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November 4, 2006 |
Social Architecture Gets Testy
Calogero Sees “Racism” in Criticism of RIOC/DHCR
Review
by Jami Bernard
The Master Plan for the development of Roosevelt Island – and how that plan has mutated architecturally and in terms of affordability – were topics of hot, sometimes frenzied debate at a forum held October 23 at the Center for Architecture in Lower Manhattan. By the end of the evening, a panelist was accusing an audience member of "racist" attitudes for opposing recent development deals, and the moderator hastily shut down the much-vaunted Q&A session.
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Most dramatic of all was when the esteemed John Johansen, a 90-year-old elder statesman of American architecture who has made his name preserving function over form, bluntly dismissed Octagon Park Apartments as sterile, soulless, and inhuman. "I wouldn’t want to live there," he proclaimed with passion.
It all began peacefully enough, a lovefest designed to showcase how Roosevelt Island has achieved the Holy Grail of urban planning: affordable housing that’s easy on the eyes and located in a friendly, green part of town. The six panelists agreed that the Island was, and remains, unique in terms of housing, demographics, views, and proximity to Manhattan. The Island "tugs at your heartstrings," according to Judith Calogero, Chair of the Board of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation (RIOC). "I used to like it a little bit better… when I could sneak onto the Island and walk around the Island, when people didn’t know who I was," she said. "But since now that my photo’s been published in The WIRE so many times, I’m not as anonymous as I used to be."
The free event, billed as Roosevelt Island: Market-Oriented Housing 1975-2006, was open to the public as part of a series of Architecture as Public Policy gatherings sponsored by the American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) Housing Committee and the Planning and Urban Design committees in association with the Congress of International Modern Architects. A packed house heard from a selection of panelists, including the original architects from Johansen & Bhavnani, the firm that designed Rivercross and Island House; Bruce Becker, whose firm, Becker & Becker, designed Octagon Park Apartments; and Alfreda Radzicki, whose firm has been working with the Hudson-Related developer team on the Southtown buildings.
The evening offered a history lesson on architecture and social conscience, accompanied by slides and explanations of how the architects worked around their era’s constraints on materials, design, and funding. Johansen spoke of trying to incorporate cutting-edge engineering techniques that would have saved money on caulking, but said he was shot down by local building codes. Becker admitted during the brief Q&A that "the design on Roosevelt Island is influenced by politics, by a lot of different forces. It is the way it is because it had to be."
The evening was a toast of sorts to Philip Johnson, the architect who crafted the original blueprint for how the former Welfare Island could grow into a thriving community, and to Ed Logue, the city planner who, while president of the New York State Urban Development Corporation (UDC) from 1968 to 1975, was the visionary credited with getting the ball rolling.
In her opening remarks, Calogero offered a sort of State of the Union address, in which she summed up Eastwood’s departure from the Mitchell-Lama program, the ethnic and financial demographics as of the 2000 U.S. Census, and the new developments at the north and south ends of the Island. "In terms of design, so much of what we do at the Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) is to make up for some of the failed policies of the past," she said. "When the government is involved in designing the building of affordable housing, what we know of as public housing, which we see in every city in this country, there is a temperament to some of their housing. And I say it is failed because it wasn’t all well-designed or placed appropriately on the land, it was not built for the long haul, appropriate reserves were never structured, and the operations were never considered for the long term. So we live with those failed policies and we strive to do things better."
Calogero said DHCR’s updated design guidelines demonstrate that "we build much smaller, we build much smarter, we build much greener, and we build to endure a long-term design, something to last some 40 or 50 years."
The Octagon, according to Calogero, has been a "critical" component of DHCR’s plan, not only to preserve "this absolutely beautiful building, and as one of our first forays into the market-rate business," but also "because it allowed us to develop on the northern end of the Island, it allowed us to bring 500 more units of housing to the Island. When I first came, the population was 8500, but the original plan as Philip Johnson saw it for the Island was for 20,000 people, or 5000 units. In order for us to achieve some level of self-sufficiency, and to operate the Island in a manner that we think it deserves to be operated in, we needed more residential development. We needed to be able to charge ground rents and other fees; that’s how we operate."
Judith Berdy, president of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society, provided an update on the Blackwell House restoration and trolley kiosk. "Southtown seems to be growing like Topsy. The buildings are beautiful and well maintained," she said. But she expressed concern that residents of Southtown’s two institution-owned buildings (465 and 475 Main Street, owned by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Cornell-Weill) "come and go from their buildings and don’t assimilate into the community. It’s a little frustrating for us."
Since questions were not permitted until the end, and then shut down before a discussion could get under way, Berdy’s concern went mostly without comment. However, the lack of assimilation she spoke of contradicts the original hopes for the Island as expressed by the panel’s architects. According to them, each constellation of buildings was meant to encourage socialization; Johansen described "the confluence of the system," how courts connected to other courts, colors to colors.
