The Shift to the City Two East River Projects Plans by Richard Rogers & Partners Fellow Proceeding’s – The Institute for Urban Design
November 10, 2005 The Barnard Club New York, New York
Silvercup Studio Park by Laurie Olin Partnership
THE SHIFT TO THE CITY TWO EAST RIVER PROJECTS with Plans by Richard Rogers & Partners
The Barnard Club At the Midtown Executive Hotel 40 W. 45th Street, NYC November 10, 2005
Program
Introduction:
Ann Ferebee, Director, Institute for Urban Design
Welcome:
Lance Jay Brown, CUNY
Moderator:
Grahame Shane, Cooper Union, Columbia, CUNY
Panelists:
Stuart Match Suna, Silvercup Studios Kathleen John-Alder, Olin Partnership Chris Sharples, SHoP Architects
Respondent:
Michael M. Samuelian, Related Properties
Rapporteur:
Jayne Merkel, Contributor, AD, London
Biographies of Panelists
Fellows Program Registration List
Architects shift focus to city design
The observation that architects, by training focused on the design of buildings, are growing increasingly interested in the larger issues of city design was first made to me last spring by Ellen Posner, Newman Institute, CUNY. She then sought to highlight Richard Rogers as a prime example of architect-turnedurban designer. Lord Rogers, who received a key portion of his education at Yale University, has now returned to the USA. With a hop and a skip, he has landed at Silvercup Studios, Queens, and FDR Drive Park, Manhattan. Now, with a jump, he will design the Javits Center expansion, surely accelerating redevelopment of Far West Side. Several lessons may be drawn from Rogers’ two East River projects. Grahame Shane, in a case study publication commissioned by the Institute for Urban Design, mentions his plans for Thames Embankment. This reminds one that urban riverside redevelopment is carried out over a long period of time (perhaps decades) and that multiple engineers and landscape architects, as well as architects, are involved. In the Silvercup Studio project The Olin Partnership has been crucial with landscape elements. In the case of FDR Park, SHoP has modified the Rogers scheme to meet needs of the city as client. Perhaps the most hopeful lesson is that developers educated as architects, including Stuart and Allen Suna, are seeking out the best talent in urban design. As Newman Institute and other schools add design to real estate curricula, American city design can be expected to improve. Ann Ferebee, Director Institute for Urban Design
FELLOWS HEAR ABOUT ROGERS APPROACH TO URBAN DESIGN AS PRESENTED BY STUART SUNA
Lance Jay Brown My assignment is to welcome you all here. It's an absolute pleasure to once again be with the Institute family. It only happens twice a year. I always look forward to it. One tradition is to welcome people who have not joined us before, and there are about ten who are new with us tonight. I would like to acknowledge an old friend, Jeffrey Soule, who's from Washington heading up the APA. Folks who have joined the Fellowship are, alphabetically, Glen Allen, Colin Cathcart, Karen Fairbanks, Christine Glavasich, and Kathy Ho. You all know Kathy. She's editor of The Architect’s Newspaper, the best publication about architecture in the city. As a board member of the AIA, I'm not supposed to say that but I think they'd agree. Ann Locke. Andres Mignucci, San Jaun. John Palmieri, Department of Development Services, City of Hartford. Lynn Rice, Lynn Rice Architects. Maria Sachs, Pike's Peak Income Holding. Commissioner Steven Weber and John Young Director of Planning in Queens will be joining us later. This evening, we're going to look at two waterfront projects. I would feel remiss if I didn't share at the beginning of the evening the fact that I returned today from a visit to New Orleans. Given the name of this institute and the events on the Gulf Coast, I would just implore anyone here who has any influence to help New Orleans pull itself out of what seems to be the biggest cloud I have ever seen. There's something terribly insidious about water damage. It leaves everything looking as though it might survive, but in a short time it all disintegrates. The city of New Orleans was close to 500,000 people, and there are only 50,000 people there at the moment. There are people that would like to see those who left never return. If you have any opportunities to lend support to that devastated area, it's a good idea to do that now. With that, I'm going to give the floor to my colleague Grahame Shane, who teaches in the Urban Design Program at CUNY.
Map showing location of Rogers East River Park and Silvercup Studios West.
Grahame Shane Thank you, Lance. I teach at City College, Columbia and Cooper Union, and I write for The Architect’s Newspaper. I wrote the case study that you can pick up at the front door. Stuart Match Suna will present Silvercup Studios Project. Kathleen JohnAlder from the Olin Partnership will talk about the landscaping of that project. Chris Sharples from SHoP, who is working with Richard Rogers, will talk about the East River project. Our key theme tonight is the Rogers approach to urban design.
I wanted to make a distinction between recent British and American urban design experiences in New York. The background to that was that Rogers has had an enormous influence in Britain through his friendship with Prime Minister Tony Blair and has become a major political force in the country's planning. What he's put in place in terms of ecological evaluation of buildings, strategic planning, is mind expanding.
Rogers' office, once he got his own practice, did forward-thinking urban design projects for London along the Thames River. This is from 1986, a project to bury the Thames Embankment highway and pedestrianize Trafalgar Square. Foster has just done this for the Greater London Council. There's no way that they're going to bury the highway on the Embankment, but it was a nice idea.
Silvercup Studios, opposite the United Nations on the East, is shown in this slide. On the bottom righthand side of Manhattan is the long thin armature of the park that Richard Rogers has designed with SHoP, to help complete the green ring around Manhattan. This represents the major transformation of the city with the waterfront coming off industrial use and into residential and commercial use.
