an effort to fill the void left by the collapse of city planning in New York in recent decades. It is far from certain that architects are qualified to fill this vacuum, but it has become reasonably clear that local community boards aren’t up to the task. Community activists can be highly effective at preventing projects from disrupting neighborhoods, but they have little interest in fostering new architecture of character and no reason to think about the vitality of the public realm beyond their own backyards.
The choice of these architects was clearly polemic. At a time when New York is stuck in the formulaic belief that the only way to attract people is by creating ersatz versions of the past, the competition’s organizers hoped to stimulate innovative ideas for structuring social space.
Unfortunately Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect, chose not to compete. But most of the projects on view display Mr. Koolhaas’s influence, if not in form then in scale. His concept of bigness, advocated in his 1995 book ”S, M, L, XL,” is the ruling principle that enables these architects to justify what are, in essence, megastructures: oversize buildings that contain an urban array of functions. Too, Mr. Koolhaas’s firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, established in 1975, has long advocated the expansion of architecture’s sphere of influence over urban planning.
With the exception of Mr. Price, the finalists share some common traits. All use curves or waves to set the site area off from the surrounding regularity of the Manhattan grid. With varying degrees of looseness, they adopt the megastructural approach: bringing together urban activities within a large, comprehensive architectural framework.
The dense mix of functions — offices, apartments, parks, indoor recreation, sports stadiums, shops — corresponds to what Mr. Koolhaas has called New York’s ”culture of congestion.” But it also holds appeal for developers eager to squeeze the last economic drop out of the city’s limited land.
Perhaps New Yorkers will be most interested in the scheme proposed by Mr. Eisenman. I plan to write about this design later, along with another recent competition-winning proposal by Mr. Eisenman: a new cultural center for the Spanish pilgrimage town Santiago de Compostela. But I left Grand Central thinking that Mr. Price’s design is the one that best deserves our attention before the exhibition closes.
Mr. Price, 65, is not well known in this country, but he has been a legendary figure in British architectural circles since the 1960’s. His best-known project is the unbuilt Fun Palace, designed with the theatrical impresario Joan Littlewood in 1962. The work exerted considerable influence over the development of ”high tech” architecture in the 1970’s.
The Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano in 1971, is clearly descended from Mr. Price’s Fun Palace. And his palace is also an ancestor of the megastructural approach adopted by most of the finalists in New York.
Mr. Price, however, has taken a very different route here. Playing a game of one-upmanship, his plan is as mortifying as only an Englishman knows how to be. In the Grand Central exhibition, allegedly avant-garde architects are falling all over themselves trying to show that they can outdo the developers on the developers’ terms, and Mr. Price just strolls casually onto the site as if he were hiking across a moor, takes a few deep breaths and says: ”Oh, no. It would be best if we didn’t build here at all. Instead of building, we ought to be thinking about taking things down.” Another deep breath. ”We’ll call it ‘A Lung for Midtown Manhattan.’ ”
Mr. Price’s ”lung” essentially treats the site as a rectangular nature preserve. Train tracks would remain uncovered. New development would be banned. Over time some existing buildings would be eliminated. The site would be marked with a sparkling covering composed of small glass spheres.
The east and west boundaries would be fitted with tunnel-like structures that Mr. Price calls sleeves. These would be places people could go in any weather to contemplate views of the city and the river. They would also channel air from the river into the heart of the city. A third observation post would be created by excising two floors from an existing building that straddles the tracks.
Mr. Price’s one-upmanship style extends to his mode of presentation. Instead of the glamorous computer renderings used by the other contestants, he offers rough pencil sketches that look as if they could have been dashed off on napkins between sips of claret. Even the term sleeves evokes drop-dead informality: custom tailoring of such exquisite refinement that a jacket turns out looking utterly shapeless.
The design probably never stood a chance of winning. It can’t pass for practical. City officials had already defined the site as the city’s next great development corridor. But the idea of practicality is completely relative in this context. None of the projects are officially authorized. None have clients. The quality they project is not reality, but rather realness, to employ a term coined by uptown drag queens. They are practicality impersonators, developers en travesti.
Mr. Price chose not to go along with the impersonation. No massive new construction. No sports stadiums. No urban bone crunching. No high-tech structural calisthenics. No hay to be made. Just a light dusting of glass frosting and a breeze blowing from the river. Just a place for a city to breathe.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 18, 1999, Section E, Page 1 of the National edition (of the New York Times) with the headline: CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK; Design Fantasies for a Strip of the West Side.
SOURCE
Extremely Provocative 