What’s New at NYU?
by Sandy Ikeda
Fri, 2 May 2008
Last Wednesday I attended New York University's fifth open house presenting the University's latest vision for the next 25 years (or so), called "NYU Plans 2031." The event drew a thick crowd of local residents to Hemmerdinger Hall on the east end of Washington Square Park. Inside were images on large poster boards, each with someone nearby to answer questions, illustrating both present conditions and possible future physical development. To see them, go to this website and click on "April 23 Open House Boards." (Note: These files take a few minutes to download at normal speed.)
The above image (from the website) is a rendering of one of the proposed changes to Washington Square Village (where I lived when I was an NYU grad student in the 1980s) looking from LaGuardia Place east. The line of low buildings that today walls off the tree-shaded walkways in the foreground just off LaGuardia Place from the interior courtyard of WSV have been removed, replaced by a low-lying structure to one side, a plaza with seating on the other side, and a ramp up the middle easing public access to courtyard, which today almost nobody uses. At the eastern end of the complex, plans are for two academic high rises that will tower over the existing 17-story buildings.
The proposed new construction includes an I.M. Pei "pinwheel" tower joining the three residential Silver Towers, a larger Coles Gymnasium with "zippered" setbacks to add more interesting visual diversity to that stretch of Mercer Street, as well as several other new or remodeled academic buildings and public spaces.
NYU wants to add an equal amount of new academic and residential space – 6 million square feet in total – without adding significantly to its student population (about 1,000 more) over the next two decades.
According to the accompanying documents:
It is almost as important to understand what "NYU Plans 2031" is not. It is NOT a master plan, which typically serves as a roadmap for making decisions about properties an institution already owns and controls; much of NYU's planning contemplates growth in sites owned by outside entities. It is NOT an architectural design plan: The concepts presented so far are planning concepts, not architectural designs. It is also NOT a construction guide: All the concepts in this plan will have to be examined in great detail by NYU for their desirability and feasibility, and much more. on a number of levels.
Nevertheless, here are some observations on the set of "possibilities" that I saw presented at the Open House.
***
When a group of us were having lunch the other day at Ennio & Michael Ristorante, on LaGuardia Place, I sat next to a colleague from Italy. When the waiter brought out spaghetti at the same time as the entrée, which in Italy of course would be served before, someone asked her which should be eaten first, to which she responded that it didn't matter because the whole thing was a mess anyway. In my opinion, however, eating the pasta before the chicken parmesan is still better than having it after, if only marginally so. That's pretty much how I feel about the proposals. (For better or worse E&M appears to be gone in NYU Plans 2031.)
The superblock that is Washington Square Village and the giant red cube that is Bobst Library, along with several other structures south of Washing Square Park, were built in the late 1950s as part of Robert Moses's slum clearance efforts that razed blocks of working class flats, lofts, and factories, and sealed off several north-south-running streets through the neighborhood. Many of the NYU Plans 2031 proposals are an attempt to undo what Moses hath wrought. The main damage, however, was done in the creation of the superblocks, which appears virtually unchanged in the presentations I saw.
(A Wikipedia entry asserts that "The plans include ideas to demolish the buildings and restore the superblock to its original 6-block constituents," but I saw no evidence at the Open House or in the accompanying documents of any significant restoration of the grid.)
What the University and the city government did in the '50s and '60s was a huge mistake, so what I saw last Wednesday is largely an attempt to unscramble some of the mess by using infill, as in WSV, or trying to make public areas more comfortable and interesting, such as in Gould Plaza next to the Stern School of Business. To some extent, then, the new construction shows a concern with human scale and makes some of the current dead spaces more lively and inviting. Of some concern is that the planners' attention to human scale applies mainly to the horizontal – with the size and pattern of street frontage – and not to the vertical. In general, the new buildings will be taller than their surroundings, much taller, threatening to cast long shadows over the relatively open skies of Greenwich Village. But the tallest ones are set back from the street to reduce the visual impact of their height, or occupy areas that are today dead zones anyway (such as along Mercer Street just above Houston Street).
The most significant problem, however, from which the others mostly derive are the superblocks themselves. A genuine solution would be to restore the original street grid, which Rem Koolhaas argues "creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy," and which has the shorter blocks and frequent street corners that some urbanists say are essential elements for the entrepreneurial success of a neighborhood.
However, there is a movement to landmark the Silver Towers apartment complex, just south of WSV. This would place another major hurdle in restoring the grid, which along with WSV now cuts off what would be the extension of Wooster and Mercer Streets running north-south. Here is a NY Times article on this issue, along with accompanying blog comments. (Thanks to Benjamin Hemric for the pointer.)
Most discouraging to me, however, is that even in its most fanciful imaginings of what might be, the planners leave Bobst Library completely untouched. It's still sits there in all its mottled, red splendor. One of the planners suggested that this was because it was a named building and thus couldn't be torn down. What a shame!
(I will follow up in the near future with a post focusing on the protests to NYU Plans 2031.)
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