Rogers did public lectures on the radio, in 1996, and put forward a program for ecological cities and applied it to London, especially in the East End, with a London Gateway project on either side of the Thames.
This shift to residential represents a major shift in New York City planning policy. The treatment of the river as an ecosystem and as a larger resource for the city is something that we can learn about from Rogers. He also has learned about New York, studying the Hudson River Drive. Our normal way of operating is to have an esplanade along the edge, the streets brought to the edge and then commercial or residential development along the edge. What Rogers is proposing is to keep the raised highway and then make an attractive space underneath the highway. It's going to be a big design project, and Chris Sharples is going to illuminate this. Rogers first worked with Norman Foster and then in partnership with Renzo Piano. As a youngster, I was an unpaid advisor to friends who were working on this project from the Architects Association, London. That's how I came to be here tonight. I am showing a Rogers sketch for Silvercup Studio Project. It's the inserting of a high-tech modern building into the center of the city that completely transformed the neighborhood around it and had an innovative public space that sloped down. It's been incredibly successful. One of the ideas of the Suna’s Silvercup project is that the north side of the project could have ramped escalators like this inside the building and have a plaza on the north side that slopes down towards the United Nations under the bridge. It could be a spectacular urban space.
In the background of Rogers mind there's this strategic thinking at a very large scale and planning for the future ecological impacts. In America we weren't neglecting this, but it tended to be done by unofficial bodies. On the East River, one pays homage to Ray Gastil and the Van Alen Institute in the 1990s, who did riverside infrastructure studies. They did a study for the East River corridor, a very beautiful design by Jessica Reiser in 1996. In the same period, there was an East River competition won by Victoria Marshall, who's with us tonight, who is a landscape urbanist from Penn, for a set of parks along the East River that were based on barges that recycled garbage and were then turned into parks. New York City is not being remiss in terms of strategic planning, Long Island City and the West Side yards, are both sites where, in fact, Rogers is going to be working. You can find the details on the New York City Planning website. Next we're going to find out the details of the Silvercup Studio Project. There's an East Coast corridor that's united by the high-speed rail link from Boston to Washington, through Penn Station. Javits Center is close to that. Silvercup Studio Project is part of the Long Island City hub that should be developed as a strategic sub-center for Manhattan and it's got easy connections to JFK and LaGuardia Airports. Stuart Suna is president of Silvercup Studios. He was a gracious host to me when I was there. He studied at Carnegie-Mellon and used an innovative process of selecting Richard Rogers through an interior competition, a fantastic idea. He was on the ground floor as a developer in the right place at the right time.
He has made a fantastic success of the studios and turned them into the largest movie studios outside of Hollywood, forming the basis for this enormous and exciting project called Silvercup West.
Silvercup image
GATEWAY TO QUEENS, SILVERCUP PROJECT SHOULD PROVIDE DENSE LIVE-WORKLEISURE ENVIRONMENT AND CREATE NEW JOBS. Stuart Match Suna Thank you. So you're not disappointed, we're going to talk about urban planning and about the site but not about the architecture, since we're saving some of that for our certification, which will arrive at the end of this year, December 19, or January 9, once City Planning is fully ready with the E.I.S. We've been working with them a very long time. In this historical picture, you can see the Queensborough Bridge under construction. This building is the New York City Terra Cotta Works, a landmark. Some of the terra cotta projects in New York City came from here. You'll see as we walk through how we attempt to reuse terra cotta in the site. Here you can see what Grahame was saying about Long Island City. Citibank Tower is at the right. They just broke ground for the new project. Here is Silvercup West. This is the Queens central business district. This is also from City Planning's maps. Queens West. This is where the Olympic Village was going to be, which is still going to be the rest of Queens West. This part is with Rockrose by Architectonica.
We see our project as a gateway to Queens. As you're coming across from the Manhattan side or if you're going from the airports across, we see the site as a major crossroads and that Long Island City should really become a dense urban area and compete with the Jersey waterfront. Long Island City shouldn't just be low-lying lands. It should really have this kind of height. We see this symmetry going across on both sides of the river. You have beautiful open space here. We see that Long Island City really has great potential. That's the existing site. We're here at the salt pile. This is a mapped city street. This is Roosevelt Island. Some of the rezoning City Planning has already done, there's some as-of-right projects that are going to be coming down the pipeline. Not just Queens West but also the central business district. Some of it's as much as twenty years old. Some of it is just recently done, or about to happen, including our site. This is the existing site, Queensborough Bridge. Silvercup Studios is actually five blocks behind to the east. These are the temporary generators that the New York Power Authority put there as part of our settlement after taking it to courts. They're moving them and we're developing the whole six-acre waterfront site, which will be over two-million-square-feet of new development. The salt pile, which is a mapped city street, will become a public street with public access. There will be public waterfront access through here and a full esplanade. It also has some contamination. It was an oil transfer station, so it had oil spill over there. This is the roof of the terra cotta building. Part of Richard Rogers Partnership's vision of live-work-leisure is that one of the beauties of living in a dense urban environment is that you can integrate live, work and leisure as we've done in this project. There's both residential and there's industrial -- which is the new film studios. There is leisure, being health club, restaurants, catering hall, and then there's also 600,000 sq.ft. of office space that will be dedicated to media and entertainment-related companies. It's also much more environmentally friendly by opening up the space. Certainly in environmental buildings we'll see, but it also reduces a lot of the pollution caused by transportation. These are some of Richard's early sketches as far as the relationship between the bridge and the water. Initially he was
thinking about some very high-rise towers, because the studios need to be large open spaces that can't have huge towers coming down on top of them. So we wanted to have some open space and plazas and public esplanades on the waterfront, along with some high-rise development.
