The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Architecture and the City
technological envelope. In the Columbia Student Center, the ramps are covered
in glass so that they are translucent and self-supporting. And we hope
that will be an incredibly social place—what we called a hub of activities. It
will be the first time in New York City that structural glass has been used in
this particular way.
WM: Have you seen the new Nike Town building in New York, where escalators
are not the central spaces, but only routes to selling floors—and
thus not what we would like to see cities be or become?
BT: Yes, cities are such incredibly complex places, but the question is always
how do you increase their complexity, not how do you centralize them, and
how do you design certain buildings as urban generators?
WM: You had a very unusual site at Columbia in the history of New York
because normally we have zoning, or laws that ask buildings to go in certain
ways, but there is never a physical frame for the building: yet here you had
a physical master plan dropped into the surrounding commercial city.
BT: Yes, you don’t know how right you are. The zoning of New York is in contradiction
to the McKim, Mead, and White master plan for Columbia. And we
said we were going to be normative: that is, we said we would like to continue
the cornice of the existing McKim buildings, so we had to go for six months
through an unbelievably complicated, bureaucratic process. The zoning in
this area said that you had to have a cornice at 85 feet, but the McKim cornice
adjacent to this site was at 100 feet. We had to ask for a zoning variance,
which meant that we had to go before community boards, which meant
that anyone can protest your building.
WM: This story goes to the heart of the problem of designing in New York
City, and how much education the public needs to understand the design
process in this city.
BT: It is interesting, the bureaucratic code developed by the city over many
years, with all its contradictions—even when there are historical and physical
changes, and the code is no longer appropriate. There is a puzzle with
these constraints: you are much freer to invent within that Gordian knot of
impossibilities than if you ask for a variance, where you are endlessly scrutinized
with all the wrong criteria. This is the fascination of the New York
process.
WM: How about the Gröningen Video Gallery site, which is a lost “nowhere
site,” in a roundabout? Were you given that site or did you select it?