On the Park Bench - Author's Forum: Space & Anti-Space

Hello everybody, we're going to give people another minute or so to come in. And then we're going to start our program. Once again, we're waiting for people to come in. I wanted to welcome everybody to on the park bench, a public square conversation. Uh this is part of our ongoing authors forum series which discusses recent books on urbanism and related topics. And our producer uh for the authors forum is uh the distinguished uh urbanist and architect Doru Todani. And uh he is working behind the scenes. I wanted to thank Doru for all he has done to help put together uh this uh authors forum and bring it to seeing you. Um today's uh topic is uh the book space and anti-space the fabric of place city and architecture by Barbara Littenberg and Steven Peterson. The interviewer today is Philip Langdon. So you can share your thoughts on on the park bench at this web address And you can register for our next webinar which is taking place a week from tomorrow December 16th at 12:00 noon. And the topic is legacy cities organized by Dan Baisden. This webinar will explore why legacy cities are so critical to America. And you can find out more and register at cnu.org resources on the park bench. But we have a really great program for you today. And both of our main speakers have had a long and illustrious career in architecture and urban planning. So I'm going to hit on just the highlights. Barbara Littenberg is an architect and founding partner at Peterson Littenberg architects. She has taught and been involved in architecture programs at Cornell, Princeton, Columbia, Yale virtually all over the Ivy League. Prior to forming her own practice she worked for Richard Meier and James Stirling. Steven Peterson is also an architect and founding partner with Peterson Littenberg. And he has a 40-year involvement with urban design and city planning. He has taught architecture and urban design at Princeton and Columbia and has lectured at numerous universities. He was executive director of the Institute for architecture and urban studies in New York. He held a distinguished visiting professorship at the University of Maryland and was chairman of the Brunner Prize Committee of the New York Chapter of AIA. I became familiar with their fantastic urban design work um when it was published in Peter Katz's book The New Urbanism Toward an Architecture of Community in 1994. I reported on their astounding designs for the World Trade Center in New York, which unfortunately were never built, although they were favored by the public. Philip Langdon, who is going to be moderator and interviewer today, is a writer, a long-time writer in the field of architecture and urban design. His most recent book is Within Walking Distance, Creating Livable Communities for All. Phil introduced me to the New Urbanism before it was even called the New Urbanism in a cover article for The Atlantic back in 1988 and I worked with Phil for many years at New Urban News. I'm Rob Steuteville with CNU, an editor of CNU's online journal Public Square. The book they're going to be discussing today, Space and Anti-Space, The Fabric of Place, City, and Architecture, challenges what constitutes the physical form of the contemporary city. It was published by ORO Editions in July and you can buy it online at the ORO Editions website, amazon.com, or many other places where they sell books. The audience will have a chance to ask questions directly of the authors. Please use the Q&A function of Zoom, not the chat, the Q&A. And you can ask these questions as they occur to you. Uh we will get to them when the main portion of the interview is over. Now I'm going to pass this along to Steven and Barbara to share their screen. Okay. You're your screen. You have to put the screen share on. Oh, dear. There we are. I think. Can you hear us? I can hear you. Okay, good. Question. So, do we begin, Phil? Um yeah. So, um uh I I read your book 3 months ago, reviewed it uh very favorably on the site Common Edge, which people can find on the web. Um and it's it's it's really a has a deep understanding of cities and what makes cities satisfying, much of which has to do with space. So, first of all, I uh you have this unusual title, space and anti-space. Um what exactly do you mean by by space and anti-space? I'll talk about Um well, what's interesting is that anti-space, I suppose, is referred to by other people as modern space. The space that we live in and believe in most prevalently in our time is this infinite flow of natural undifferentiated background into which things occur. And the ant- We call it anti-space because it is such a dominant presence in our minds and our experience, both from outer space and from airplanes and from in the landscape that it seems to be the inevitable uh founding condition for all things to occur. It's very powerful. The anti-space is a phrase sort of used in a sneaky way by me to inform the fact that the belief in this nebulous continuous infinite uniform space has the effect on us of keeping us from making actual architectural and urban spaces. Because Somewhere in the book, you you say something about space is is the essential thing in urban design. Um and so, how do you practice that? Well, you've got to be conscious of making