This is the studios. There are four studios on one floor. You can see these are the trucks coming up, so you can load right into the studios, which have a tremendous amount of truck traffic. We wanted to get all those trucks off the street, the way they are in Long Island City.
You can see here these are the studios we want to lay out, and the studios take up a lot of space. We had a plaza facing south and a plaza here bringing people down from Queens Plaza. This is also a series of early analyses that were done, diagrams as far as different designs for the site. You can see here there were three different towers. We need to have a minimum of eight studios and reach 16,000 sq.ft. They need to be thirty to thirty-five feet in height. We decided we can actually stack them on top of each other and do four upon four. So it freed up the site, even though it's a six-acre site, of ways to rearrange the towers in different configurations.
This is up at about a hundred feet above sea level. Up at this elevation, there is an outdoor park-like area for the over three thousand people working and living in this environment. There will be an alley of trees, cafes, a reflected pool, and this pink area is going to be a catering hall. The two catering halls will service over a thousand people, which is desperately needed in western Queens.
None of these is what we actually are doing. You'll see some other schemes of how we respect the terra cotta building, respect the majesty of the Queensborough Bridge and have public access to the waterfront. We also want to energize. This is an Olin Partnership drawing, so you can see here this is the plaza. There's a terra cotta building. Here's the bridge. This is all an upland connection. Here is the mapped street, now open to the public, an esplanade connecting it all around. Also, as you'll see later on when Kate John-Alder presents, all of this exterior is energized with retail space. So it's open to the public and making the ground space open instead of very closed. The existing Citibank tower in Long Island City by SOM is closed off to the public. You can only come in through one lobby, and the retail inside is internal retail. We want to see all this retail being open, restaurants along an esplanade like you have in London. Also, in part of the program would be a 100,000 square-foot museum or cultural space. We're working with the City of New York to include it in this part of the plaza. All the parking of 1,400 cars, goes actually down three levels below the water table. All the truck services in the studios and all the industrial use here come into the building. There's not only loading docks but you can also come up a ramp and you come into the studios.
We see this also as economic development opportunities and job creation. You'll see in the landscape, we want to integrate the space under the bridge to reach the thousands of people who live in Queensbridge Houses just to the north, which is the largest low-income housing project in the country. It has been cut off by the bridge. We're working also with the city and Department of Transportation to make the space under the bridge. Here is a section looking north-south. This is the office building for 600,000 square-feet. This is the cultural space. These are the studios you can see stacked on top of each other with circulation between. One of the public spaces, at the request of City Planning, is going to have a public elevator that will bring you up to one of these terraces. Not to the whole deck but to just one of these areas, about 5,000 square-feet. Even though it's not part of our calculation of open space that we exceed what's required, City Planning wanted for us to give something extra to bring the public up to that elevation. This is the elevation of the office building. Again, you can see the Rogers Partnership wanting to invoke the history of the Queensborough Bridge and how the skeleton structure relates to it and how also the catenary structure of the bridge and the slopes and also work with the terracing. The ultimate FAR that we're looking at here is 7.9. We initially started with a 10 FAR. One of the important things about the site is the beautiful vistas from Long Island City to Manhattan. Long Island City has better views of Manhattan than Manhattan looking back at Queens for right now. This is one of the early
diagrams. Richard was impressed with the site, that you could have this open six-acre pasture. You're just missing cows and goats. How could this be in the center looking across at the central business district? This is the cafe that would be up a hundred feet above the river out on the waterfront. These are the escalators that Grahame was talking about along the north glass facade that you can see over here. So not only will you be able to go up into the cultural space, but you'll also be able to experience the bridge and the historic structure like you've never been able to see before.
City Planning, has looked at the outer boroughs in a way that has never been looked at in a long time. Particularly with the leadership of Amanda Burden, not only looking at the outer boroughs and rezoning, but also that we can have real density urban development and jobs along that waterfront. You can see in renderings how the park relates back to the building. Here's the esplanade. This is the future of the waterfront of Long Island City. Here's our project over here. These are the existing projects, and this is what it's going to look like. This is the symmetry that New York should be having along the waterfront. We have more jobs, less traveling, and less pollution.
This is the Queensbridge Park section connecting to the low-income neighborhood. We want the space under the bridge to be fully integrated so people living and working here can actually come across and be part of the same community. This is the view from FDR Drive where Richard now has another project, looking north. You can see how we want to integrate it into the community. Existing pictures of the neighborhood. This is the way the Department of Sanitation looks. This is a mapped city street. It doesn't allow access but illegally leaches salt into the East River, all the things that we're trying to fix. Even with the direction of the Mayor and City Planning, it's difficult to get DOS to relocate a salt pile. There is the terra cotta building. We're going to be opening up a lot of these vistas. Again, it becomes a mapped public city street with retail along here, benches, and connecting back into the esplanade. We really think that the public should have access to all of this. Long Island City is a wonderful place. We've been there now as a family for over twenty-five years. I actually lived in Silvercup for ten years. I was the legal caretaker in the apartment building. We've now installed the largest green roof in New York City's history with the support of Clean Air Communities and New York Power Authority. The micro climates really can change radically. We can improve the quality of life and the quality of air. A picture of the esplanade along the riverfront shows how wonderful it would be. Right now no one has access to this site, to the waterfront, in over a hundred years. We think that is actually sad, and Long Island City with the vision and support of both the Mayor and
Artist Ethan Furster’s unofficial web impression of Queens West and Silvercup towers on Long Island Waterfront.
