Preservation Meets Development

Joel Towers has been leading groups of students on expeditions by boat up the craw of one of New York’s most desolate waterways, Newtown Creek. The dank channel that marks the Brooklyn-Queens border was once one of America’s busiest, dotted with flour mills and glue factories. Today it’s taken up by warehouses and waste transfer stations and is the city’s only Superfund site.“You help them to get over, first, the shock of a space like that, and then begin to liberate their imagination as to what could it become, without being too utopian about it. What’s necessary to remediate soils and water in a place like that? What kind of industries exist to do that? And so they start recognizing that building is a much more long-term perspective project rather than a kind of autonomous event that happens on a single lot.” Mr. Towers speaks with the conviction of a neighborhood activist, but in the precise language of a teacher who wants every word to be understood.If Mr. Towers had a credo, it might be: Be mindful of history, respect your surroundings, go green. In commissions for his private architectural practice, SR+T Architects, Mr. Towers has included features like solar aquatic waste treatment and energysaving radiant floor heating.Mr. Towers’s perspective on development is sharpened by academic concerns. Last February, he became the director of the Sustainable Design and Urban Ecology program at Parsons School of Design. It was the final of three life-changing events to happen to Mr. Towers, all clustered in the space of a year and a half. In December 2003, there was the announcement of the Nets arena plan, which will dramatically affect his family’s former neighbors in Prospect Heights. And one year earlier, Mr. Towers and his wife Martina, also an architect, welcomed a son to the world.Caring for young Anton is easily Mr. Towers’s happiest responsibility, but the majority of his day is spent nurturing the fledgling Design and Urban Ecology program. That means lots of meetings and paperwork, all aimed at establishing an interdisciplinary course of study where budding architects, planners, and designers look at the city not merely as an accumulation of buildings and people, but as a living, breathing organism.Asked about his toughest commission, he seems momentarily stumped, and then decides it was his first: a residence near Albany, completed for William McDonough Architects. “You never quite grasp it, I think, until you have a backhoe that comes and destroys the earth in front of you as a result of something you’ve drawn on paper.”On a recent evening, he ambled into the new Atlantic Terminal Mall in Brooklyn. There was something he wanted to show a reporter. While shoppers and mall rats milled around him in the entranceway, the 39-year-old architect lifted his gaze and pointed to the ceiling, which is adorned byscores of large ochre scrims, each one emblazoned with a detailed geometric pattern. After a moment it became apparent that the design is the magnification of an old map.“It’s humorous to me and kind of unimaginable that they missed the irony of what they were doing when they decided to use old Sanborn maps as the dominant decorative motif for the ceiling of the mall,” Mr. Towers said with a smile that contradicted his less-than-enthusiastic words.The “they” is the mall’s parent company, Forest City, a real-estate group that has grand plans for the neighborhood. Forest City’s owner, Bruce Ratner, plans to dramatically alter the neighborhood’s landscape to make way for a basketball arena for the Nets, formerly of New Jersey. Mr. Towers fears that the arena will make the lovely 19th-century Sanborn map look even more like a relic of history.“What’s fascinating about Sanborn maps is that they are a record of the pattern of building in the city. And so what they show are a series of – for the most part – brownstone buildings, throughout Brooklyn. Well, if you were to take the Atlantic Center Terminal and combine it with the Atlantic Center Mall and map them on top of the Sanborn maps, what you would see is that he is radically altering the development pattern of Brooklyn.”For Mr. Towers, who was raised in Westchester by middle-class parents with Brooklyn roots, it’s about holding on to what’s good. Although he and his wife Martina recently made the decision to move away from Prospect Heights to a building in Park Slope, he says he’ll continue to work with community groups to propose alternative plans for development of the area.“You know, I’m not, as an architect, someone who thinks that historic preservation is something that means the city stopped sometime in the 19th century and we shouldn’t do anything after that. The city doesn’t live that way. But I also feel you should be respectful of that history.”

Preservation Meets Development

Preservation Meets Development

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