it. Um Let me go let me go to the next slide. before this In instead of urbanism the essential difference between space and anti-space is most clearly defined here between Palladio and Mies. Mhm. Where Palladio constructs space inside his building and Mies lets it flow through. He doesn't make anti-space. He keeps it going in a flowing continuum. So, the the space of Palladio is kind of enclosed or bounded or very well defined as opposed to what Mies does. Precisely. The Mies has fundamental dichotomy between the two types of space is that one is unconstructed and unbounded and infinite and the other is geometric Cartesian and made into shapes and forms which are almost as present as physical forms themselves. Mhm. There's a comparison that can be made between these two images of plans. One of San Carlino in Rome by Borromini and the other by Corbu in Amida by India. And they are essentially the same physical arrangement. It's It is an astonishing pair. These two slides are exactly the same scale. And yet one is made out of heavy masonry and solid walls, but the forms of the space themselves around the chapel and the little church as an oval are very explicitly dominating elements of physical form. The The physical form is supporting the volume of space. Even walking around the backside of the shape to the outer on the outer ring, every little step is a separate space. And Corbu the space flows through the building. It isn't stopped. It isn't formed into objects or volumes, but it is a continuous flow of air almost all the way through from front to back. And then the the room, which is in exactly the same position as San Carlino's chapel, is a meeting room for uh the members of the association What is the What is of mill owners. But if you can see that nothing is stopped. Everything is an object floating in a space bounded by two parallel walls to keep it moving from front to back. Even going into the toilets there, you have to move around the column and back in. There's no doors. It's all flowing and continuous until you sit down, I guess. And and um on the left end the uh um Borromini. Um so you talk lot in the book about thick walls and and how they form space and really define space and give a lot of character to different parts of a building for instance. Is that something that's that can be applied today in architecture? Well, the virtual thick wall, poche, empty spaces within a frame can actually be applied today quite easily and is done so frequently. Yeah. The point is that the overall construction of the spatial sequence has to admit to the fact that you're not letting space flow through but stopping it and defining it. You can do that with thin walls. Poor man's plan could be made easily with thin walls. Barbara, you were saying that this morning that you could take down the thick wall between the the chapel and the cloister and it would show it could be the whole thing could be made out of thin walls bounded in a frame of solid walls. Mhm. And I would add that when you go to the next slide, the same principle comparison could be made at the scale not only of the architecture but also of the city on the left in which case at Sandi Le Corbusier is being compared to Parma. Uh but the same idea of flowing space and the objects formed by uh Sorry. Excuse me, our dog is calling. Our dog has brought a squeaky toy to the conference. Uh So Sandi representing modern space, the center of Parma representing a clear sequence of formed closed spaces which can be seen as volume. So they're kind of a nice comparison because the the main elements are almost interchangeable with the the voids on the Parma plan. You could almost set the Corbu elements right within the voids of the city plan. Uh on the right, you have the comparison of Jackson Park in Chicago, the two versions of made by Olmsted and Root, the 1993 plan which was produced for the World's Fair, and then how it was renovated into an open free-flowing spatial park, romantic garden park space. It's a literal literal demonstration of space below with the organization of the Columbian exhibition and the formal water courses being obliterated by the renovation as anti-space, which is the natural appearance of a naturally formed continuum throughout the whole park. The whole thing could have been sustained as a formal garden if they'd wanted to, but the power of even in the 1895 of the idea of anti-space being a natural and preferred phenomenon of this continuum is dominant. The incidentally, this is at the very bottom middle of that park is where Obama's presidential library is being built. Yeah. So uh so do you see the um um the 1893 design as as preferable to the 1895 one? Aha. No. No, it's not preferable. Oh. This is why we call it space and anti-space. Not or anti-space. It's it's a a sort of analogy with modern physics which says that there is a a both matter and anti-matter and one will destroy the other if they come into contact. So you have to have a place where the formal garden of the world's fair is differentiated from the informal garden of of the landscape architecture that comes after. Both can exist at the same time, but here's the thing. If you subscribe to the power and the authority of the natural space, it will overwhelm your intentions to make formed defined space. And