Grahame Shane They film The Sopranos at Silvercup Studios is the image of New York in many ways. Also, Sex and the City was filmed there. It single-handedly has helped turn around the image of New York. Let me introduce Kathleen John-Alder, Associate Partner, Olin Partnership. We've already seen some of the work that Olin is doing for the Suna brothers at Silvercup West. She worked on the Getty Center, trained as a botanist, and was also an illustrator. LANDSCAPE PLAN WITH NATIVE GRASSES SOFTENS WALKS INTENDED TO BE USED BY THOUSANDS DAILY. Kathleen John-Alder It's my pleasure to be here tonight. Stuart gave a wonderful presentation of the project. I'm going to give a little more detail about the landscape design. Stuart has already located the site for you with the Queensborough Bridge to the north, 43rd Street with the salt pile to the south, Vernon Avenue, and then the East
River with Roosevelt Island. Our site will be next to Queensbridge Park, a second stage in a planned Hunters Point East River Esplanade. We're going to be the first project on the Hunters Point Esplanade to develop the details for this part of the city. When we first went to the site, just as Richard Rogers was entranced by it, we were, too. It's magical. You have the bridge. The day we were there was a snowfall, the grass meadows, the river, the beautiful terra cotta buildings. Stuart showed you the images of this site, which was the main factory for terra cotta production in New York. What's left is this old building with the terra cotta friezes, an inspiration for our design as well as the bridge itself. Here's the salt pile. Here are some of the details, then Vernon Boulevard. When we first started to think about the landscape, one of the first things we always do is look at the sun and shade studies. We discovered that in the morning the esplanade would have shade, but most of the time the esplanade would be sunny, as well as the south side of the building would be very sunny. So putting trees on the site, but allowing people to have both sun and shade as they sit and enjoy the esplanade and the views, was important. We also could see that the site was going to be windy at times. So we're thinking how are we going to activate the site? Well, sitting for meeting and standing, sitting for relaxation, shade for reading, eating, socializing, relaxation and games, and sun for socializing and the promenade. You'll see how we placed these on the site. We did this very deliberately, starting with Vernon Boulevard, and making sure that we were going to draw people down to the esplanade along an upland connection corridor and view corridor, as well as along 43rd. The esplanade is designed so that in the future we can make connections both south and north. In particular, those connections are important to the Suna brothers and the development of this project. Another thing that's interesting in the design of the Rogers building--and it's very subtle--is that in the studio spaces are wonderful bump-out areas where, if you're lucky, you'll be able to view stars. So that was also important to us in the placement of trees and how we designed the landscape.
We also looked at what kind of benches we would use, what would the furniture be like? When we thought about this space, we knew we were going to be influenced by three things. First of all, that it was going to be part of an esplanade, so that it had to bow to traditional New York furnishings so there could be a continuum. We also thought of the gritty industrial past of Long Island City, the site itself is a terra cotta building and all of the industry, and then third, we thought about the sleek Rogers building and the architecture. So what we wanted to do when we started to select and think about ideas for seating, for the paving materials from cobbles to brick, terra cotta of course, to the old New York cobbles and crosswalks, to more contemporary designs, including two of our projects in Los Angeles, Gateway Plaza and Queensway Bay, in which we took the idea of terra cotta and made it look like planking or decking. We looked at different types of railings on waterfronts. How would we take some of this but actually make it expressive of this site and place, and for the 21st century? Some of the initial sketches, there was a wonderful design charette at Silvercup Studios with City Planning. This is a sketch by the Rogers office, talking about the bridge and the idea of an overlook, how important this overlook would be once you would draw people down from Vernon to this overlook and allow them to look down at the U.N., across at the magnificent skyline and up at the bridge, right at this corner. As well as initial sketches for the esplanade, how would we place a bosque of trees actually in response to the architecture? As Stuart told you, there are residential towers here. The studio complex is in the middle with their central walkway or atrium space, and another tower over here with the commercial. The curved path brings you to the front and the overlook. The bosque of trees with seating, cafe spaces, retail space, is easy access and includes a pathway in front of it with benches. We’re thinking about a design that would use deck chairs that you would find on an ocean liner and chess tables. 43rd Street will have a little public space at the end and a plaza for the residential area. Here's an enlargement of the esplanade. You can see the esplanade is on two levels, but it's very slight. It's
only about a foot difference, but what it does is make this whole space accessible to the public. There's just a slight separation so that we have a more active space, an esplanade space, for movement along the river, jogging, biking, walking, while above it's more passive for seating, people watching, and separation. The planting design, thinking about the trees and the native grasses and knowing that this building would be tall and viewed from above. So we put together a palette of native grasses that look like a leaf pattern from above, but when you're at the ground level will blend and flow and look natural. You can see some of the trees we've used. They had to be very tough and salt resistant, so honey locust, silvatica, platinous, will be used along the street and will echo the trees at Queensbridge Park. Altilia, Americana, and the cherry trees at the front for a spot of color. This is a sketch by Laurie Olin looking at the curved benches that have segments in which there are backs and segments in which there are no backs. Terra cotta. We had to devise a design for some bollards. Again, the terra cotta building and its frieze was influential in the development of this bollard design. Lighting. New York City standards on 43rd and Vernon. Pole lights, Hess pole lights along the visual
and upland connector and visual corridor. On the esplanade we did not want to have another vertical element, so we're talking about inserting lighting into the railing of the esplanade at the post, lighting within the seating elements themselves so you get this wonderful curve. Then very small spotlights along these grand stairs that help you transition from the upper area to the lower area. One of the ways we were thinking of attracting people and getting them to move from Vernon to the esplanade is by placing sculptures. This is a proposed idea for a kiln sculpture reminiscent of the kilns that were there on the site before. This was our sketch study, to talk about how this street not only would be very important for access to the building but would be a wonderful view corridor as well to the city and direct you to the esplanade. This is the elevator Stuart talked about that's on the esplanade, so that people who come to the esplanade will have the ability to ride this elevator up to this public open space and cafe. From both the esplanade and from up above, they'll have the ability to look at Manhattan. That's our design. Thank you.
