URBAN DESIGN UPDATE

Sagaponack

Mexico City Shanghai

Kiev

Newsletter of the Institute for Urban Design January/February 2005 Vol. 21 No. 1

MIDWESTERN CITIES SHRINK AND YOUNGER CITIES SPRAWL AS A NEW GENERATION TACKLES THE CHALLENGE Youngstown is shrinking. Despite the obsessive anxiety about sprawl on the part of American planners, Kent State University under a team directed by David Reed, is looking for ways to revise street patterns to ameliorate the sense of void on streets in a city from which some 20,000 have departed – in search of jobs – in the last decade. Sprawl, on the other hand, blights upscale Southampton where potato fields vanish beneath MacMansions at the edge of 200-year-old villages. Paul Goldberger, writing in the September 13 issue of The New Yorker brilliantly bullseyed in on need for a community plan in Sagaponack where Fellows Richard Meier and Steven Holl are designing high end homes for buyers – but where no plan – such as the one for Sunnyside, Queens, organizes the homes into a satisfactory ensemble. For the best new take on reusing urban land to contain sprawl read Rosalind Greenstein’s Recycling the City for Lincoln Institute (see review on page 3). How will city-design evolve as new challenges arise in Southeast Asia and Central Europe as well as in North American cities? Who are the professionals emerging? Here are three names that emerged at a sandwich session on December 30th with friends and Fellows at the Institute headquarters: Michael Conard, Columbia, Linda Pollak, Michael Fishman, recently relocated to Halcrow, LLC and Sonja Lyneham, visiting from University of New South Wales. Casey Jones joined the dialogue via email from Washington. Among those mentioned were Ray Gastil now in the public sector (see page 2) and Sandro Marpillero at Columbia. Also mentioned were Mateo and Matias Pinto, teaching at Columbia University last year, from Caracus. Mexico City has a new infrastructure plan developed by Fernando Romero that was presented last fall to students at Columbia’s urban design program. Romero’s second project, Hyperborder 2050, proposes European and Asian firms as new players in the region. Romero’s work also will be included in Young Architects 6, available from Princeton Architectural Press in May. China, where the focus of concern is farmers being pushed off land, is nevertheless the source of a new generation of gifted urban designers and architects. Delphine Yip, working for Benjamin Wood in Shanghai has revitalized Xintiandi neighborhood including rear alley pedestrian routes. This formerly prosaic neighborhood of 1920s residential buildings has a master plan by SOM. The American firm, Wood + Zapata, is run in Shanghai by Delphine Yip, a Harvard-educated Shanghai-born local architect. She sees to it that 4-to 5-story height is limited on new buildings on cobblestone alleys while older buildings are adapted to new use. At least one East European city is heady with democracy. Kiev’s Independence Square, so recently the site of demonstrations that helped elect a new president of Ukraine, has also been the site for recent design schemes including one by Theodore Liebman and others by a cadre of local designers. Bratislava, capital of Slovakia, finds itself the fastest growing economy in Eastern Europe. The challenge for local designers will be to maintain the historic core while creating housing, retail and manufacturing sites beyond the core.