without formed defined space, both in the building and in the city, there can be no place. There are no complex places where things can occur. It's just everybody moving around individually, autonomously, in a free open-ended social social situation. The collective forms of social and civics events take place take a place or require a place. Now, I'm I'm looking at the Parma the Parma plan, and it looks like there are all these different outdoor spaces that are would be interesting places to be and to explore. And and they just they just have many different characters. Um whereas the the Corbusier plan it just seems like you don't have that richness of of close experience around you. True, there's no differentiation really. There's only one place, just Yeah. bigger and So, I I was surprised I was surprised that the book you start out with a pretty substantial chapter on Mies. Um so, if you want to go to Mies, and here we have Crown Hall. And um and looking at this, I mean, I'm just I'm just struck with how it looks like it could go on forever. I mean, it's in Chicago. It could go on all the way to Wisconsin. And all these individuals, they seem like cogs in a giant machine to me. They It seems like there's nothing that makes people feel important or sort of enclosed in in a very satisfying interior. So, I'm that's that's my take on it. Maybe you can tell me what you two uh think of this. Why did you include it? Not having visited the architecture studio at Crown Hall many years, I recall teaching at Harvard and in Gund Hall where they had those wonderful open trays where the students that the whole aspiration was that the students would mingle and share their work. What of course the result was they would build bookcases on top of their desks and erect these temporary sort of Quonset hut-like shelters over their desks in order to produce a sense of private space. So, as an interior, I I think aspiration is very clean, but as you can see the students don't exactly have a lot of work that appears to be occurring on those surfaces, which of course today would be filled up with computer monitors and all kinds of other paraphernalia. So, it's an idealization of space, but one that's not really conducive to individualized personal activity. Also, starting out with Mies is important because he made transparent glass buildings the thing to do. Mies van der Rohe and the glass curtain wall Mhm. are everywhere in every central city in a different derivative form from this. You can take that interior picture, which is clearly set up. The man on the right with his hands on the table is about to draw, I guess, but he seems hesitant to even face up to it. But, if you If you look at that interior, we were in World Trade Center 1 about 2 months ago, and the inside of that building feels exactly the same as the inside of this building, except there's a a core over on the left-hand side where the elevators and toilets are, and fire stairs. And we were on the 44th floor. So, often Mies Mies van der Rohe is left out of the discussion, but his influence in satisfactorily making a transparent glass building at the essence of contemporary downtown architecture is very powerful. And well, it strikes me that it it's hard to create much human scale um for the occupants uh in this type of a design. Well, it's true. Look, let's look what's left out. There's no coat room, there's no pinup board, there's no file cabinet, there's no uh sep- separate space. The whole idea is that it has to be one continuous space that flows out under the Celotex ceiling into the trees and beyond out to Kansas and Wisconsin, as you said. It's all part of the same continuous flow managed in a way here that's elegant and extremely beautifully done. So, there's no question about that. I'm not denying Mies's power as an architect. He's an amazing thing. But, what happens in Crown Hall, curiously enough, because it cannot be divided in space, if you look at the perspective on the left, there's a series of little windows down by the grass, with the floor elevated for the room of the drafting room that we're seeing the interior of. Down in there are the coat rooms, the toilets, the administrative offices, the classrooms, and everything else that you need in a school. So, it's suppressed, Mhm. kept out of the picture because of the presence of this Mies' view This is a picture taken from Hilberseimer's book on Mies. And he says in that book that Mies had a space concept that was very important to Mies, space concept. Yeah. Now, in the in your book, you talk a lot about urban fabric, um which is which is a term that's used a lot in architecture and and urban design. Um so, um how do you how do you define what urban fabric is and how do we how do we see that represented in these in the slides we see here? This is a kind of curious comparison between Lower Manhattan, which we'll refer to again later, which was sort of a case study a district that we used to illustrate some of the concepts later on in the book, compared to the Pudong neighborhood in Shanghai. What's curious is they both are promontories set out surrounded by water on three sides. Very similar with a spine running up the middle in the case of Lower Manhattan, Broadway. In Pudong, it's an elevated highway. And you can see what