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Sunday, December 17, 2006
Brooklyn Teaser
My University of Miami studio is all over but the shouting. I'll be putting the students' three master plans and their corresponding building types online, but for now, here are a few drawings from one of the teams.
The blocks over the rail yards have courtyard apartment buildings that provide almost as many apartments as the Ratner / Gehry towers. The surrounding blocks are coded for development that the property owners may build if they wish (like all zoning).
Update: I've put a 3D model view from one of the other teams at the end of the post, and there are som photos of the existing site above.
The master plan (click on the drawing for a larger version).
The regulating plan (click on the drawing for a larger version).
An aerial view from the west (click on the drawing for a larger version).
A site section from Atlantic Avenue to Dean Street (click on the drawing for a larger version).
Looking towards Times Plaza, from Flatbush Avenue (click on the drawing for a larger version).
A view of the new Atlantic Avenue, with the former rail yards site on the left (click on the drawing for a larger version).
Update: Here's an aerial view from another of the teams:
University of Miami students: Adam Rak, AnthonyTadajewski, Jeremy Taylor, Joshua Rak, Lindsey Rundle, Louise LeGardeur, Monique Faggans, Nicole St. Germain, Peter Jensen, Renee Gibbs, Tiffany Barber, Troy Marrocco.
December 17, 2006 in Architecture, Classicism, Current Affairs, New Urbanism, New York, Urbanism | Permalink
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» Brooklyn Teaser from No Land Grab
Veritas et Venustas Architecture critic John Massengale toured Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards footprint with his University of Miami design studio and used it as this term's case study. He put up some teaser images on his blog, with more plans... [Read More]
Tracked on Dec 19, 2006 6:55:54 AM
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How incredibly sane it all looks!
Posted by: Andrew Cusack at Dec 17, 2006 4:53:46 PM
Please let your teams know NOT to model any buildings on top of the Brooklyn Bear's Community Garden. We're the triangle on the northwest corner of Flatbush and Pacific Street that Ratner is not stealing with eminent domain.
Posted by: Jon Crow at Dec 19, 2006 8:59:31 AM
Jon,
You're right. All the students loved your garden when we visited Brooklyn, and we often talked about the importance of leaving it in the first few weeks of master planning. So if there's not quite enough room on the two large-scale plans you see on the blog, that's just an oversight that would be corrected in what's called "design development." Everyone wants community gardens.
I think you'll be happy to see the third plan, that hasn't been posted yet, because it makes the site for your garden even better.
John
Posted by: john at Dec 19, 2006 9:19:21 AM
HIP HIP HOORAY!
This is just what Brooklyn needs. It makes the city better instead of worse.
Posted by: steve at Dec 19, 2006 9:22:36 AM
PS re Eminent Domain: Our plans use no eminent domain. We planned courtyard apartment buildings for the railyard blocks and zoned the surrounding blocks for appropriate development.
For example, if there are 10 or 12 story buildings on one side of Atlantic Avenue, you want similarly scaled buildings on the other side of the street, because that is how you shape a good street, also called the public realm. But coding, different than eminent domain, would require that developers buy the land, so either the owners would get a fair price or they would stay in their buildings and not sell.
Behind the 10 story buildings on Atlantic, rowhouses would remain on the smaller side streets, in the typical New York pattern. That would step the scale down to the surrounding neigbhorhoods.
Posted by: john massengale at Dec 19, 2006 9:36:36 AM
I love these plans! They have Brooklyn written all over them.
Posted by: danny at Dec 19, 2006 9:41:34 AM
What can we do to get these into the public debate? THESE ARE SO MUCH BETTER THAN BRUCE RATNER'S INVASION!
Posted by: Brooklyn Boy at Dec 19, 2006 9:58:46 AM
I agree with Brooklyn Boy. Lovely work.
Posted by: staceyjoy at Dec 19, 2006 7:21:57 PM
Looks fit for the borough with no ambition.
Posted by: Derek at Dec 19, 2006 10:50:00 PM
Derek, You must be an architecture student.
The question is, Should New York State be paying hundreds of millions of dollars to make a good city, or is its goal to provide an ego trip for the architect? "My ego trip" is what Gehry calls his design for the rail yards.
