NEW YORK | AMSTERDAM | GLIMPSES 2040

DWELLING | NEW YORK

THE NEWARK VISIONARY MUSEUM

2011

The Newark Visionary Museum is Interboro’s submission to the “GLIMPSES of New York and Amsterdam in 2040″ exhibition, which will open on June 8, 2011 at the Center for Architecture.

I am an architect. I know what is to come by the principle on which it is built. . . Now you know why I dynamited Cortlandt. . . I agreed to design it for the purpose of seeing it built as I wished. . . My building was disfigured at the whim of others who took all the benefits of my work and gave me nothing in return. I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy, nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim.

-Howard Roark, from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Poor Howard! If only he had chosen painting, or poetry, or some other medium that he could have had more control over! If only he was born later, and could have lived through the 70s, where, joined by a coterie of theoretical “paper architects,” he could have pursued a pure, uncontaminated, unchanging vision that would have been his and his alone. Robert Moses famously said that when building in a crowded city, you have to “swing the meat axe,” but Moses learned later that crowded cities swing back: when visions for what cities should look and feel like make it off the page and into the world, they are sometimes so highly compromised that they are unrecognizable. Neither Radburn nor any other “model” Garden City ever got a greenbelt (the essential component, according to its primary theorists), a highway interchange is built where the Plan of Chicago’s civic piece de resistance was supposed to go, and Hope VI has replaced our Towers-In-The-Park with housing typologies—medium-density, low-rise townhouses—that the Towers-In-The-Park were themselves built to replace. Even when things were built according to plan, they didn’t evolve according to plan. When the Levittown historical society was looking for an original, unmodified house for their headquarters, they realized that almost none existed, as most had been transformed over the decades by resourceful inhabitants. Barring the sports fields, Central Park might not look so different than 1858’s Greensward Plan, but Olmstead’s hope that his park would inspire genteel, assimilative behavior would appear an idle one to anyone who spends time in it.

Broad Street in Newark is fascinating to consider in this context because it is a virtual museum of stalled 19th, 20th, and 21st century urban visions. Like objects in a museum, many of the buildings depicted here seem to occupy their own worlds, and are separated from the other worlds that surround them. Introducing our own vision (our glimpse) in this environment thus engendered a certain amount of self-reflexivity. Why would we succeed where Frederick Law Olmstead, Louis Danzig, and Henry Cisneros and so many other giants of city-making failed? One “big bang” seemed out of the question. Instead, what we present—apart from a critical historical context—is a collection of sensible moves at a variety of scales that we think could better integrate and connect the islands in the archipelago. Thus instead of introducing another part, we’re proposing ways to connect parts that already exist. These range from ideas for regional transportation (why not extend Manhattan’s 7 train to Newark?), to increased housing options (for example, better senior housing), to programs (boat tours of the Passaic River), to admittedly utopian policies (annexation and home-value insurance). Could there be a way to bridge Mies and McDonalds? If there is a criticism here, it’s that visions fail because they are too often conceived of as wholes, when inevitably they become parts of a whole. A self-sufficient suburb? A machine for living? Private, climate-controlled, drive-through shopping? These visions pursued phantoms from the start. Like Roark, they never fully understand the need for negotiation, interconnectedness, and interdependency.

Project Team

Tobias Armborst, Daniel D’Oca, Georgeen Theodore, Lesser Gonzalez

http://www.interboropartners.net/2012/the-newark-visionary-museum/

REFLECT
The reason why visions fail is "...because they are too often conceived of as wholes, when inevitably they become parts of a whole".

The stance that Interboro takes is one that is both appropriate to the task at hand for this assignment and also what has happened in the past and happens in the present.  When design "happens", the scale of work happens at the city scale and often the human scale is forgotten.  Buildings are for people to use. The city is one that is inhabited by people.  I think the most over planned but underthought aspect of our environment is suburbia.  Access to green space, amenities and the like never result as planned and the room for spontaneous encounters is not accounted for.  This takes me back to the reading in week 4

" "Derive":instead of working, walk the streets in search of the unknown.  Engaging and being absorbed into. Social encounters with strangers is encouraged. Encountering the unfamiliar is key to this." 

The work presented here by Interboro with voices of past and present planners is both interesting and amusing.  What happened in the past may have been relevant then, but as times change, needs change. The need for flexible space, not only for planned (or unplanned) activities at one moment in time, but also for building reuse, is becoming more and more relevant. 

Application to Paddington. What does retail's physical presence become in the future? The need for SPACE will be more about storage facilities and delivery of goods as the shift from bricks and mortar to online becomes more and more imminent.  The Paddington site now caters mainly as a grocery store with a few supporting stores. In 2040....