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Murphy/Jahn Architects' 135-story tower would have been the tallest building in the world at the time it was proposed by Donald Trump, in 1985. The current scheme, was designed by David Childs at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for the Related Companies. |
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| New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority has finally
settled on a design for the new Coliseum building at Columbus Circle -- and it looks surprisingly familiar. by Michael Sorkin Walking around a bend in Riverside Drive a few days ago, I was startled by the sight of Donald Trump's Riverside South complex looming over the rooftops. Twice the height of the surrounding buildings, the first two of an eventual dozen towers seemed massive and alien, harbingers of a radical scale change that will forever deform the profile of Manhattan. The vaguely deco buildings are postered with large testimonials to their superlativeness by Trump, Philip Johnson (the first building's architect), and Brendan Sexton, outgoing president of the Municipal Art Society and incoming president of the Times Square Business Improvement District. It's a telling mix of personalities, suggesting the elision of commercial advantage, architectural cachet, and civic virtue that has come to characterize so many of New York's big projects. These same interests are behind the latest proposal for replacing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority--owned Coliseum at nearby Columbus Circle. Indeed, the night the deal was announced, Sexton, all grins, was on the local news, congratulating Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for his artistry in putting together the "package." Never mind that the Coliseum scheme is essentially the same one that was proposed during an earlier round of bidding, begun in 1985, which finally came to grief in 1994 because of a downturn in the market and a lawsuit by... the Municipal Art Society. Produced by the same architect (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's David Childs) albeit for a different developer (the Related Companies this time around instead of Boston Properties), the building--which as the result of mayoral pressure now includes a jazz theater--looks, after 10 years of thought, slightly more like the New York, New York Hotel in Vegas, a Red Grooms--like compendium of "New Yorkness." The overheated rhetoric at the press conference was highly Trumpish, a bunch of white guys standing around kvelling about quant. Although Trump -- a repeated contender for the Coliseum site -- did not win the deal, he provided the ethic, the aesthetic, and the context for the proposal. (And not just conceptually: Columbus Circle already includes Trump's hulking Gulf & Western Building, reskinned with gold glass by Philip Johnson and renamed the Trump International Hotel and Tower.) Over the years of vying for the Columbus Circle site, Trump proposed two different versions of the world's tallest building, one designed by Helmut Jahn and the other by Eli Attia. While these buildings were universally derided for their deranged phallomorphology, they nevertheless created cover for equally destructive changes taking place nearby. During the past 15 or so years, the area to the north of Columbus Circle, extending up Broadway to 72nd Street, has been upzoned, a transformation concealed behind ludicrous palaver about contextualism, as if a 50-story building could somehow be camouflaged by a low base and a few quoins. (Marisa Tomei to Joe Pesci: "Like you blend.") The result of this shift in thinking about scale is that twin 71-story towers are now considered modest and appropriate. Like Riverside South, the Columbus Circle scheme is emblematic of the way the city of New York plans and does business in the post--Robert Moses era. The Coliseum was built at the ebb tide of the legendary power broker's influence. Whatever one thinks of Moses's methods (or his racism or taste), he never hesitated to think big. While the projects at Columbus Circle and Riverside South are gigantic, their smallness of vision derives from a much smaller sense of the civic. Unfortunately, they're also a long way from the spirit of the anti-Moses movement they grew out of: Thirty-five years ago, Jane Jacobs virtually reinvented the idea of planning, switching its emphasis from wholesale demolition to a careful stewardship of urban life and the conservation of its social and physical ecologies, its neighborhoods. She popularized these ideals at a moment when community activism was on the rise across the country and the drama of new vision was being replaced by the romance of consensus. Given a general (and legitimate) concurrence that no big power, whether private or public, had the best interests of the public at heart, compromise emerged as the new paradigm for the planning process, creating a culture of trade-offs. In this so-called bonus system, increased building bulk was exchanged for the inclusion of some amenity -- a plaza, an arcade, subsidized housing units, a jazz theater -- or even a concession like an agreement to build a block or two away from zones of frenzied development (as with Times Square). Although the huge Coliseum site allows huge construction "as of right," the project is simply too big -- a result of this new mind-set. Once conventions of size and scale, which define the shared