Visionary?

The AC stops working in the middle of an August heat wave. We pull down the shades and switch off the lights in a feeble attempt to manage the deadly temperatures, and sit sweltering in the dark. I feel the incandescent heat from my museum-quality desk lamp, so I shut that off too. The only light left in the office comes from our computer screens. My coworkers complain, sigh in frustration, and amble out in search of cooler places. It hits 101 degrees Fahrenheit according to news reports, but on 23rd Street—with no protection from overhangs, trees, or any other sunshade—it feels much hotter. Our neighbors down on 20th Street, at the new office of Cook + Fox Architects, record temperatures near 180 on a section of their roof that isn’t planted with se-

dum; on the green part it’s about 80 degrees cooler.

Reporting on a similar heat wave in Europe, one TV commentator is moved to ask, Should we be ­thinking about building our cities differently as we enter a new phase of extreme temperatures? The answer is obvious, according to an increasing number of architects, engineers, and landscape architects. In fact, many are becoming experienced at making roofs sprout with plants (see page 97), one of the many developing technologies that can help make dense cities livable—and more beautiful.

I find green roofs in the Llewelyn Davies Yeang proposal for revitalizing Istanbul’s waterfronts; their project is one of the two winning schemes recently announced by the Greater Istanbul Municipality. The architects put ecology at the center of their development, aiming for equilibrium between the built and natural environments. They studied everything from bird migration to water conditions. In great detail they show a phased develop­ment that considers wetland remediation as important as mass transit. They explore building ­densities, transportation arterials, parklands, and water features, noting that this might be one of the last opportunities to connect people with nature in the rapidly urbanizing region.

The other winning project is gorgeous. It’s a ­formal exercise in exploring density and ­placement of buildings and roads at another Turkish waterfront location. It’s a signature project by Zaha Hadid, whose blockbuster 30-year retrospective at the Guggenheim (see Paul Goldberger’s review on page 134) has moved the press to anoint her as a visionary, an artist, a star. She’s at once “intuitive” and “brilliant”; her dynamic imagery is between “sci-fi” and “contextual.” It’s hard to disagree with any of this. I too love contemplating her exploding, fragmented, precise drawings; her sensuous furniture forms; and her more subdued buildings.

But given the choice of where to live I would, without hesitation, choose the Llewelyn Davies Yeang city. Though it’s bound to have some artful architecture, it will also have air you can breathe. And when heat waves hit, it will have cool places to take refuge from the sun. And when floods come, the wetlands will make the rising waters less severe than they would have been without remediation. I don’t see such moments of respite and safety in Hadid’s design. And I wonder, Can we honestly call an architect “visionary” if her work ignores the most basic of all connections, the one between people and the earth that gives us life?