NYC Landmarks Law on Trial

Tomorrow at 2:00 PM the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission will begin deliberations on the Central Library Plan. Its final decision on whether to accept this destructive scheme will hinge on whether commissioners under Robert Tierney are courageous enough to oppose Mayor Bloomberg and admit that the NYC Landmarks Law is inadequate as protection for the city’s greatest public building.

New Yorkers are largely unaware of the limitations of the law passed in the wake of the Penn Station demolition during the 1960s. Most buildings are protected only for alterations to their exterior construction; a few get additional designation for specific interiors such as the Astor Stair Hall at NYPL. Even when significant structural alterations are proposed, such as the removal of book stacks that hold up a major space, the Commission is powerless to save a building from permanent defacement. What if a law does not function as intended? Should it be amended? Ignored?

Opponents of the Central Library Plan will argue tomorrow that Commissioners should go beyond the letter of the law in order to uphold its real mandate: avoidance of disasters such as the destruction of Penn Station. Will any of these public officials stand up to moneyed interests and vote no? Watch this space and see.

Why New Yorkers Must Reject the CPL

After months of controversy, the Central Library Plan will be presented to the public during a few rather closeted meetings this month. Here are some reasons why New Yorkers must fight this sham and stop the NYPL board from eviscerating one of the city’s most cherished public buildings.

• The Foster design is simply not good enough. It has all the distinction and architectural panache of a run of the mill airport lobby.
• The architect and the library board are deluding the public with their presentation of the current design, and lying about its funding. Light levels are lower than shown, there is no provision for book transport from underground storage rooms, and the views of Bryant Park will be blocked by restaurant service zones. Moreover, the critics cannot have access to full plans or details about the cost of construction, so there may be even more faults in the design.
• The NYPL board has conducted its business and made its decisions on this plan with virtually no public input or open discourse about its merits. Only when confronted by scholars and preservationists did it even agree to hold meetings to review the CPL.
• The city is wasting millions in taxpayer dollars on what will prove to be a spectacular failure. The new “circulating” library will not attract more patrons, will not provide better space for reading and study, and will not even improve on the technology of the existing Mid-Manhattan branch.
• All of the reasons for destroying the stacks, moving millions of books, selling two library buildings, and constructing a new facility in the Schwartzman Building are based on false premises that seem to change with each public communication from Tony Marx. Why should New Yorkers believe anything he says?
• Most importantly, the Carrere and Hastings masterpiece that has served the city for more than a century must be preserved as a whole ensemble, not a series of set pieces, each with its own named patron or donor.
• The stacks are an engineering marvel and a historic landmark that is more than worth its own preservation effort. All those who love historic buildings should decry their destruction, especially for such venal ends.

Icons and Aliens 2012

When John Costonis published his 1989 book on the legal aspects of historic landmarks he could not have imagined the kind of controversies that would emerge during the coming years. It is worth revisiting his prescient text in light of what is happening to the beloved New York Public Library. A new “lending library” with “state of the art” architecture and communications technology has been inserted into the very heart of one of the most venerated buildings in a great city. Though Tony Marx calls the architecture of Norman Foster’s room “world class” no one has yet seen it that way–reactions have ranged from “regional airport style” to “Barnes and Noble lobby.” The superlative building by Carrere and Hastings will be infested with something that I can only compare to Sigourney Weaver’s stomach splitting prey in a classic science fiction film.

Life Is A Beach

In his prescient and groundbreaking work, Design With Nature, Ian McHarg called the world’s attention to the protection of wetlands, among which were the spectacular dune ecologies of the New Jersey Shore. One of his first eco-design studios at Penn’s landscape program was a study of the Shore’s complex layers of sand bars, dunes, banks, and flora. As a New Jersey resident, I have always taken particular pride that this marvelous work of nature was a one of McHarg’s subjects for a key study.

Today, as I sit more than 200 miles away from Atlantic City, Long Branch, Cape May, and Long Beach Island, I am saddened by the pictures of abject destruction wrought by hurricane Sandy (aptly named for her power to make beaches disappear).

If one image captures the folly of contemporary society’s attitude toward climate change and its potential effects on our planet, it must be that of a New Jersey beach or boardwalk washed away by Sandy’s furious wind, tides and surging waves. Virtually nothing says that we “design AGAINST nature” better than a picture of this majestic shoreline after such a storm.

I do not know how our government, the Department of Environmental Protection, will deal with reconstituting the towns, natural areas, parks, wildlife habitats, and recreation areas that were obliterated by Sandy, but I do have a message for those authorities. Respect the earth. Care for it. Do not presume to control anything that nature’s systems have maintained for thousands of years. Tread lightly on the dunes, for they are as fragile as down-covered chicks, hatched from an egg.

We Quakers refer to one of our Truth testimonies as Earthcare. When we constructed those flimsy bridges, seawalls, beach bungalows, and resorts, not only were we designing against nature’s considerable forces, we were acting in the most careless way possible. How might we as architects, planners, engineers and government officials show CARE in everything we do from this moment on? This is a question worth pondering, while we mourn this massive loss.