character of a place, can be easily overturned, the door is open for every project to seek its entitlement to excess. From a developer's point of view, it is simply impossible to build less than the maximum that can be had. Public agencies, on the other hand, might still be expected to take a broader view. Competing schemes for the Coliseum were supposedly judged on an aesthetic as well as an economic basis; this put an unfamiliar pressure on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which ran the competitions. As anyone who has ridden on the New York subway can attest, quality design is not uppermost in the minds of MTA leadership. It has been argued that the most responsible position available to the agency is to sell the property to the highest bidder to produce maximum cash for the transit system, and this appears to be what it has done. The irony is that by focusing so narrowly on money, the MTA will only increase the strain on the transport system. Like the Trump complex on the river and the Times Square redevelopment, the Columbus Circle proj-ect will dump huge numbers of riders on one of the grottiest, most disorganized, and overtaxed stations in the system. If the experience of Riverside South or Times Square is any guide, the developers will weasel out of contributions to station renovations, and the MTA will drag its feet until only the minimum improvement is made (and that years in the future). Several months ago, a group of architects (full disclosure: myself included) were invited by the Municipal Art Society (whose good intentions and civic vigor are always well directed) to redesign Columbus Circle itself. This was prompted by the city's decision to revise the traffic pattern around the circle by making it, well, more circular. Although the schemes varied in quality, they raised a number of issues that the new building has ignored. First was the matter of considering the huge subway station below. Then there was the notion that a civic space of such consequence needed to be thought of as a piece, not simply as a collection of autonomous fragments. And, finally, there was the idea that a blockbuster project demanded the rethinking of an area far beyond its boundaries. But nobody ever ran a competition to find the best architectural or programmatic idea for Columbus Circle. The two official competitions to date have been for developers, with architecture ancillary. What would such a freely imagined scheme look like? Although you know a great solution only when you see one, the concerns should be clear. To begin, it requires a formal idea at the scale of the city. Columbus Circle is an important transition point between the Upper West Side, Central Park, and Midtown. It stands at a convergence of patterns -- the serpentine Olmstedian landscape, the street-walled New York grid, and the area's Modernist, Ville Radieuse style of isolated elements floating in space -- and serves as a bridge between the residential north, a nearby group of campus-based cultural, educational, and medical institutions, and the commercial densities to the south. A successful scheme must commit itself to the geometry of the circle, to the building's relationship to the subway, and to managing the lateral movement between park, circle, and river. The winning scheme does very little of this. Like every other project proposed for the site, it accepts the promulgated guidelines that call for a low circular base, as it does the maxed-out floor-area ratio offered. But why shouldn't the circular base be high, to echo the volume and carry on the scale of Central Park West and South, where the buildings run in the 20- to 30-story range before setting back? Also, like a number of other schemes, this one disposes its twin towers (meant to "evoke" the twin towers of several buildings on Central Park, blah, blah, blah) on either side of what used to be 59th Street, now blocked by the Coliseum, but it leaves the passage closed. Why not reopen 59th Street as a grand promenade from park to river, making a visual connection that will actually be legible and useful to people on the ground? The project has also been criticized for being too much like a shopping mall, its amenities interiorized, sucking life from the street. While there's more than enough life in the area to assure plenty of pedestrian traffic around the building, the shopping mall paradigm (the privatized version of the civic) has a deadening effect on the architecture and avoids any real urbanistic engagement. Interior shopping streets may be necessary in a building as deep as this, but why is the jazz theater up four long escalator flights? And where are the grand connections to the subway? Is everyone expected to arrive by limo? If New York has an anthem, it's Ellington's "Take The A Train," whose namesake stops at Columbus Circle en route to and from 125th Street, the longest express run in the subway system. How nice to go directly from eponym to jazz. While this project is not exactly meretricious, it represents a dramatic failure of imagination. A huge development like this, located on city-owned land, offers the opportunity to explore big issues and solve big problems. The blinkered business-as-usual approach, however, only yields big buildings and small ideas. |
Keywords:
Columbus Circle, Coliseum, New York Metropolitan transportation Authority (MTA), Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Rudolph Giuliani, Municipal Art Society