happens in the city of what we would call space, which is Manhattan, and the city of anti-space, which would be in Shanghai. The urban fabric is clearly missing in Shanghai. That is, there is no continuity of There's no blocks, there's no continuity of street space at the lower level. So, the fabric is the stuff that occurs at the lower level of the city that defines the experience of the street. Lower Manhattan, as we all know, does have towers. It was always known as the the place for the city the the beautiful modern city of towers, but it exists simultaneously as a city that is spatially rich and occupiable at the ground. Yeah. And and the view of Pudong, what is this diagonal open area that that runs through um much of much of Pudong? That thing? The the the diagonal that runs the little tiny white line that runs around over here over to the circle. Yes. Mhm. This is what somebody in CNU told me was where automobiles have the right of way in Pudong. Yeah. Okay. Not the pedestrians. So, what happens is the traffic runs around in all these streets that are kind of wiggly and rounded, and the human beings have to get up on this little circular walkway and get to the buildings via an upper level that thing that doesn't doesn't allow for any shops, any streetscape, any ambiance, any restaurants. There is no place to walk on the ground really in Pudong. And what what shows up here is the the two things that are critical to us making urbanism again that are are missing in Pudong. One is a sense of closed set spaces, and the other is the imposition of towers that must come to that seem to have to come to the ground without interacting with the city. These two forces, the the development of towers and the faith in anti-space are the things that we analyze in the book in the various chapters. Yeah. Here is an example of three urban fabrics. So sort of urban layouts. So cool. Only one has an urban fabric. Right. And the word fabric is very important to use rather than urban texture or streets and blocks. Excuse me. Because it is literally a fabric, an interwoven in in interconnection between solids and voids that allows you to walk and experience a multiplicity of places. The left picture of Tysons Corner, Virginia, was a '60s edge city. If that is that there's no connection between the parts of the building and the roads run around randomly, unconnected to the surfaces. And Pudong on the right, all of these are the same scale, same area. Mhm. Pudong in the end, you can see there's no relationship between buildings. And critically, in both places, other than Lower Manhattan, there's no blocks. The thing that is essentially missing from the urban fabric Is the Is the central to the urban fabric is the block. Is the urban And the blocks are destroyed by the preference for anti-space because everybody wants to break into the block and get in the backyard and a walk through everywhere. And pretty soon you have chaos like at Pudong. Just eradicating Let's look at the next. Yep. So, these are four examples of urban fabric. Rome, Paris, Manhattan, and Phoenix. And as immediately apparent is you would say that Rome, Paris, and New York are urban fabric cities to elaborate on that question. They each have a very distinctive pattern. The fabric to each is unique. One could identify Rome by its public spaces, which look very different than the arrangement of the public space in Haussmann's Paris, which is again very different than the arrangement of the public space in Manhattan. What's curious is in all three of those examples, they're approximately 33% of blue stuff, that is the open space area uh is identical. Uh but the way they're distributed within the city is very unique and different one from the other. Uh in Rome, the intimacy and the smallness of the blocks provide a certain wheel Anybody who's been to Rome uh has experienced that amazing sense of urban closure. Paris at a very different more metropolitan scale, and New York, of course, because of the repetition of the 200-ft block dimension. Phoenix, on the other hand, jumps up to 60% open space. And as one could see, uh all of a sudden, it's no longer really, although it has a gridded block structure, as you could see in the aerial view, uh when you look at this the blue bluish figure-ground, uh you realize that the open space has nothing to do with the actual formation of the block unit. And here it It looks like It It makes me think of a city that's been flooded. Yeah. And and you have these buildings, but but they're all independent, and they don't form any spaces uh that are interesting to be in. Yes, and they're all on a road grid. The The fact that the percentages of the solid void in in traditional cities or in cities that are truly urban and have urban fabrics suggest that it's an ongoing phenomenon that is consistent with in over time the same thing, whether it was done in ancient Rome, Renaissance Rome, Baroque Rome, Paris, or New York's Commissioners' Grid. So, the art of urbanism can be analyzed and can be continued. The reason it isn't continued in Phoenix is because of the tower and again, the acceptance of this free free flowing open space. Mhm. Move faster. Uh here again a diagram one of the uh quick point here uh the spatial network diagram in Manhattan, Lower Manhattan, uh