All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
user-change—the last gasp of modernist urban science fiction and its pre-cybernetic technical fix. A massively noncommittal space could liberate everyone: by predicting nothing, it would accommodate everything. The city would be a series of laminations that serve its shopping subjects by smoothing the flow of traffic, allowing efficient circulation between a narrowed set of architectural certainties produced by the wisdom of the market.
After working through such post-urban paradigms as bigness, sprawl, hyper-development, and retail, Rem’s Harvard (the Prada of universities) research project has turned its attention to the techniques of Roman city building, investigating especially its style of code-making. This reversion is produced by the generic city, which must inescapably turn to type for the means of its own inhabitation. Built up of standard components, the generic requires a basic gene pool of building types that can take on a variety of recombinant forms.
For Koolhaas, historicism stands in for prescription. The village green, the constructivist archive, Coney Island, Vegas, and ancient Rome are ideal postmodern enthusiasms: all understood at a distance. One as easily imagines Robert Venturi playing craps as Rem Koolhaas riding a rollercoaster. Having fun is not the point. The professional objects of Rem’s sly veneration—John Portman, John Jerde, Wallace Harrison, etc.—are all big American men representing big American business, druids of a practice in which innovation is largely technical and organizational.
There’s a hint of shame behind this nostalgia, the taste that dare not speak its name. Koolhaas clearly adores the actuality of postwar modernism, the repetitive blocks of the Albany Mall or downtown Stockholm, the thin curtain wall of Lever House, the 1964 World’s Fair. I can understand this: I grew up on Vallingby and Scandinavian Modern. It’s like liking vanilla. Ditto the thin columns, strip windows, and lifted volume of the Villa Savoie and the compulsive repetition of the Ville Radieuse. Rem’s projects are darkly traditional, ironic sequels: Mies III.
The remorseless, addictive celebrity and rapier prose obscure an old-fashioned whine of alienation and a complete refusal of risk. Although he has helped open interesting territories for analysis, Koolhaas’s project excludes any idea of subjectivity beyond hedonism or slavery, and any optimism for anything but the bottom line. With world-weary resignation before corporate “nature,” the voluminous oversimplification, the campiness, the fogy disdain for the political, the ironic combination of criticism with celebration, all mark the larger failure to ever tell us what he really wants (so uncool).
But there must be at least one relevant urbanism somewhere between hysteria and totalization, perhaps in places to which we’ve turned a blind eye. The neoliberal, economic version of rationality is soulless and converts our affections to commodities. The asphyxiating environment, the grossly uneven distribution of resources, the repression of the regimes—Singaporean, Chinese, Nigerian—that run these fascinating cities, the lived lives behind the defensive walls of the compounds in Lagos or in the jerry-built apartments at the edge of the Chinese town that are replacing traditional bustling neighborhoods, the sheer stupidity of the culture of consumption—these are not to be desired. A useful urbanism needs to take a stand about what is.
2002
16
Herbert’s List
In its approach to planning for Ground Zero, the LMDC has shown both a poverty of imagination and a deep desire to control the terms of the discussion. This failure has left a conceptual and artistic deficit that is being filled by individual creators and the many unofficial alliances that have sprung up in the wake of the disaster. The LMDC, however, has been deaf to their efforts, opening its inquiry only under pressure.
If there were a forum in which one might have expected to see some of the great variety of ideas and plans produced in the past year, it is the New York Times. Our newspaper of record, however, has provided crabbed coverage of possible design alternatives. Much of the responsibility for this stems from the gate-keeping role played by the newspaper’s architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp. Muschamp has been acerbic in his criticism of the LMDC’s flounderings. And his scathing commentary on the six misbegotten plans released in July was immediately echoed in an editorial headlined “The Downtown We Don’t Want,” which characterized the schemes as “dreary [and] leaden” and argued that no plan with that amount of commercial space would fly. It also suggested—following a proposal made by the LMDC and others—“how much better residential and commercial areas would cohere if West Street can be submerged and covered with a promenade or a park.”
The very next day, though, Muschamp weighed in with a short “appraisal” in which he lavished praise on quite a different vision. Plucking one of the site diagrams published in the run-up to the LMDC Six by New York New Visions in an exemplary analytical document, Muschamp trumpeted the discovery of a scheme of “remarkable elegance” and “unmatched conceptual beauty.” This turned out to be a parti in which the buried West Street was topped not with a “promenade or park” but by a series of developable blocks. Authorship of the plan was attributed to the architect Frederic Schwartz, who had been busily working officialdom on behalf of this diagram, now detached from the larger project of New York New Visions from which it had emerged.
While most of the July LMDC schemes had proposed to bury West Street, the Schwartz plan differed in suggesting that buildings be constructed atop the tunnel. The idea is not unfamiliar: Schwartz cut his architectural teeth in the Venturi, Scott Brown office working on Westway, and this scheme revisits the basic idea behind that project: the use of publicly funded infrastructure to create sites for private speculation. Muschamp presents this as a logical way to alleviate pressure on the Trade Center site by offering an alternative territory for development. Neither Muschamp nor Schwartz, however, has advanced any argument for the formal superiority of such a development to the creation of additional green and public space above the buried roadway.
Muschamp presents this plan as if it were the only solution to the question of off-site replacement space. Ignored are millions of square feet currently vacant downtown and the numerous unbuilt and underbuilt sites in the area (together more than enough to replace the World Trade Center twice over), as well as the possibility of replacing lost space elsewhere in the city. Although contemptuous of developer demands for immediate replacement of lost income streams—“The lease made me do it,” he acidly began one of his pieces—his plan accomplishes just that, predicated on the ultimate in developer reasoning: the logic of the parcel.
The parcels, however, were also the grounds for an exercise in Muschamp’s central critical operation: compiling lists of his favorite architects. Having suggested that the parceled development of West Street was the only logical way forward, Muschamp—playing Napoleon III to Schwartz’s Haussmann—selected a group to implement the plan and then published their risible efforts with great fanfare in the September 8 issue of the New York Times Magazine. While there were a few tasty images among the proposals, the schemes were largely undercooked, with no urbanistic glue to give spatial and circulatory logic to the ensemble. Muschamp’s mindless branding made Larry Silverstein look like Cosimo de Medici.
The plan, however, also suggests that the Twin Towers themselves be rebuilt—slightly southeast of the original site. But wasn’t the “remarkable elegance” of the Schwartz plan that it obviated the need to replace the towers? To be sure, the buildings shown are Trade Towers with a twist: the huge structures have been torqued to resemble “a pair of candlesticks of unidentified authorship.” In fact, they resemble fairly precisely a widely disseminated scheme by Richard Dattner, whose project is submerged in the claim that these buildings “enjoy a variety of sources.” I am reminded of the undergraduate strategy of oversupplying footnotes to conceal a source. The week following publication of Muschamp’s plan, a piece appeared in the House & Home section entitled, “At Home With Frederic Schwartz, The Man Who Dared the City to Think Again.” Here, after congratulating him for his “aspirational” scheme, the writer described Schwartz’s SoHo loft, his girlfriend, and his breakfast. The shelter section of the New York Times is, of course, obsessed with pedigree. And, given the fact that Muschamp’s list is about celebrity, the hapless Schwartz had to be made into one.
The celebrity mill received a further spin in the September 11 special issue of New York magazine, which included its own collection