Sandy beach, Newport, Rhode Island, 2012

Architecture and Politics at the Biennale

Michael Kimmelman has written one of the most perceptive reviews of a recent architectural exhibition I have read–see this Sunday’s New York Times. His negative assessment of the current Venice Biennale for architecture is exactly on target. To wit, anyone who really cares about the quality and beauty of our built environment will find very little of interest in this, the most prestigious and venerable of all world architecture forums. Why should this be the case?

Architecture is about the public realm. Public architecture is always a reflection of current political forces. We live in a world in which political change is desperately needed, but such change is nowhere to be seen. Entrenched financial elites control the economy and governments around the globe. Nothing is done or built without their assent or support.

The architectural profession, long associated with revolutionary, avant garde movements, is beholden as never before to these power elites, especially as cultural capital is purchased by the highest bidders in the form of Starchitect designs, academic studies, urban development schemes, and public art. The leaders in our profession have bought into this cultural consumption pattern and little is being done to change the situation, even as the profession withers under a punishing recession.

As Kimmelman points out in his essay, architecture without “Architects” is where real innovation and promise lies. He talks about exhibits that were assembled to feature vernacular design, outlier architects, designers without professional credentials, even squatters in Venezuela. The powerful leaders in the “design professions,” such as the Biennale’s director, David Chipperfield of London, make token gestures toward the coming upheaval in his profession, but are afraid to let the cat out of the bag.

And so the public, looking for signs of creativity and change at the Venice exhibition, sees only tired, hypocritical repackaging of old designs (a Herzog and de Meuron building not yet built) and weak-minded media collages that make obvious statements about our chaotic world, but offer nothing substantive as a remedy. It is sad that architects, who once promised to save society through visionary designs for cities and institutions, can’t even engage the realm of pubic architecture, let alone influence the politics of development around the globe.

Wang Shu, Anti-architect

China has made its position clear on how to develop new towns, cities, and campuses: hire expensive Western Starchitects to design prototype buildings and ensembles, then copy them ad infinitum until you have a Modernist nightmare. The 2008 Olympics set the tone, and Chinese have been complaining ever since.

Strange, then, that China’s only Pritzger laureate is Wang Shu, an architect who hates Western-style excess and lives in the middle of nowhere. Jane Perlez of the New York Times has visited him in Hangzhou, and observed that all of his buildings are “touched by old China” and that he “is an outlier in his profession.”

It’s hard not to like Mr. Wang, who with his wife Lu Wenyu runs a small studio with mainly part-time student help. He practices calligraphy like an old Chinese poet-scholar, and recycles all sorts of traditional building materials in his work. He drives an old station wagon and lives modestly. He took some time off to learn about traditional building craft from old masters. He is nothing like the high-flying darlings of the architectural media in the west.

Of course, once he won his Pritzger, Chinese officials embraced him as their new exemplar and Western academic architects claimed that he was solidly within the “modernist” camp that they espouse. That he finds both of their positions distasteful and hypocritical seems beside the point to the media. Brava to Ms. Perez for pointing some of this out in her article.

It’s hard to be a real revolutionary in a culture where everything is immediately consumed and labeled. Mr. Wang and Ms. Lu are clearly railing against the status quo in their quiet way. They are acutely aware of the effects of government corruption, land graft, and the alienation of Modernist urbanism. In a very real sense they are anti-architects, at least as the profession is currently practiced in China and almost everywhere else. Hurray for that.

Listen to the Lions on NPR

We’ve had online videos, New York Times stories, and a debate in the New York Review of Books. Now Margot Adler of NPR has entered the fray. Her piece on Morning Edition is really wonderful, because you can actually hear the sounds in the Rose Reading Room! Nothing like radio to bring a story to life.

ARTINFO Article on NYPL

Another highly critical piece on the Central Library Plan has appeared in the online publication, ARTINFO. Take a look at it, as it references our remarks at the May panel discussion. My colleague, Charles Warren, has written a wonderful essay for the Wall Street Journal or a sympathetic newspaper. Let’s hope it gets published.

Video of NYPL Forum

For those interested in seeing last week’s panel discussion on the future of the New York Public Library, check out the video on their website. I think you’ll find in illuminating as I did.

A Very Public Shame

This piece of very good news is already tainted. I have been invited to participate in a panel discussion of the Central Library Plan next Tuesday evening at 6:30 PM at the New School in Manhattan. There I’ll be able not only to hear the concerns of some of the leading scholars and writers in the U.S., some of whom will be fellow panelists, others audience members, and add some of my own, in a frank discussion of the New York Public Library’s campaign to destroy the stacks in its landmark building at 42nd Street. The bad news is that there won’t be a representative from the NYPL board or administration at this important event. Cordial, personal invitations conveyed by respected academics and writers were spurned. This is a shame, a very public shame.