[...] the privatized model of urban development embodies no nonmercantile aspirations. Suburbia today conforms to a simplistic, low-density, auto-dependent, money-driven model. [...] What one drives by in the typical American suburb is the result of little more than thousands of purely economic transactions. And in this instrumental landscape, each individual development is manufactured and considered only within its own short-term economic parameters. Any sense of a larger community or shared culture must struggle against the physical impediments of distance and the devotion to the automobile.

James S. Russell: "Privatized Lives: On the Embattled ‘Burbs"

(N.B. the Futura on the sign! Well played, Metrolink.)

Although I was supposed to spend the weekend in Newark, it’s only a short ride on PATH from Jersey to New York, so there was really no way I was going to sit through a boring conference about slippery ideas like “leadership” and “networking” when instead I could be walking around Soho and the West Village. I regret nothing. The city is wonderful and I’m more than willing to use any excuse I can cook up to visit.

For what it’s worth, I think the High Line is fabulous¹. The architectural details are thoughtful and well-designed, the landscaping is superb, and the view of the city is at once refreshing and reässuring; the perspective is new but the city is the New York we know and love. While some of the ambition of the original design has been compromised (no wetlands suspended over 14th St? Will we still get that awesome tree lift?), it’s still a very impressive place. Even the fact that it’s there at all is exciting, and I can’t help but wonder how many other potential gems are hidden in the city, waiting to be found. (Los Angeles, capital city of underutilization and missed opportunity, has taught me all about this.)

In the new urban chemistry of New York, the High Line is both a byproduct and catalyst of gentrification. This is clear both in the glitter of the starchitecture developments springing up around it and the people who come here. Yet walking amid the hipsters and tourists, I was surprised by the pacing of the whole experience. It's impossible to hurry here, not that you'd want to. Field Operations artfully segmented the path into landscaped episodes–grasslands, woodlands, open spaces, and more intimate ones–and the result is a true urban oasis. This is reflected in the way people use the space: they sit and read, eat their lunches, crowd-watch. Many were, like me, taking snapshots with their digital SLRs; others leaned over the railings and gazed at the city below. Most of all, people simply stroll (and in lower Manhattan, this is a sight to behold).

Much of this, I suppose, has to do with scale. The vast acreage of Central Park allows for programming like baseball fields, ice-skating rinks, and amphitheaters. The wider, eastern half of the Promenade Plantée–the only real precedent for the High Line, running along an old rail route through the 12th in Paris–is crowded with local joggers and cyclists; here there is really only room for strolling. You go to there just to be there, not to go anywhere or do anything besides escape the sidewalk. Unlike Central Park, on the High Line everyone’s a tourist. After all, it doesn’t go anywhere anymore. It’s just there, a narrow park floating over Chelsea. Ostensibly it connects, or will someday connect, the Meatpacking District with Hudson Yards, but no one actually walking between those two places would use its meandering path for expedience. As a landscape, it is not a means but and end to itself. As a public space, the High Line is social rather than instrumental.²

The creation of public space from the ruins of vestigial infrastructure is, in a way, the inverse of the Sylmar project, which is about using new infrastructure as an opportunity to create public space. I’m not looking to repurpose anything, or to change one thing into another, but, by coupling public transportation and public space, actuate them both. Their relationship should be one of mutual enablement. On one hand, connecting the rail station to the city with public space will embed the station into the fabric of the city–an essential part of making mass transit work for American suburbia. On the other hand, attaching real function to the space transforms it–as a place, is not passive but active, neither a park (social) nor a plaza (civic) but an instrumental space. The reciprocity of these two aspects is vital to the project: the more people ride the train, the more lively the space; the more lively the space, the more people are drawn to the train. And with ridership projections at 16,000 passengers a day, Sylmar may be the busiest station between Los Angeles and San Francisco, so the numbers are there. The key will be in how the link is designed–my job in the spring.

PS The pedestrianization of Times Square is awesome, even if the place is still full of European and Midwestern tourists. I didn’t know, though, that the thing at the very apex of the intersection was an Olive Garden.

[1] For other notes around the High Line, see this, this, and this, as well as JHK's predictable bitchfest here.

[2] see Elizabeth Blackmar, "Appropriating the Commons: The Tragedy of Property Rights Discourse" for transportation facilities and the public realm.

Being in the midst of my own thesis and curious if not skeptical about the very nature of an architectural thesis, I walked to SCI-Arc this weekend to see their graduate thesis exhibition. I’ve gone a few times before and enjoyed the work. Student work, at its best, provokes and inspires, and few schools have the reputation for innovative work that SCI-Arc has earned. This year, however, instead of giving out one award for the best thesis, the school gave four. It’s easy to see why: as a group, the projects weren’t merely unimpressive–they were boring. Scandalously boring, really. The eight or so projects on display were uniformly mediocre; there were a few good renderings, as usual, but many graphics were ugly, illegible, and some were badly pixelated. Precedent studies were sloppy and predictable. And not to get all William Safire on you, but the presentation texts were poorly written and full of grammar and spelling errors (and questionable Deleuze references, but that’s a separate issue). I’m sorry, but if this is your graduate thesis presentation, how have you (and your instructor!) not read over your abstract a hundred times? I suppose there aren’t any red squiggly lines in Illustrator.

Most offensive of all was the overwhelming lack of urgency in the projects. Careless presentation is one thing; poverty of critical thought is another. There was all the Maya and V-ray and Rhinoscripting you’d expect to see, but nothing else, nothing beyond the blob. One project explored the geometric possibilities of “banal figures” such as the rubber ducky. Another fearlessly tackled the perennial issue of cuteness. One of the winners of the best M.Arch thesis award affixed huge baroque arabesques and curlicues to a generic building and twisted them into a gothic-looking tower straight out of some DeviantArt dystopia.

This makes me sound more curmudgeonly than I mean to be. It’s not like this kind of form-making is particularly wrong or morally reprehensible, nor is it uninteresting. Yet there seems to a failure to harness the technology and use it as a means to an end beyond itself. They may be interesting as isolated exercises, but I lose patience when they’re posed as architectural theses and I’m left asking that most frustrating of questions: so what? What then is a thesis? How does one argue through architecture, and, more importantly, what do we argue for? The SCI-Arc projects I saw were dull because, after form, there was nothing. I’m not sure whether to chalk it up to myopia or nihilism–could they not see past the final rendering or did they just not care?

Today I organized a meeting with a few other fifth-year students to discuss our own thesis degree projects. People talked about coastal settlements and rising sea levels, politicized war memorials, militant agriculture in Palestine, border crossings, homeless shelters on Skid Row, and a chancery. There are two things happening here that I didn’t see at SCI-Arc: architectural ideas born out of social awareness and diversity of direction. Hopefully we’ll all come out with very different projects that are not only innovative and beautiful but thoughtful and relevant.

In the mail today:

a+t continues to rock my world.