Grahame Shane Now we're switching from an amazing city space with landscape in three dimensions, and escalators, to a long, thin armature of green space that is not so green in some places but will be a rather extraordinary technological environment in terms of lighting, heating, sound proofing, as well as opening out to a more normal park further uptown. It's a pleasure to introduce Chris Sharples who was my colleague at Columbia and previously worked in Japan.
had an elevated expressway. You've got lots of infrastructure that's blocking that connection, that desire to extend the city to the edge and bring the water to the city. These images make obvious what the problem is. There has been forty years of master planning for this site. One of the things that we saw while I was working with Richard was that it was more about understanding a cross-grain relationship with how the city needed to make a connection with the water, not necessarily immediately through a parallel connection but more in terms of drawing people through these streets down to the edge. Moving from the scale of the street, the other idea was that this park was going to be the linkage that would connect the whole island of Manhattan, drawing people around the Battery and eventually bringing them to the East River Park. It was a critical connection in that sense, at the same time there was work going on at Governor's Island and a new park being planned for Brooklyn Bridge.
19th Century sailing ships unload cargo onto East River Street. Image from The East River Water Front Study, New York City Planning Department
THE FDR DRIVE PARK DESIGNERS BUILD CONSENSUS WHILE DESIGNING MASTER PLAN.
Chris Sharples As everybody understands, it's a study that was a year in the making, and it was truly collaborative. It didn't just involve the Richard Rogers Partnership and SHoP. It also involved a whole slew of people: Michael Samuelian from City Planning, Amanda Burden, Vishan Chakrabarti, and a host of supporting consultants. To give you a sense, within the year period, there were over a hundred and twenty meetings. It occurred with city officials in our office, in their offices, and in the basements of Al Smith Housing, with no fewer than six people. For us it was important that it wasn't about creating a master plan, but understanding how you begin the process of building consensus through design. The first thing that Amanda made clear to us was provision of access to the waterfront. That was the first charge. One would think that's a common goal, but we
All these elements together made us realize that we weren't just talking about an edge. We were talking about a space, a body of water that was being framed by all these different greenways. A lot of people in my age group don't remember that this edge was at one time incredibly dense and thick. In a way, that made us question the whole issue of whether the FDR necessarily had to come down. We already had an idea that if it came down, it would be very expensive and it would take a great deal of time. You would also have a number of roadways that you would have to cross. At the same time, members in different community boards understood that reducing the service to Lower Manhattan by disrupting the flow of traffic on the FDR would also hurt certain characteristics, for example the financial district. In the beginning when we started this, it was, okay, maybe the FDR comes down, but very quickly we realized that maybe the FDR could be a part of the solution. At the same time, we also understood that the edges of the five boroughs are quite diverse and in certain cases are defined by architecture, as we see with the Upper East Side and the promenade in Brooklyn Heights. There was not a lot of pedestrian activity occurring along South Street because of the bus parking, the
parking of vehicles and the fish market underneath the FDR Drive. You had to go in a few blocks before you actually started to get a sense of some form of pedestrian traffic on Water Street. So how were we going to begin drawing that energy of the interior of the city to the edge? The desire to increase maritime activity became a definite charge for the project. What became critical is that there needed to be an organizing principle that would draw people together. And that became the esplanade. It became the organizer, the spine for the whole project, starting at the Battery Maritime Building and ending at the East River Park at Pier 42. We started looking at models around the city. The Hudson River Park was one of them. But again, the width of space between where the city fabric stopped and the edge of the river began on the Hudson is quite different when you get to the East River. This idea of extending the city to the edge became something that was linked with the idea of keeping the FDR Drive raised. During this process, we were also working with Ken Smith. He was the landscape architect on the job and, as Kate was saying, we were looking at different materials, in this case masonry materials that would allow us to create a tactile environment in terms of using a sort of planking pattern. We also looked at railing devices for view finding or way finding devices to orient people as they walked along the promenade. Also Community Board 3 people were asking for fishing pole holders. In a way we were creating a menu-based approach that allowed people to really become a part of the process. At the same time, we had to think about how we were going to deal with the space underneath the FDR Drive once the chain-link fence came down. One of the things that we came up with was creating large pavilions, some of them as large as 7,000 square feet, with mixed-use programs, and at the same time looking at how we would deal with the underside of the FDR with sound attenuation materials. For us it was like creating this room underneath an expressway that did a number of things. One, it emphasized the sense of continuity. It created areas where you could create interior spaces. At the same time, it also started to generate a sense of intimacy in relationship to the
