URBAN DESIG N CA SE S TUDI ES Vol. 2 No. 3 + 4 October - December 2005 Richard Rogers and New York Urban Design: East River Park and Silvercup Studios West. By Grahame Shane, Columbia University and Cooper Union. After the October failure of Albany leadership at Ground Zero and of White House leadership in Gulf Coast cities, American urban designers have reason to be dismayed. It is, therefore, refreshing to see New York turn to a new talent pool of European architects unafraid of Urban Design in a complex and high-tech environment that is able to connect fragments with infrastructure, while respecting local ecologies. These architects are able to handle the gritty side of the city that never appeared in the sanitized and suburbanized New Urbanists schemes of the 1980’s and 1990’s. It would appear we are in the midst of a paradigm shift, a phase change, when the worthy formulas of Battery Park City and conventions of New York City waterfront development of the 1970’s are shifting. Projects by avowedly modernist designers, like Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, take pride of place, while younger neo-modern offices like Resier and Utmoto, Thomas Leeser or SHoP, now have a fair chance of success.
transportation system as oil prices skyrocket. There is no hi-tec flood barrier defense system comparable to that of London. There is no traffic control system like the London Congestion Charge Scheme, monitored by computers and raising millions for the reconstruction of public transportation long starved of investment. Nor is the New York City government considering the effects of global climate change and
It is curious that New York is ready to bring in these hi-tech star architects as Urban Designers on large projects, yet the city itself possesses no overall strategy for its environmental defense or
Figure 1. Map showing location of Rogers East River Park and Silvercup Studios West.
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Figure 2. Night view of Roger’s East River design with SHoP’s treatment of the underside of the raised highway.
training at Yale with Paul Rudolf in his Brutalist phase (1961). Together with their architect wives and partners of the period, they pursued a different technocratic aesthetic influenced by Buckminster Fuller, James Stirling, Archigram and Reyner Banham’s writings in the 1960’s. Rogers and Foster maintained their faith in the logic of machine-age modernism with its aesthetic of transparency and efficiency. Rogers and Renzo Piano’s winning design for the Pompidou Center in 1971-77 created a slopping, animated public space with sculptural ships’ ventilators set against a building facade of suspended media screens and escalators, unified by a massive steel exo-skeleton (based on Cedric Price’s Fun Palace Project of 1961).
plate tectonics, as London is slowly tilting to the east, descending century by century into the sea. Professor Michael Batty of London University’s Center for Advance Spatial Analysis (CASA) has produced dramatic, visual simulations of the impact of a tidal wave or surge on London. Lord Rogers has played a prominent role in the government reevaluation of Urban Design as instrument for a strategic, planned, sustainable growth pattern in southern England. In this paper I will briefly compare recent European and American Urban Design and investment strategies before concentrating on the two New York case studies as examples of the shift taking place in Waterfront Urban Design. Finally I will evaluate the larger questions raised by this paradigm shift.
This was the first of what has become a series of innovative European public spaces that retrofit the old city center for contemporary uses, ranging from Foster’s Maison Carre plaza at Nimes to Jan Gehl’s pedestrianization of central Copenhagen. Rogers linked public space and public infrastructure, despite the arrival of the automobile.
Rogers Urban Design Background Rogers, with his then partner Norman Foster, first became known for elegant high-tec, low-rise factories, contrary to
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Urban Design in New York. New York City was one of the first cities to actively seek to replace its industrial waterfront through Robert Moses’ parks, housing and highways along the East River in the 1950’s. In this tradition, the City Planning Commission imagined the downtown tip of Manhattan transformed into a new global, hi-rise office and residential center, incorporating the highways and tunnels sought by Moses. Paul Rudolph’s megastructural design to cover the highway planned through the heart of Soho epitomized the avantguard, New Brutalist, mega-scale Urban Design convention of the period. This project included twin towers, predecessors of the World Trade center, and a new community at Battery Park City built around parkland and threedimensional village clusters (designed by Conklin and Rossant).
