No 'Wow Factor' to Hudson Yards Designs, Please

by Sandy Ikeda
Sun, 9 Dec 2007 at 12:03 AM

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Architects tend to make lousy urban planners. While an architect's intelligence and imagination can make a single structure within an existing urban ecology a thing of functional beauty, those same qualities applied to the design of an entire city are deadly. "Intelligent design" in this sense strangles the spontaneity of ordinary people that keeps the city lively and developing.

Unfortunately, it's probably the dream of every architect to build a city.

What's the solution? Minimize the design elements and build slowly if possible. Perhaps the larger the project, the less ambitious — in terms of predetermining a particular outcome — the designer should be. Ambition, artistry, and smarts may produce a "wow factor" that works for a bridge or a skyscraper but at larger scales usually ends up producing "Emerald City," striking from a distance but cold and lifeless up close and over time.

Constructing a mega-project all at once also imposes a visual homogeneity on all the elements, even if each is designed by a different person, because they will all reflect the technology and ethos of a particular time and place. Instead, let different parts of the district adjust as causes and conditions change over time. Time gives both perspective and life a chance to emerge.

Right now, there are five proposals for the development of the Hudson Rail yards, 26 acres owned by the MTA on the far West Side of Midtown, bordered by 30th and 33rd streets and by Tenth and Twelfth avenues. Representatives for each of the proposals — each produced by teams of a dozen or more architects, landscape designers, engineers, and developers — also presented their visions at a standing-room only crowd at the Cooper Union on December 3. Have a look at them either online here or at 335 Madison Avenue, where you can view scale models through December 14.

While there are many blog-worthy aspects to this project — including its history and financing — it's the design concepts themselves I'd like to focus on here.

Living cities like New York are engines of creativity: economic, social, and cultural. That doesn't mean, however, that they are either machines or works of art. They are an example of what the economist Friedrich Hayek termed the "result of human action but not of human design." In short, you can't construct a living city (or a vital city district) from the ground up, any more than you can invent an entirely new language in any meaningful sense. In that sense, all five of these projects looked destined to fail. People will go there and spend money whatever gets built, of course. But will it mirror the creative vitality and economic success of Chelsea that have developed largely unplanned over the past 30 years? Very unlikely.

First and foremost is the scale, which constitutes nearly an entire city district. It's part of the Bloomberg-Doctoroff administration's ambition to develop and revitalize the corridor running from the current Madison Square Garden west to the Hudson River. Though a far cry from a city, it will probably be a long time before we see a mixed-use, high-density development of this size in Manhattan.

Second, because of the vacuum created by Twelfth Avenue, the rail yards themselves (which developers themselves will have to pay to cover without disrupting train service), and the deadly dullness of the Javits Center, the area is currently on no one's list of must-see destinations. Almost any new development might seem to be an improvement. But just because it sits due north of artsy Chelsea and will eventually be linked to livelier parts of town by the proposed High Line Park and an extension of the number 7 line does not guarantee success.

Third, the five have much in common, largely because of the parameters set by the MTA and the City. Each must have grass and open space, some sort of cultural complex, a school, as well as residential (condos and rentals, 20% of which must be priced below market), office space, and commercial/retail. They must also be "environmentally sustainable," utilizing recycling and other technologies in conformity with Mayor Bloomberg's "PlanNYC 2030" initiative. They all somehow integrate a revamped High Line into their design. And of course they are all really big.

Finally, to varying degrees each has a high wow factor: Impressive architectural design and striking visual concept. Most look like the Emerald City turned inside out with grassy, hollowed-out centers and shiny towers that cascade down toward the Hudson River. And what gets built now, or over the next decade, will be there for the foreseeable future, since getting zoning changes to these areas would be costly and time-consuming.

Among the proposals, Brookfield does the best job of trading off some wow for genuine usefulness. It does this by keeping the pathways running east/west in line with the existing street grid, achieving some amount of street-level integration. More important, while all five retain Tenth and Eleventh avenues as uncovered through-streets, only Brookfield emphasizes ground-level spaces along these avenues that actually encourage commercial use. The others seem to want to hide these amidst shrubs and parks. The look of their proposal, judging by models, pictures, and elevations, is less stunning than the others, which is a good thing.

My least favorite is the one by Extell. Like the others (Tishman Speyer, Durst/Vornado, and The Related Companies), except for Brookfield, Extell lays down a green wind tunnel stretching from the Hudson to inner Manhattan. Its architecture and layout strongly evoke the high modernism of (the evil) Corbusier.

District-size developments like Hudson Yards, in order to successfully integrate into the urban ecology, require time for adjustments to economic and social trends that no one can foresee. Monumental cities and city districts, such as in Augustus's Rome or Hausmann's Paris, might eventually work and even look good after a century or two, but only after ordinary people wear pathways through green lawns and beat down the sharp edges of their grand designs.

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