View from the Yellow Cab…

Coming into any city from an airport by cab invariably takes you past some of the more banal or even grim suburban/industrial hinterlands that that city has to offer. NYC is no exception. On a grey snowy day in March it wasn’t looking too good, until Manhattan snuck into view – defined extraordinarily by two 80 year old tall buildings that in a supposed city of skyscrapers still dominate the mid-town horizon. Crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings flash between the struts waving their welcome!

These historical ‘twin towers’ keep appearing until you drop down to street level.

Traditional street edge enclosure does lower east side urban grit just as well as gentrified loft apartments…… the scale and complexity of Manhattan seems to always accommodate areas of marginal use opportunity – the developers can keep a step ahead but somehow there are still streets of ‘original’ buildings after years of development boomtime – Jane Jacobs would be pleased!

Um er well yes…. The strength and robustness of the Manhattan grid and back-of-pavement buildings accommodates all kinds of architectural posturing and silliness without major damage to its sense of urban form. The height of this building suggests that there is a city planning initiative to increase local height and density (just guessing! I know nothing about planning rules in NYC….). Doesn’t look too good here!

And here’s a bit more of the “lets play with morphology” game, and lets maybe forget that the most attractive aspect of these streets is the extraordinary consistency of those traditional warehouse forms – they don’t all look the same, are not all the same height or same materials but neither do they self-consciously change alignment, materials or height apparently just for the hell of it!

But hey, here’s a bit of urban intrusion with more chutzpah than most – the New Museum art gallery on Bowery by Japanese architects Sanaa. This building takes an internally-focused, big floorplate use and inserts it onto a small vertical site – the slipped, stacked boxes define its floors and undermine its potentially monolithic character, and the straightforward, ‘come inside’ street frontage  (hard to see here) just follows its neighbours. Does it work? More in a later blog…

Once the sun comes out photographing the fire escape patterns on the building frontages becomes irresistible. These and the window pattern and scale become the repeat that ties together the disparate ages, materials, heights and frontage length. Great urban edge!

OK I’ll stop it soon. The larger (or later? or different construction??) buildings lose the front fire-escapes so the light pattern focuses on window reveals instead – same result, unified street edge.

This is great view – back on Bowery? – where the traditional warehouse buildings range from 3 to 10 storeys but still all do the same thing typologically and at the street edge, then in the distance is that cranky lot doing the morphology game – what is that setback all about? Why up to 15 storeys all of a sudden – but not everywhere?

This is probably too small for you to see, but the Empire State building is at the end of this street view and the guy on the skateboard is happily going against the one-way grain.

Now here I’m cheating – out of the cab and onto the pavement (oops, sidewalk..) using the second most popular NYC form of transport – feet. This is the ‘new look’ Wall St – the monoculture discovered the appeal of mixed-use (especially residential) after the bankers started looking elsewhere and empty buildings started appearing. This is a 60-ish storey purpose-built residential block which might contribute to re-establishing NYC’s reputation as a city of towers – it is certainly part of the subtle character shifts going on in its famous neighbourhoods.

The next step with the feet is on and over Brooklyn Bridge – this view looking towards Brooklyn.

Looking south I love the way the Statue of Liberty is out there holding back the storms, and the container wharves angle their cranes in parallel with her upstretched arm. Walking over the bridges reminds you intensely of the island character of Manhattan, the power of water.

Looking north from the Bridge, the ‘twin towers’ pop up again, but its disturbing how they are the most compelling – and tallest – buildings in mid-town. The city seems to have lost its dramatic skyline as too many of the new buildings are large-footprint, mid-rise (for NYC), developing a somewhat lumpen skyline and internal urban landscape. It genuinely loses out – in height and drama – to developing world cities and now, it seems to me, has become ‘old-fashioned’ in the nicest possible way – maybe the most pure expression of the 20th century city, but unable to become a 21st century city? Discuss….

Back in the cab and on the way to JFK, mid-town in silhouette – through the bridge struts again – including those two archetypal towers ruling the roost. This shot picks up some of the finer grain of smaller buildings but there is no real sense of this being a city of super high density and tall buildings…. what happened? Have Dubai and Shanghai just redefined for us the expectation of what ‘tall’ really means? Or has NYC fundamentally changed its approach to urban built form?

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