Figure 3. Rogers East River Project in association with SHoP includes an urban beach, fountain and promenade, with landscaping by Ken Smith Associates.
bonuses for maintaining street walls in carefully delineated fragments, called Special Districts.
In contrast to Roger’s technocratic vision, his American contemporaries at Yale, such as Jack Robertson or Jonathan Barnett, reacted against modernist town planning and its failures. These designers, with Alexander Cooper, formed the core of the Mayor’s Urban Design Task Force formed in response to the protests of community groups, historic preservationists, artists and especially Jane Jacobs whose Life and Death of Great American Cities (1961) encapsulated the arguments against modernist megastructures.
Alex Cooper and Stan Eckstut’s winning master plan for Battery Park City in 1978 extended this innovative New York Urban Design strategy to the waterfront, with its Olin-designed linear park along the esplanade and streets opening back to the city behind. After the defeat of Robert Moses’ Westway, the Greenwich Village community battled for 15 years for this strategy to be continued up the Westside, with the addition of landscaped piers proposed by QuenellRothschild in their 1980’s Hudson River Park proposal. This green linear armature connected Downtown to Olmsted’s Riverside Park at 72nd Street. In the next decade the City Planning Department produced a Waterfront Zoning Code revision that extended this pattern to four boroughs, giving
After the City Council in 1969 refused to pass the City Planning Commission’s Master Plan, the Yale-trained Urban Design Group responded by turning back towards the traditional street of New York. The group rewrote the Zoning Codes for Downtown and gave
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developers incentives to build higher through zoning bonuses in exchange for public access to the waterfront esplanade.
Urban Design model of enclaves from Battery Park City to Canary Wharf in the East London Docklands in the 1980’s, and as she abolished the democratically elected Greater London Council (G.L.C.). Thatcher removed all controls to get development started but planned no network of infrastructure. The resultant isolation of the vast Canary Wharf enclave, its monolithic, retro Urban Design codes and the bankruptcy of the developers taught the British a tough Urban Design lesson.
On the East River the Bloomberg Administration’s 2005 rezoning of the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfronts has extended this logic even further, offering high Floor Area Ratios (F.A.R.s) to developers in exchange for the construction of public riverfront esplanade and piers, as well as the inclusion of lower income housing at sites in the neighboring hinterland.
At a personal level, Rogers, like Foster in Battersea, pioneered urban waterfront development for his own offices in Hammersmith, West London. Here, acting as architect–developer, he created a personal live-work situation, while also developing lofts for sale, with a restaurant designed and executed by Ruth Rogers. For Rogers, as for Foster, the streetwall remained an important component of Urban Design. But the aesthetic and scale of this surface remained resolutely modern and hightech.
Rogers’ Strategic Urban Design. From the start Rogers’ office always had an Urban Design dimension in the megastructural, Archigram tradition. Rogers contributed to the re-evaluation of the Thames waterfront and the South Bank. He studied the Thames Embankment and Trafalgar Square, for instance, proposing in 1986 to cover the highway on the Embankment, build a new pedestrian bridge across the river and to pedestrianize the north side of Trafalgar Square (later executed by the Greater London Authority (G.L.A)).
Rogers’ Urban Design research also maintained a high-tech interest in largescale, city-wide infrastructure systems and environmental costs. Rogers gave the BBC Reith lectures on “Cities for a Small Planet” in 1995 and then headed the Labour government’s Task Force on Urban Regeneration (1998-2000). Subsequently he became the Chief Advisor to the Mayor of London, responsible for the Thames Gateway. The Rogers Report recommended dense brownfield redevelopment in old industrial areas (such as the East End of London) and advocated higher ecological standards for the construction industry.
Figure 4; Rogers’ Thames Embankment proposal with new pedestrian bridge and islands on the South Bank (1986).