pedestrians. We looked at this in terms of the context of the city, making sure that any type of architecture that was integrated under the FDR would not block street view paths. That extended also to where the esplanade could grow. In some cases, as you see here, Ken integrated landscaping and seating areas into these wider zones. Community Board 3 was interested in bringing a farmer's market or flower shops to the East River, and the possibility of dance theaters or artists groups, nonprofit groups, taking over community spaces. We also looked at how these spaces could be transformed during different seasons. In the winter, an insulated environment could be created while still maintaining glowing views out to the water. This is a view at Pier 15, at one of the cross streets, looking across to the future Brooklyn Park. In order to make the esplanade work, it's how we bring people to it. There are two major thresholds to the park besides the cross-grain connectors. It's the connection at the Battery Maritime Building. Currently you can't connect because that's where the FDR dives down in front of that building. Other things that were brought up as we were starting to work was how the Battery Maritime Building was going to be used in terms of servicing Governor's Island. So there was the need to allow traffic to queue and use some of the slips. Working with URS on reconfiguring traffic patterns and moving the tunnel northward, we were able to create this incredible plaza in front of the Battery Maritime Building. Paving was a device to create the slip locations to drive vehicles that will be going to Governor's Island. This becomes the front door from the southern tip of Manhattan on to the new esplanade. Other things we started to focus on were the existing pier structures and the ones that have permits to rebuild, as in this case, Pier 15. Piers now operate on a six-footon-center structural system that creates silting and prevents habitat from occurring underneath. What we started to look at was the idea of what happens if we can increase these spans to thirty-fifty feet? We looked at the idea of using a Vierendeel system as a way of spanning the space. We weren't allowed to add more area over the water. The existing built area was what had to be maintained or removed. We thought about doing double duty. Maybe
we can generate a park over some of this area, and then below it within the Vierendeel Truss, create additional program space for maritime use. We talked quite a bit about this with Michael Davies and Vishan, which we were not putting out images of what things would actually look like. We had to produce some ta-da moments, but this was not necessarily what it will look like in the end. We looked at doing something with the building and creating a marina in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Then at Peck's Slip, which is currently being used as a parking lot, Ken was thinking about bringing water back in there. So during the summer it would become a reflecting pool and during the winter possibly a skating rink. As we move further up, Catherine and Rutgers, Montgomery, other slips where we looked at the possibility of generating more green space, again drawing the community down through these cross-grain connectors back on the esplanade, and then moving you up along the edge. To conclude, we generated this ending threshold through an urban beach at Pier 42. This becomes the culmination and the last connector to the East River Park. In the end the idea is to bring the bow sprits back into the city and the city back out to the water’s edge. Grahame Shane I want to thank all of our speakers and the teams that came with them. I'd like to thank Stuart Suna for his support in developing this panel, which seemed at times like it wasn't going to happen, but despite being under review, gave us a very comprehensive picture of what the Silvercup development will be like and what an amazing matrix of three-dimensional spaces, public and private, landscape and urban, that we could very well get. Michael Samuelian is an ex-student at The Cooper Union, a graduate of Harvard, and an old friend. He will respond to the speakers.
Michael M. Samuelian Thank you, Grahame. I spent the last two and a half years of my life managing the East River waterfront for the Department of City Planning, so I am more than intimately aware of the details of the project and the hundred and twenty meetings. I give credit to Chris Sharples and his team for doing a phenomenal job with a politically difficult project which straddles two very different community boards, Community Board 1 at the tip of Lower Manhattan and Community Board 3 on the Lower East Side. SHoP also did a fantastic job. When I left City Planning a couple of weeks ago, I was able to tell the Deputy Mayor that I left him with the most popular project in Lower Manhattan. That was the truth, because we have not received many negative comments with regard to the project, and that is a testament to the participatory process that Chris, SHoP and the Rogers team provide. This is the first time that I have seen the Silvercup proposal. One thing that's very clear is a strong imprint, not just from Richard Rogers but also from Amanda Burden. I could see it in every slide that was presented and in the language that the consultants and the owner used in describing the project. It's all about the activation of the public open space, the materials and how people experience the waterfront through materials and through different compositions of public open space, down to the types of benches. As any of you who have worked with Amanda know, the types of benches, the depth of a bench, the height of a bench, whether or not the bench has a back, details which drive designers crazy --- are important. It's important to see that a city official, and more importantly the administration, is supportive of good design. The very fact that we have three projects by Richard Rogers in New York in 2005 is extraordinary. That's a direct reflection of the high standards that the administration has given to designers, developers, and building owners. It's a risk on the part of the administration to do that, but you have quite an enlightened Mayor and quite an enlightened Deputy Mayor, and a very enlightened Commissioner of the City Planning Department reflects that. We're lucky to have this administration, and I'm happy to have it for another four years. It's a fantastic opportunity for designers to be working in the city.