NEW PROJECTS Ho Chi Minh Sydney

Stone Barns Tarrytown Port of Los Angeles PEOPLE ON THE MOVE

From A Global Perspective Among The Most Interesting Urban Design Projects Are Those In Pacific Rim Cities Including Ho Chi Minh, Shanghai And Sydney. Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, and with a population projected to grow to 20 million by 2020, plans to redevelop the center, reports Dennis Pieprz whose firm, Sasaki Associates, is responsible for the new plan. The almost circular 1,840 acre site, to include residential, office and nearly 1,000 acres of parks, wetlands and water, will connect to the 19th century historic center. The clean up of the Saigon River will transform the metropolis to a riverfront city. Sasaki won the assignment after an urban design ideas competition in 2003. Sydney’s Rhodes Project is unusual for the openess of the planning process and for freshness of vision. Planning Workshop Australia reached out to next generation architects Carlos Frias and Marvin Soh to develop plan, reports Sonja Lyneham, head of the office. Sherman Creek, an inlet on the East River off 207th Street near the Northern tip of Manhattan, will be noticeably greener this spring as the parks department installs four street-end green spaces on the blocks below 207th Street. This will be the first implementation step of a plan started by Fellow Warren James in 2002 for The Audubon Partnership for Economic Development. The community-based plan falls under the aegis of The Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, operating with some $300 million of Federal, State and Local funds over ten years. Pacantico Hills, New York is the site of the Stone Barns Centre for Food and Agriculture on an 80-acre portion of the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. estate near Tarrytown. Its perfect match of architecture with cuisine make it among the most satisfying East Coast projects of the last year. The Norman-style stone barns, originally designed by Grosvenor Atterbury, are currently being replanned by Machado and Silvetti to accommodate the Blue Hill Restaurant. Project architect Chris Grimley reports that the client will next open a new visitor center. Meanwhile, diners can currently order salads made from vegetables grown in the 24,000-foot greenhouse next to the restaurant. The San Pedro Waterfront and Promenade Master Development Plan, prepared under the direction of Vaughn Davies, EE&K, for the Port of Los Angeles Board of Commissioners, is among the most promising of current urban design projects on the West Coast. When completed, it will provide Los Angeles with a recreational gateway to the Pacific to counterpoint the working port of Los Angeles, now rated busier than New York’s. The new plan will provide an 8-mile promenade and new development sites on a 400-acre parcel. Ray Gastil, former Director of Van Alen Institute, has become Director of Manhattan Office of Department of City Planning . . . Vishaan Chakrabarti, who formerly held the post, returns to SOM as Director of Urban Planning . . . Ronald Lee Fleming came down from Cambridge to speak at a Bard Birthday Breakfast last December 15, where he urged an audience celebrating the 40th anniversary of New York’s Landmarks Law to look beyond esthetics to the public good . . . Bonnie Harken, Nautilus International, is working for the office of Manhattan Borough President on a study to improve waterfront access for the West Harlem/Hamilton Heights neighborhood . . . Alan Balfour, Dean School of Architecture, Rensselaer, returned last May from Shanghai’s TongJi University where he gave the keynote address for introduction of Shanghai/Berlin, special issue of Time and Architecture Magazine . . . Civitas, a non-profit representing Upper East Side and Harlem residents has obtained $70,000 for an engineering study for a pedestrian bridge reports Chairman Genie Rice. The bridge would make Randall’s Island sport facilities available to pedestrians . . . Joan Byron, Pratt Center for Community Development, travels often to work on Justice and Sustainability Project for Bronx River . . . Ruth Durack, on leave from Kent State’s Urban Design Center, will return permanently to her hometown, Perth, to start up a new Centre for Urban Design of Western Australia to be sponsored by the State of Western Australia, the University of Western Australia and Curtin University . . . Michael Fishman has joined Halcrow, LLC, one of London’s largest urban development firms, where he will represent the firm in New York.

HONORS EXHIBITIONS EDUCATION London Baghdad

IN THE PRESS BOOKS

Aleppo, the fabled 5,000-year-old city in northern Syria, has been awarded Harvard’s Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design for the rehabilitation of the ancient city center by the private German Technical Cooperation (GTZ). The prize will be given to Mayor Maan Chibli on April 13 and an exhibition on how the city’s urban fabric has been maintained during the rehabilitation process will be on view through May 25. Mexico City and Barcelona have received the prize previously. El Barrio: Puerto Rican New York, and perhaps the oldest Spanish neighborhood in the city, is the subject of an exhibition, designed by Fellow Warren A. James and on view through June 12 at the Museum of the City of New York. The exhibition is based on photos by Hiram Maristany who still lives in El Barrio, where he was born in 1945. The London School of Economics has been long admired in the USA for its Ove Arup cities program which, with its emphasis on social issues, has often provided a home for Fellow Richard Sennett. Now reports Katherine Firth, the Design Studio, which she directs, has established a formal relationship with the London Development Agency, where a current study focuses on a new stadium for Wembly, east of London. The first class of Iraqi archeologists completed training in December to set up a computer-based inventory of Iraq’s historic sites, which continue to be looted as war goes on. The program was funded by UNESCO and carried out at Amman, Jordan by Getty Conservation Initiative and World Monuments Fund. The J.M. Kaplan Fund helped provide digital cameras and other needed equipment. It is interesting to note that the most admired of Italian and English architectural magazines are increasing their coverage of cities. Domus reports on Athens Olympics impact on city, Valencia harbor plan for 32nd Americas Cup and a Shanghai Paris comparison by Scott Lash, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, London University, in the August 2004 issue. The Architectural Review, under managing editor Catherine Slessor, published in the January, 2005 issue a report on a building boom in Warsaw, a cemetery in Belzec (Poland) and the library in Alexandria, designed by Craig Dykers and partners, Snohetta. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews Since 1430. By Mark Mazower. Maps, color/black/white illus. 525 pages. Harper Collins, New York. $45.00.