Urban Design in London in the 1970’s period was largely the concern of elected municipalities. Europeans watched in awe as the British Prime Minister Mrs. Thatcher imported the New York 4
Rogers’ East River Park Project.
Figure 5. Rogers East River Park 2004, Site plan and detail of New Esplanade, showing expanded platform for esplanade and highway treatment.
Amanda Burden, the Mayor’s City Planning Commissioner, built on this strategic initiative and in the wake of 9/11 created a limited Urban Design Competition for the East River Waterfront Study in 2004.
Rogers brand of Strategic Urban Design, with its extended networks and dense nodes, does not exist yet in New York as official policy. Here designers have concentrated on fragmentary Special Zoning Districts on the model of Battery Park City without the infrastructural links common in Europe. During the 1990’s Ray Gastil, as Director of the Van Alen Institute, organized a number of exhibitions and competitions stressing the strategic, infrastructural and ecological scales of operation. The Van Alen commissioned Jessie Reiser and Nanako Utemoto, for instance, to study the entire “East River Corridor” of degraded Moses waterfront parks in 1998. Their design criss-crossed the waterfront with a spaghetti-like network of graceful, pedestrian bridges, bicycle paths, viewing platforms, piers and beaches.
Figure 6. Jessie Reiser and Nanako Utemoto, East River Corridor 1998.
The Richard Rogers team with Sharples, Holden Pasquerelli (SHoP) and Ken Smith Landscape Architecture won the $200 million project which contained short-term design proposals and longterm strategies for a three-and-half-mile strip of waterfront. 5
Rogers sought to learn lessons from the linear armature of the Hudson River Park (where the highway was demolished). For security reasons much of the Downtown Special District is already pedestrianized. Rogers attempted to create pedestrian connections from the waterfront back into the Downtown core. He countered the raised barrier of the Moses highway by treating it as a linear, armature of brushed concrete.
Rogers Silvercup Studios Project. The story of the Silvercup Studios is a true New York Urban Design study in miniature. In 1980 Harry, the father of the present developers bought the Silvercup Bakery building in Long Island City, which had lain vacant for 6 years, for his sheet metal businesses. For a variety of reasons, he only moved half his business. His two sons, practicing as architects, became fascinated by the space and light of the building.
Under the highway the Rogers team envision a set of new, transparent kiosks to the north and south of the South Street Seaport. They show neatly dressed TaiChi classes exercising where once the messy fish market took place. Joggers from the nearby converted office towers run on their track, while the bicycle path around Manhattan is also extended.
One son, Stuart Suna, designed and lived in his own loft apartment in the building’s legal caretaker apartment. Stuart, with his brother Alan, began to act as small-scale architect-developers, renting out the unused tall grain silo spaces as studios. In this small way began a train of events that has produced a multi-million dollar studio business in New York (with the support of public agencies).
Beside this long illuminated armature, Rogers proposes a series of wider enclaves on piers or extended riverside platforms, as at the foot of Wall Street, Coentes Slip and by the Ferry Terminal at Battery Park. Ken Smith uses a common, cantilevered trellis element to differentiate Wall Street, where trellises make arbors for lunchtime breaks, from Coentes Slip, where trellises are beside an ice-skating rink/ summer pool.
As the business grew the two sons became recognized as dynamic forces in the community, sitting on the Queens Community Board, and participating in local politics. When the New York Power Authority (NYPA) stationed a “temporary” power generation station in Long Island City on the waterfront, Silvercup was able to successfully resolve the matter with NYPA. With this resolution, it became possible to plan the site with public access to the waterfront.
Further north the Rogers team also proposes new enclaves, this time on landscaped piers or by reconditioning the Moses parklands. Ken Smith’s trellises and ShoP’s pavilions reappear to house various local community activities. It is here that the Rogers team proposes the big public beach and fountain. From here the towers of Rogers’ second New York project in Long Island City will be visible.