One of the most important slides was Grahame's first slide of what we thought esplanades were. Criticisms of Battery Park City, a popular and well-designed place, is a different esplanade paradigm. I'm there a couple times a week. It's a fantastic, well-maintained environment, but it's not the most dynamic in terms of feeling like part of the city. Its design is detached from the city. It's a beautiful row of trees, beautiful benches, beautiful hand rail, but you don't feel you're in New York City. Both of these projects challenge that in a different way. The Silvercup project clearly takes the building all the way to the water's edge, activates it with retail, activates it with multi-levels of public open space and brings the city out to the waterfront to the greatest extent possible. This is a respectable and impressive attempt. Similarly, the East River waterfront densifies the edge and packs it underneath the FDR Drive. Who knows whether or not we'll be able to build it and what approvals we'll have to go through to get it, but the intent on both projects, to bring activity all the way out to the water's edge, is a different way of thinking about a waterfront. It's different from Battery Park City and it's different from Hudson River Park. It's a new way of thinking about how we can perceive and experience our waterfronts.
space. But it's always a challenge to activate an elevated open space. The idea of having a party space up there is a fascinating way of activating it. I want to close on a couple of questions we were struggling with at the city. How do you pay for these things? Maybe this is now my new hat? I've just started with the Related Companies. It's one thing to build a beautiful waterfront. But how do you maintain it? How do you pay for the costly maintenance? I'm impressed that both the Silvercup team and this administration can figure out how to make our waterfronts great again. Thank you.
These are two similarities between the two projects that are notable. I'm sure you intended it that way, but it's interesting to see that slide of what waterfronts were and what they can be. The Silvercup project is interesting in terms of analogies to the East River waterfront with regard to the mixture of uses, the diagram that Stuart showed of living and working and leisure all in one place, very much encompassed in almost a 1960s or 1970s megastructure city within a city. This is a fascinating idea. The East River waterfront could not try to do everything. We did look at residential development. We never looked at office buildings. But that was shot down by the community. I have qualifications of what the elevated open space in the Silvercup project will be like. It is, in fact, a challenge that we're all familiar with: how do you get people to an elevated open space that isn't public open space, no matter how hard you try with an elevator. I was just at the reopening of the plaza at 55 Water Street. Ken Smith did a great job redesigning that public open
Rogers East River project in association with SHoP .
All illustrations courtesy of speakers. Special thanks to Bettina Kaes for design and edit.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
Lance Brown recently completed two terms as CUNY Chair, School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture and is 2005 Chair of AIA’s National, Regional and Urban Design Committee. He co-directed Crosstown 116: Bringing Habitat II Home from Istanbul to Harlem.
Grahame Shane’s Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory, now available in the USA and Europe from John Wiley, proposes that large-scale single city plans are disappearing. More likely to succeed are plans addressing issues in district sections of the city. With Brian McGrath, he has written Sensing the 21st Century City, Up Close and Remote, available this month from AD. Currently he teaches at Columbia and Cooper Union and was recently Visiting Professor of Urban Design at University of Montreal. He holds a PhD in architectural and urban history from Cornell, among other degrees.
Stuart Match Suna, President of Silvercup Studios, received an architecture degree from Carnegie-Mellon and was thus acquainted with the design competition process which was used in the selection of Richard Rogers & Partners for the Silvercup Studio redevelopment. His skills as a developer were honed in the transformation of the site, starting in 1983, into 18 studios. Today it is the largest film and television production facility in the USA. More than 400 commercials are now produced at the studios, including those for Wendy’s and Old Navy. It is also home to The Sopranos. A partner in Suna/Levine, he has recently completed the development of the $60 million Anchor Partnership Plaza. He is also a partner in Metro Management Development that oversees some 10,000 apartments. Suna is founder and current chair of The Hampton’s International Film Festival.
Kathleen John-Alder, Associate Partner, Olin Partnership, Philadelphia, is currently working on a master plan for Greenwich Street South adjacent to the World Trade Center site and previously worked on a master plan for Canberra and on landscape for the J. Paul Getty Center, Los Angeles. Trained as a botanist, she has also worked as a scientific illustrator.
Christopher Sharples worked as project designer at Aoshima Sekkei in Japan for three years before establishing Sharples Holden Pasquarelli in New York. He is registered to practice in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Mississippi and Washington DC. He is an adjunct professor of architecture at Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1990.
Jayne Merkel’s new book on Eero Saarinen is available from Phaidon. Merkel’s masters degree in art history comes from Smith College where, under Henry Russell Hitchcock, she prepared a thesis called “Eliel Saarinen at Cranbrook.” Her other books have covered Michael Graves, Richard Dattner and Pasanella-Klein-StolzmanBerg, all of whom are included in the Fellowship of the Institute, as is Merkel. Until 2002, Ms. Merkel edited the NY Chapter AIA magazine, Oculus, considered among the top three design professional magazines. Now she writes for Architectural Design, rated the best design publication in Great Britain.
Michael Samuelian. In the days just prior to tonight’s program, Michael Samuelian joined the Related Companies as an associate, where he will work on the new Moynihan Station project. Until two weeks ago, as director of Lower Manhattan Special Projects at the New York City Department of City Planning, Samuelian carried in his portfolio the East River Waterfront, Greenwich South Neighborhood Study and urban design guidelines for the World Trade Center site. He holds an MA in Urban Design from Harvard and a BA in Architecture from Cooper Union.