The Times (of London) Literary Supplement, in a review by John Ashbery, lists this book first in a poll of 30 writers to select top books for 2004. That a city profile should be selected as a top book confirms that city biographies are a genre that has arrived. The text focuses on how each population group – Muslim, Jewish and Greek – changed the culture as well as urban form. This volume draws attention to a city which, though off the beaten path for American urban designers, nevertheless ran up second against Valencia in the race to host the Americas Cup in 2007. Alexandria: City of Memory. By Michael Haag. 368 pages. Yale University Press. $35.00.

Michael Haag, a photographer and journalist, gives the reader an armchair tour of Alexandria via the work of Greek poet Constantine Cavafy who lived in Alexandria when it, not Athens, was the seat of Greek letters. He also describes the city as seen through the eyes of E.M. Forster, who worked there during the First World War, and through eyes of Lawrence Durrell, whose Alexandria Quartet was one of the post-war literary hits in the English language press. Haag fails to mention Andre Aciman’s Out of Egypt: A Memoir, a more recent memoir on post World War II Alexandria. Recycling the City: The Use and Reuse of Urban Land. Rosalind Greenstein and Yesim Sungu-Eryilmaz, editors. Black/white charts and photos. 260 pages. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge. Paperback. $20.00.

Among the most interesting of some 14 writers in this collection of 11 papers are Alan W. Evans, University of Reading, on the economics of vacant land; Marie Howland, University of Maryland, on how to overcome barriers of contamination in inner city and the role of community development corporations in brownfield redevelopment by Margaret Dewer, University of Michigan; Sarah Gardner’s survey of Camden, Newark, Patterson and Trenton reports success in Newark with its land-hungry private sector.

NEW FELLOWS

Charles R. Beckert, Associate, Henderson and Bodwell, LLP, Plainview, NY; Peter Claman,

Partner, SLCE Architects, New York, NY; Suzanne Clarke, Esq., Private Developer, San Diego,

CA; Carolyn Clevenger, Senior Project Manager, NYC Economic Development Corp., New

York, NY; Henry N. Cobb, Founding Partner, PEI Cobb Freed & Partners, New York, NY;

Shane Coen, Principal, Coen + Partners, Minneapolis, MN; Billie Cohen, Landscape Architect,

A. Billie Cohen, Ltd., New York, NY; James Corner, Director, Field Operations, New York, NY;

Thomas Curley, HOK, New York, NY; James S. Davidson, Partner, SLCE Architects, New

York, NY; Michel Dionne, Partner, Cooper Robertson & Partners, New York, NY; Craig

Dykers, Architect/Director, Snohetta, Oslo, Norway; Deborah Gans, Gans & Jelacic, New York,

NY; Christopher Glaisek, VP, Planning, Design & Development, Lower Manhattan

Development Corp., New York, NY; Beth Greenberg, Principal, Dattner Architects, New York,

NY; Kathleen John-Alder, Associate Partner, Olin Partnership, Philadelphia, PA; Casey L.

Jones, Office of the Chief Architect, US General Services Administration, Washington, DC;

David Kamp, President, Dirtworks, PC Landscape Architecture, New York, NY; Laurie Kerr,

Contributing Critic, Wall Street Journal, New York, NY; Michael A. Manfredi, Partner,

Weiss/Manfredi Architects, New York, NY; Ross F. Moskowitz, Partner, Stroock & Stroock &

Lavan LLP, New York, NY; Enrique Norten, Principal, Ten Arquitectos, New York, NY;

Richard Pergolis, President, Pergolis Swartz Associates, New York, NY; Elizabeth Plater-

Zyberk, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., Inc., Miami, FL; Monica Ponce de Leon, Partner, Office

DA, Boston, MA; Barry Rice, Principal, Barry Rice Architects, New York, NY; Mario

Schjetnan, Architect/Urbanism/Landscape, Grupo de Diseno Urvano, Colonia Condesa, Mexico;

John Shapiro, Principal, Phillips Preiss Shapiro, New York, NY; William W. Sharples,

Principal, SHOP Architects, P.C., New York, NY; Edward Tuck, Senior Associate, Michael

Graves & Associates, New York, NY; James L. Wescoat, Jr., Head of Landscape Architecture,

University of Illinois at U-C, Champaign, IL; John Williams, Senior Vice President, HDR, Inc.,

New York, NY; David Miles Ziskind, Principal, S.V.P., STV Architects, New York, NY.

UPDATE, published six times a year, welcomes contributions from members.