In another outcome, the Suna brothers were able to get from the New York City Landmarks Commission permission to restore the New York Terra Cotta Works. The future use of the building is still undecided, and the Suna brothers
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are looking to obtain fresh ideas from the local community and from New York preservation groups.
residential towers (600 and 517 feet) on the south side of the block give views down towards Wall Street and across to Manhattan. The towers are assembled on the site to work in concert with the beautiful cantinary lines of the Queensborough Bridge.
Alan with degree from Cornell and Stuart Suna with degree from Carnegie Mellon, wanted to bring world-class architectural design to the Long Island City waterfront. They believed that this site is visually a gateway to Queens. It is also a hinge-point between the triangle of Queens West and the Long Island City central business district. The brothers, therefore, solicited a request for expression of interest for this six-acre site from architects in New York and around the world. Proposals came in from Seattle and London as well as from New York.
On the roof of the studios, which is the base building block between the towers, there is a combination of indoor and outdoor space for the thousands of people who will occupy the building. There is a catering hall for up to a thousand people with spectacular views of the Queensborough Bridge and the Manhattan skyline. Landscaped outdoor gardens, reflecting pools and cafes are being designed by the Olin Partnership, Philadelphia. These spaces will be for office workers, studio workers, residents and visitors to a museum, also part of the current scheme. In addition, there will be a public elevator giving pedestrians access from the esplanade up to an observatory deck 100 feet above the river.
After extensive dialogue with more than 10 firms, the list narrowed to KPF, NBBJ, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. Finding his the most exciting vision, the brothers selected Richard Rogers and Partners. The Sunas, familiar with Rogers’ books including Cities for a Small Country as well as Cities for a Small Planet, agreed with Rogers philosophy. The Sunas believe that greater urban density is more energy efficient and helps reduce suburban sprawl.
On the north side of the block, Rogers proposes a skillful move that begins to resolve the difficult urban design scale conflict between the giant bridge and the miniature Terra Cotta building. With landscape architect Laurie Olin, Rogers creates a public plaza that will reach back into historic reference to materials and objects that were created at the New York Terra Cotta Factory for sensitive
The stepped northern commercial office tower (430 feet tall) serves to shelter the project from the noise of the bridge traffic as it soars overhead. The two
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Figure 7. Silvercup site plan by Olin Partnership
human scale. For example, the bollards separating vehicular from pedestrian traffic are cast from chimney pots on top of the original building. Benches are clad in details from the frieze of the Terra Cotta building.
projects to the North of the bridge by opening up the space under the bridge to make it more accessible and to create new jobs for a population with high unemployment.
Inside the glass north façade Rogers places a stepped series of escalators that cascade up the side of the studio block leading to a series of public spaces occupied by designated not-for-profit groups with their own public terrace facing Manhattan, on a level below the main roof garden (also accessible by elevator from the waterfront esplanade).
For further information see:
Rogers’ Lesson for New York.
Rogers East London projects; http://www.richardrogers.co.uk/ GLA Olympic Plan and Plan 2004; http://www.london.gov.uk/mayor/strategies/sds/index. jsp
Silvercup Studios is an example of Rogers’ Strategic Urban Design that offers a lesson to New York to move towards a similar strategic set of values, in terms of the environmental codes, public transportation networks, and building communication network capacity to counter sprawl.
Van Alen East River Corridor: http://www.vanalen.org/workshops/rur_corridor_study /introduction.htm Rogers East River Park Plan; http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/erw/index.shtml Grahame Shane thanks Stuart Suna for his introduction to the Silvercup Studio Project. Ann Ferebee for editorial comments and Bettina Kaes for graphic format. This case study is dedicated to the memory of David Anderson.
The Suna brothers and Rogers’ vision is to integrate the new development with the Queensbridge Park and housing
Figure 8. Artist Ethan Furster’s unofficial web impression of Queens West and Silvercup towers on Long Island Waterfront.
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