It does not make a city. In his plan, Atlantic Avenue remains a miserable place, the "parks" are not for the public, and what many in the neighborhood call "the ugliest building in Brooklyn" (the shopping mall that also belongs to Ratner) remains at one of the most important intersections in Brooklyn.
For a statement of how most people in the neighborhood who are not architects feel, read Jonathan Lethem's letter, here. The question is, why have the goals of architects, and architecture students, diverged so far from the goals of urban designers and non-architects?
Times are changing. The second half of the twentieth century was the time of Modernism (not to be confused with modern -- Koolhaas, for example, says Modernism is over), but now we're in the twenty-first century, and we see how badly the principles of Modernism and Starchitecture treated our cities.
Strangely enough, this is all presented as somehow "progressive." But students all over the country, who usually are progressive are overwhelmingly asking for traditional dormitories to live in, while their fellow architecture students live in some alternatate Bizarro universe of shard buildings. What is wrong with our architecture schools, when going to architecture school means your goals are different than your fellow students?
I remember when I was an architecture student and I went to see Boston City Hall It's heroic Brutalism was the latest thing, and it won the AIA award for best new building . I.M. Pei was a superstar, supposedly the best urban designer in America. But instead of following the principles of urbanism in designing the new area around City Hall he followed the anti-urban and therefore anti-social theories of Modernism. Fifty years later, the city is saying We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore.
When we build cities, we want to build places that will endure and enrich. Ego trips and fashion experiments usually do the opposite.
Posted by: john at Dec 20, 2006 9:21:08 AM
I think it would be more convincing if you showed the number of units, as well as what proportion of them are actually on the Ratner site. It's an unrealistic comparison to spread the development out over property owned by others throughout the neighborhood.
Posted by: frank at Dec 20, 2006 9:36:10 AM
Frank,
I will do that when I make a more complete presentation.
The count I will give will be only for the three railyard blocks. In the student schemes, the other blocks are only coded for development, so we didn't include those in the count.
Conversely, Ratner wants to use eminent domain to take other blocks, and those blocks contain a high percentage of his units.
Posted by: john at Dec 20, 2006 9:41:40 AM
Reminds me of the Stalinallee in former East Berlin. Seriously.
Posted by: Brian Rose at Dec 20, 2006 10:14:23 AM
Brian, there's a discussion about this going on over at Curbed. Stalinallee was designed by one hand in a heavy, authoritarian, bad Classicism. While what you are looking at are diagrams of building types that would be designed by different hands and built by different developers. It's a lot more like Broadway, the Grand Concourse or Park Avenue than Stalinallee.
I may be wrong, but it sounds like you're partially focusing on style. There is no style to these buildings. A building type, like a rowhouse or a loft building, has no inherent style. In New York, rowhouses range from Federal to all glass.
One of the things the building typologies do, unlike Gehry's ego trip, is focus on the making of the street. That's the way Fort Greene and Park Slope were built, on the whole without architects.
That's a nice website you have.
Posted by: john at Dec 20, 2006 10:54:50 AM
I would love to see plans like this for the yards....too bad we're stuck with idiots like Ratner and arrogant meglomaniacs like Gehry.
Posted by: wow at Dec 20, 2006 1:34:57 PM
Would the population density/floorspace be comparable to that currently proposed? From a standpoint of sustainability and efficiency, not to mention financial feasibility for a developer, such things are key to understand (although a lot of my ex-neighbors in Prospect Heights and surrounds seemed as opposed to any large project as the form of it, mind you), especially given the site's location at a very major transit node. The urbanism and architecture depicted here is vastly superior to the starchitecture currently on the table, in any case.
Posted by: Brandon at Dec 20, 2006 4:32:44 PM
In the studio, we never set out to equal Ratner's numbers, but instead came from this angle: 1) the state is going to spend a large amount of money to cover the rail yards - so large that the development will not be rowhouses; 2) what would turn a blighted stretch of Atlantic Avenue,at that point one of the largest and busiest streets in Brooklyn, into a good public realm; and 3) what is appropriate for a site near the LIRR station several subway lines?
For the first half of the studio, we acted as though we were planners for the city, doing what is best for the city. For the second half, we coded and designed buildings that would work well on the streets and blocks we had designed.