INSTITUTE FOR URBAN DESIGN Fellows Program Registrants The Barnard Club GLENN ALLEN Hargreaves Associates New York, NY
ALESSANDRO CIMINI Anthony Crusor Architects New York, NY
ALEXANDRA ALTMAN Battery Park City Authority New York, NY
JAMES COLGATE New York, NY
JOYCE BATTERTON Institute for Urban Design New York, NY
SOFIA Corria Cooper Robertson New York, NY
CARMI BEE Rothzeid Kaiserman Thomson & Bee New York, NY
DENNIS CROMPTON Archigram London, England
OMAR BLAIK University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA
ROBERT DAVIDSON STV Incorporated New York, NY
LANCE JAY BROWN School of Architecture, CUNY New York, NY
GLENN ERIKSON Time Equities, Inc. New York, NY
JAMES BROWN HDR New York, NY
KAREN FAIRBANKS Barnard College & Marble Fairbanks New York, NY
SARA CAPLES Caples Jefferson Architects New York, NY
ANN FEREBEE Institute for Urban Design New York, NY
COLIN CATHCART Kiss + Cathcart Brooklyn, NY
MICHAEL FISHMAN Halcrow, LLC New York, NY
ALIYE CELIK United Nations New York, NY
RONALD LEE FLEMING Townscape Institute Cambridge, MA
LISA CHAMBERLAIN New York Times New York, NY
RICHARD FRANKLIN STV Incorporated New York, NY
MILDRED FRIEDMAN Curator / Journalist New York, NY
SUDHIR JAMBHEKAR Fox & Fowle Architects New York, NY
JEAN MARIE GATH Pfeiffer Partners, Inc. New York, NY
KATHLEEN JOHN-ALDER Olin Partnership Philadelphia, PA
ROLAND GEBHARDT Roland Gebhardt Design New York, NY
BETTINA KAES Institute for Urban Design New York, NY
AXUMITE GEBRE-EGZIABHER UN Habitat New York, NY
LAURIE KERR New York, NY
STEPHANIE GELB Battery Park City Authority New York, NY MARK GINSBERG Curtis & Ginsberg Architects LLP New York, NY CHRISTINE GLAVASIEN G2 Project Planning Brooklyn, NY JORDAN GRUZEN Gruzen Samton LLP-Architects New York, NY DACIANA HAGEA Gruzen Samton LLP New York, NY CATHY LANG HO The Architects' Newspaper New York, NY ANNA HOLTZMAN The Architects' Newspaper New York, NY MICHAEL HORODNICEANU Urbitran Associates, Inc. New York, NY MARIAN IMPERATORE Englewood, NJ
MICHAEL KWARTLER Michael Kwartler & Associates New York, NY IGNACIO LAMAR Anthony Crusor Architects New York, NY GEORGE LEVENTIS Langan Engineering & Environmental Service Inc. New York, NY ANNE LOCKE AKRF New York, NY MICHAEL MANFREDI Weiss/Manfredi Architects New York, NY VICTORIA MARSHALL Unversity of Toronto Toronto, Canada BRIAN MC GRATH Columbia University New York, NY JOHN MC GRATH University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA CHARLES MC KINNEY Estuaryone Urban Design New York, NY
JAYNE MERKEL Architecture Review London, England
LYN RICE Lyn Rice Architects New York, NY
DAVID MIDDLETON Handel Architects LLP New York, NY
BARRY RICE Barry Rice Architects New York, NY
ANDRES MIGNUCCI Andres Mignucci Arquitectos San Juan, Puerto Rico
RONNETTE RILEY Ronnette Riley Architects New York, NY
PAUL MILANA Cooper Robertson New York, NY RITU MOHANTY Buckhurst Fish Katz New York, NY
JANET RISERVATO Institute for Urban Design New York, NY
PHILIP MORRIS Proctors Theater Schenectady, NY RANDALL MORTON Cooper Robertson & Partners New York, NY ROSS MOSKOWITZ Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP New York, NY SUZANNE O'KEEFE Downtown Alliance New York, NY ROBIN POGREBIN New York Times New York, NY LEE POMEROY Lee Harris Pomeroy Associates New York, NY ELLEN POSNER Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute New York, NY PETER REED Museum of Modern Art New York, NY
ROSEMARY RUGGIERO Institute for Urban Design New York, NY WILLIAM RYALL Ryall Porter Architects New York, NY MARIA SACHS Pikes Peak Income Holding New York, NY MICHAEL SAMUELIAN The Related Companies New York, NY MICHAEL SCHWARTING NY Institute of Technology Central Islip, NY GRAHAME SHANE Urban Design Program, CUNY New York, NY JOHN SHAPIRO Phillips Preiss Shapiro New York, NY CHRIS SHARPLES SHoP Architects New York, NY
ETHEL SHEFFER NY Metro Center American Planning New York, NY JEREMY SHERRING Steven Kratchman Architect New York, NY SUSAN SHOEMAKER Urban Design Consultant New York, NY ROBERT SIEGAL Robert Siegal Architects New York, NY MICHAEL SORKIN Michael Sorkin Studio New York, NY JEFFREY SOULE American Planning Association Washington, DC MARK STRAUSS Fox & Fowle New York, NY STUART SUNA Silvercup Studios Long Island City, New York EVAN SUPCOFF HNTB Architecture New York, NY ALLEN SWERDLOW Design Seven Associates New York, NY EDWARD TUCK Michael Graves & Associates New York, NY KISHORE VARANASI CBT Architects Boston, MA WARD VERBAKEL Columbia University New York, NY
ROXANNE WARREN Roxanne Warren & Associates New York, NY MICHAEL WASHBURN Michael Washburn Partners New York, NY MIKE WEBB Archigram London, England STEVEN WEBER NYC Dept. of Transportation New York, NY CLAIRE WEISZ Weisz & Yoes New York, NY ANDREW WHALLEY Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners USA New York, NY HENRY WHITE HM White Architects New York, NY REGINA WICKHAM Ceramic Artist New York, NY BARBARA WILKS W Architecture Brooklyn, NY BEVERLY WILLIS Architecture Research Institute New York, NY HENRY WOLLMAN Newman Institute for Real Estate New York, NY JOHN YOUNG Queens City Planning Kew Gardens, NY