"We had shelter places where old people could play" – the choice of words brought a laugh – "where lovers could meet. There were unassigned spaces in Island House, by the elevators, that we left open for those people to use as a children’s play area, or for hobbies and social events. We don’t know how it all worked out, leaving it open-ended. But this effort of ours was more than just architecture, it has a social aspect, which is in the diversity of income levels and lifestyles working together. And for a part of Manhattan that is so insular, it was the peaceable kingdom, mystical, the cable car going through the air and putting down silently, a wonderful, enchanting experience for children."
Johansen’s partner, Ashok Bhavnani, spoke of Philip Johnson’s original vision of Main Street as a "curved spine in the middle of the Island" around which buildings were designed to suggest a ship whose terraced "cabins" stepped down from the main thoroughfare to the shoreline, offering a view as if from a river cruise. The planners "charged us to build a community where every building is related to every other," said Bhavnani. "Logue wanted the Island to be environmentally refreshed and refurbished."
Johansen charmed the audience with unvarnished remarks about the enormity and thrill of the challenge back in the early 1970s. "My first visit to the Island was rather shocking," he said. "There were abandoned buildings, stainless-steel pans upon which dissecting cadavers were to be used, discarded objects, glass jars with formaldehyde, body parts, urine vessels – of which I still have one. I wanted to bring it here and auction it off for $500. Compared to the Ile de la Cite in Paris, how awful it is to abandon an island in the middle of a city like that."
Still, there were the inevitable compromises. The tallest parts of the buildings were to line Main Street, then step down toward the water. "The original plan called for ten stories at the middle, but unfortunately, we had to raise that up to 20 stories, and that seems to be the fortunes of housing generally in the world today," said Bhavnani of the political and economic constraints they faced. "The street became a bit narrow, and sometimes there was not enough available light."
There were also battles over whether to separate residents according to income. "The buildings had to be oriented somehow to Manhattan rather than Queens so that the lower incomes looked out at the powerhouse [now the Keyspan Ravenswood electricity-generating facility], rather than Manhattan," recalled Johansen, to much laughter. "Some deputy said we should close off all the courtyards for fear the lower income groups would overcome and invade the territory of the wealthy. I tendered my objection and we didn’t do any work for a while" until those restrictions were scrapped. "These were threats to basic principles that I held closely."
Johansen added that they worked carefully to "save all the beautiful trees and place buildings so as not to destroy them. We also made a layout of how the cranes could reach in to different parts of the buildings without destroying those trees. It was a sensitive approach, I should think."
Those environmental concerns are echoed at the Octagon, which has been recognized as an environmentally friendly gem in the architecture community. Bruce Becker ticked off the energy-saving aspects of his Octagon design, including using the pool "to discharge heat in the winter and cool the building in the summer." Like the other architects on the panel, Becker acknowledged a series of design tradeoffs under pressure from a plethora of bureaucratic agencies, each of which needed to sign off on one detail or another.
Alfreda Radzicki of Gruzen Samton, which designed the Southtown buildings, also described "certain constraints." She said, "We couldn’t build above the train tunnel or the Tram line. We kept the infrastructure under Main Street, and we inherited a height limitation of 16 stories," even though future Southtown buildings will rise as high as 28 stories.
How many architectural tradeoffs are too many? Johansen, pondering the photos projected on the wall behind the panelists, pronounced the Octagon redesign "a very big mistake, I don’t think there’s anything human about this. It’s cold, it has no soul, no life, no experience. The Octagon and its shell, as it were, are like a sea animal; they have to be designed together. There’s no separation between the Octagon and the shell that protects the organism, and we are all social organisms, we’re looking for the fit, and I don’t see it… I wouldn’t want to live there."
Questions from the audience were blocked until the end of the two-hour session, and even then were handled brusquely and cut short. Calogero, who earlier had said, "It’s so important to put together a forum such as this so we can get this kind of public discussion and debate," lashed out at audience member Linda Heimer for questioning the wisdom of selling off chunks of the Island too cheaply to developers.
"Ed Logue would be turning over in his grave," said Heimer to murmurs of encouragement in the audience. She went on to express frustration that "affordable" was a relative term when it comes to housing, that too much open space has been sold off too cheaply, and that the Island was never meant to resemble a gloomy "Medieval village" (as Radzicki had earlier claimed) with no sun poking through.
The moderator made several attempts to cut Heimer off. "Is that a question? Do you have a question?" he asked her repeatedly, at which point Calogero jumped in and called Heimer a "racist" whose opposition to new developments was rooted in a "NIMBY attitude" – shorthand for "Not In My Backyard." Audience members gasped at Calogero’s use of the word "racist," especially since the ethnic and financial makeup of the new buildings is not appreciably different than that of the rest of the Island.
Although the moderator attempted to close all questioning after Calogero’s outburst, Johansen urged him to entertain one more question, this from a WIRE reporter, who asked the architects for their personal perspectives on how the Philip Johnson plan has borne up over the years. Johansen had just begun to answer when the moderator ended the discussion once and for all.
So much for "public discussion and debate," at least when it comes to the peaceable kingdom imagined by the architects of yore.