Posted by: john at Dec 20, 2006 4:43:12 PM
I don't know if your studio was an architecture studio or a planning class, because those disciplines are very different. If I was a critic on a review of this project this is what I would say: There are some redeeming qualities, particularly the smaller buildings on the southern portion of the site, but overall this looks akin to what a slightly more benevolent Robert Moses would do. The huge square/donut buildings have the monotony of the nearby projects in Brooklyn just to the west, not to mention the awkward green spaces (I'm assuming they are parks because it isn't made clear) are positioned in a way that makes it unclear whether they are public or really belong to the monolithic buildings adjacent to them, resulting in little use.
It's great that your students learned to use the "push/pull" function in SketchUp, but I think a little more objective, pedestrian, and design-oriented approach would produce something better rather than something simply as a backlash to what is actually (hopefully not) being built.
That being said, I understand your architectural philosophy, and perfectly understand how your students could produce these designs given the right critiques, and I think that is very interesting on its own merit.
Posted by: JTS at Dec 20, 2006 11:48:53 PM
JTS's comment is bollocks. So's his e-mail addressL jseegers@oma.nl.
OMA.nl is the address for Rem Koolhaas's office, but Google "Seegers" and OMA and you'll find that Seegers is an architecture student and OMA groupie, not an OMA employee.
No one does huge buildings like OMA (look here), and unless OMA is different than every other avant garde office today, Robert Moses is one of their gurus. As you say, the party line is now that Jane Jacobs was wrong and Moses was da Man.
Posted by: londonpride at Dec 21, 2006 7:29:47 AM
I don't know about the bollocks, but I don't understand the Moses comparison. Frank Gehry's project is a Moses-like design, because of the superblocks, the eminent domain, the towers in semi-private parks, and the fact that everything is designed by one hand. Moses did not build large, streetwall buildings.
Conversely, the Miami students' designs are for normal New York City streets, blocks and lots. Developers can build standard New York City building types on them.
Anyone who goes to Broadway and 86th Street, in Manhattan, can see the Belnord, and other large courtyard buildings nearby, like Astor Court. In the aerial photo here, the Belnord (and its cheap rooftop apartments) looks large and ugly. But if you visit the building, it's large and beautiful, and the apartments have excellent light and air. The building shows why a full block is the best scale at which to plan courtyard buildings.
Closer to the site, Cobble Hill and Jackson Heights have beautiful courtyard buildings planned at the scale of the block.
Posted by: john at Dec 22, 2006 11:11:32 PM
Um, I really don't like it when people make personal attacks that are irrelevant on comment boards, and I'm not sure how I feel about people I don't know Googling me. If you did see one of the 3 comments i've made on archinect then props to you, but if you really wanted to verify my employment, you could have just emailed me, and perhaps directly told me your comments, I suggest you try it, I'll respond if you like.
If you try googling any one else in the office I doubt their name will come up.
I can't tell if your comment about Jacobs/Moses was serious ("Moses is da man")? If it was, try walking through the Lower East Side, or through the area surrounding the Cross-Bronx Expressway, and I think you might disagree. I think most of my colleagues would feel the same way.
John, thanks for the clarification about the courtyard buildings, I agree that courtyard buildings are very good for light and air and the pedestrian experience, I was just concerned about the small green spaces between the larger buildings within the block, not the courtyards. And if this is more of a planning than architecture studio, then I think each block, developed and designed in a nonlinear way, could fit in very well with the neighborhoods while still accomodating the massive programmatic requirements.
Posted by: JTS at Dec 23, 2006 10:24:38 PM
Am a thesis student, and i was wondering if i can get digital files plans, elevation or section. It would greatly help my research of the Atlantic yards area, thank you
or if you have a site 3d model,
Posted by: Rommel Gordillo at Sep 23, 2007 11:05:03 PM
That would take some coordination, and I will be on the road until next week. I THINK you csn find a digital plan of the whole city on the NYC Planning site @ nyc.gov
Posted by: john at Sep 23, 2007 11:42:26 PM
Also have you looked at Google 3D? I know they have some of this mapped.
Posted by: john at Sep 23, 2007 11:50:23 PM
