Roosevelt Island rises out of the waters of the East River with all the majesty of a beached whale tossed up on the shores of Manhattan. In the vortex of our postmodern, post-industrial, and ever-moving metropolis, here is a pocket of stillness that few people visit and where nothing much ever happens.

I visited the island a few years back, when I was told that a ride over from Manhattan on the aerial tramway was pleasant. (It was, though not nearly as pleasant as the ride back.) What I found when I arrived felt like a different continent, nay, a different spacetime continuum. Here was an unapologetic study in 1970s planning, conceived by Philip Johnson and John Burgee. Its Brutalist concrete residential structures, by the likes of Jose Luis Sert, seemed almost by design to suffocate the human spirit. Meanwhile, the narrow main street that runs through most of the island put me in mind, oddly enough, of shantytown I once visited in the South Pacific.

The reality of Roosevelt Island was effectively portrayed in the 2005 fear film “Dark Water.”The movie concerns a single mother (Jennifer Connelly) and her daughter, whom dire necessity has compelled to take up residence in an inexpensive rental on the island. In “Dark Water,” a sense of gothic menace hangs over this part of the city: It rains incessantly under gray and lowering skies. As it happens, there is indeed a gothic ruin on the grounds. This is the Renwick Smallpox Hospital, a burntout Victorian husk that has been uninhabited for years and that obliges the gothic imagination with crenellations and ivy creepers athwart its god-forsaken facade.

Johnson’s urbanistic dreams of creating a model of modernist communitarianism,with Corbusian towers in a park upon an island, never came to pass. Instead, Roosevelt Island remains dominated, as it has been through most of its history, by working hospitals like the Coler-Goldwater Hospital and Therapeutic Center. The hospital houses numerous inmates, and many more outpatients populate the rest of the Island.

Given the sorry state of the place, and the unbridled development of the rest of the city, one naturally wonders whether change will ever come to Roosevelt Island. One’s heart leaps up, therefore, on learning of a new show at the Center for Architecture, “South point: From Ruin to Rejuvenation,” featuring some 71 cutting-edge designs for the southern third of the island.

As part of the biennial Emerging New York Architects Competition, 300 aspirants from around the world sent in designs for what was billed as the Roosevelt Island Universal Arts Center. Their brief was to conceive for two clients, Coler-Goldwater Hospital and the Roosevelt Island Visual Arts Association, an arts center to occupy the Southpoint, a site originally intended as a massive memorial to Franklin Roosevelt that was to be designed by Louis Kahn. The project also included plans to restore or spruce up the Renwick Smallpox Hospital.

The jury took roughly eight hours to award first place to the Paris-based Nina Baniahmad. It is interesting to note that here, as in so many such competitions, the initial narrowing of the field to 71 designs from 300 was done almost entirely on the basis of the twodimensional graphics – the look of the presentations rather than the specifics of the designs.

There is, as you might expect, extraordinary diversity both in the designs presented and in the snazzy, parti-colored manner of their display. At the same time, such a stroboscopic welter of forms quickly becomes repetitive. Despite their coming from all over the world, these projects exhibit a weirdly unquestioning obedience to the regnant, if not rampant, Deconstructivist style. Which is to say that if their dominant formal thrust is not splinters and shards, as is the case with Ms. Baniahmad’s design, then it is apt to be the facets of Eric Amir and Paul Ehret, the zigzags of Michael Hargens or the angled, grassy berms of Jing Hao and Ling Zhang.

That said, there is something inspiring in all these dreams to improve one of the drearier parts of New York. Sadly,though, the competition turns out to be entirely theoretical: The organizers never intended to build any of these projects.

But the exhibition does compel us to consider what should be done with the site. Might I suggest a monument to FDR, as was originally planned? After all, he was by universal consent one of our finest presidents, as well as the last New Yorker to reach the White House. Yet thus far we have honored this native son with nothing more than the FDR Drive and the unlovely island that faces it from the middle of the East River.

jgardner@nysun.com

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