Architectural Design versus Urban Design

These are some notes given to the students
in my World Trade Center studio:

The Olympic Village plans show even more clearly than the Ground Zero plans the difference between the way a modern architect designs and the way a traditional urban designer works. The architect designs buildings, usually object buildings. The traditional urban designer designs the streets, squares and blocks that make the public realm. A few special buildings might be planned by the urban designer, but most of the urban fabric is made with blocks filled with standard architectural typologies found near the site in the city, such as rowhouses, Charleston Single Houses (in Charleston), loft buildings (in SoHo), courtyard apartment buildings and office towers.

Design the public realm, and think of most of the blocks that shape the public realm as normal New York City fabric: approximately 200’ deep, with 8 to 12 story street-wall buildings that may or may not have towers set back on those bases.

Draw your street plan as a diagram. Does it make sense as a diagram? Is the public realm pleasingly shaped? (The footprints of the old WTC towers can make that difficult.) Is there connectivity and interest for the pedestrian? That means a lack of dead ends, blocks that are not too long, and usually, as the City Planning Commission has pointed out, cars and retail on the street.

Can the block uses change over time, as we expect in New York? Do you have a normal, dumb New York plan, or is there some hierarchy, however subtle, in ordering of the plan? Do important buildings have sites that identify the buildings as important? Are some streets more important than others? Is there a square? How do you find your way to it?

Are there terminated vistas? Do streets deflect to views? Do views of distant landmarks come and go? All of thes elements can be used, but none are required. All can be done either well or badly.

If the Joe DiMaggio Highway goes underground between the site and the World Financial Center, where does it come up again? Look at Libeskind’s plan for West Street: Why is it only next to his site that West Street is special? What about West Street to the south and north? Why is it less deserving of being a good street when it passes outside the site?

If you have a tall building, how is it located – in relation to the city, or in relation to the site? Avoid “Projectitis” - the primary failure of the old World Trade Center. The city is more important than the site, and more important than the building. Draw the blocks around the site and connect to them psychically as well as physically.

In comparison to the other WTC competition schemes, Libeskind’s was the most urban: he replaced several of the old streets, he had civic space, he had civic buildings, he had an architectural code and multiple architects and clients involved in different blocks. At a conceptual level, that is the way New York and New Urbanism both work.

One thing he did not understand is that an architectural code is not the same as designing the buildings. His code was too specific to his personal architectural idiosyncrasies. And the City Planning Commission was absolutely right to tell him that they want more definition of the street wall, with minimum setbacks parallel to the street.

This is all part of Libeskind's Projectitis, the impulse that made only consider the character of West Street
while it went through his site. Remember Fred Schwartz’s early scheme for burying the highway below West Street and filling West Street from Chambers to the Battery with buildings between two normal city streets. Or Peterson Littenberg’s Memorial Promenade, which ran from the site to the Battery.

Before Modernism, all architects knew this. In old architecture, the city is always more important than the building. Today, many Classical and Traditional architects still have a Modernist attitude about the importance of their individual building. This part of Traditional design has not yet been fully rediscoverd.

On 3/17/04 12:32 AM, "John Massengale" wrote:

> I’ve posted photos from the site visit at
> http://massengale.typepad.com/photos/icacawta/ –
> scroll down the first page to see “enter the gallery.”

I attach two pdf files from the City Planning Commission (also available at http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/wtc/wtc1.html) with their reactions to the Libeskind plan. Note that they are not allowing the enclosed pedestrian bridge and have many requirements for the underground retail (they’re against most of it), the streetwalls, the street widths and the sidewalks. In many instances their streets and sidewalks are bigger than the existing, but than they are also expecting much taller buildings. Most of the information starts on page 3 in the Commissioner’s letter, and is then illustrated in the other attachment.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/wtc/wtc1.html