and then two depictions 1867 and 2018 uh showing the uh development of the blocks over that period of time. Uh the point simply being is you can build new buildings on an existing urban fabric that there was an assumption that if you had to make modern buildings you had to tear down the fabric in order to achieve an ideal condition for their placement. Uh Lower Manhattan is quite remarkable. Wall Street was rebuilt every 20 years, I think, for about 200 years. Uh the scale keep going up. Trinity Church keep getting smaller. Uh but it's an example of how uh fabric is something that can be maintained over long periods of time. And uh so the 1867 view is is made up of buildings that are generally about how many stories? Oh, eight. Max. Six, seven, eight. Basically stable. Mhm. And then over time you get towers on those same on those same blocks. But also still eight, 10, 12, 20 story lower base buildings that are below the towers Mhm. are also built. The urban design the this urban fabric in this drawing over here applies to both periods of time. The city as an urban fabric is interwoven between solids and voids and stays that way. Only the buildings change and architecture fits in. Okay. And this is the this the the what the conceit the molecule of urban fabric. This was the attempt in the book to try to actually break apart the components uh that make a successful urban fabric as well as it goes the molecule goes from the top which is the urban fabric and interact the composite of both voids and solids and urban architecture and how the building and the fabric relate in this very complex elaborate intermingling of elements. The That's interesting is is a sorry Phil, go ahead. Um yeah, I was thinking about the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building which was you know, one of the earliest international style towers in the United States and the thing about that building is that it actually has a base. It doesn't just go up straight from from street level to the top. It actually has a base that is somewhere around two to four stories high that kind of makes it fit into the streetscape which modernist later got away from. Yes, so the plaza was introduced as a setback which is destroyed the whole urban fabric and the membrane of the block edge. So in in your book you talk a lot about ways of fitting towers in. So maybe you should say something about the tower buildings entangled in a block base and alternatives to that. Well, this little diagram I think describes it. This is a block which was the one outlined in red in the previous slide in Lower Manhattan. It's that little red thing over there which we then take apart and then analyze more specifically and there's a photograph of it 75 Broad Street. It's quite a large building but as you can see from the sketch the block is actually made up of many different buildings from many different points in time. Uh and in this case this is trying to be an aspirational that this is a good condition and one that should be supported in design of buildings in the future. Uh that is the the which is what you're saying the the tower essentially has these lower elements which blend in and reinforce the existing scale of the streets below and its adjacent uh buildings. Uh so it is both embedded in the block and it's entangled in the block that is its base. Uh the tower gets entangled in its own base in a way which allows it These words embedded and entangled are meant to focus one's attention on the integral nature of the block as a common element. And they are derived from quantum mechanics as terms so that you get the individual atom embedded in a larger structure and the free form entangled at its base in the daily street life of the city. Uh and and one of the things that we probably should mention here is that uh there's the question of okay, why are we talking about towers? And I think that I think that your rationale is that is that um you know, we have an exploding population of the world and and a tremendous amount of urbanization that's going on and for ecological reasons, environmental reasons, we we really need to accommodate people without sprawling across the entire landscape. And so one way to do that is to build towers and then um to put people in cities but also at the same time to create good environments at street level even if we have towers. Is that how you see this? Towers are inevitable. The question is how do we handle them in cities? Mhm. Yeah. Well, one of the corporate architects work working with us during the World Trade Center competition pointed out that developers of towers have a hard time selling or renting their first 10 floors anyway. So, the fact that that's embedded in continuous with a street wall of a block is an advantage because it allows it to be differentiated and to have more variety of spatial location. Mhm. Another example of this again that towers have always been cities and I suppose the emphasis on towers in the book is partly a sort of question to the CNU which is often depicted as being anti-tower, anti-high-rise. So, as you say Phil, we're beginning with the notion that cities are densifying, uh the world's population are moving into cities and how do you maintain as So, you must accept the tower. Historically, the towers have always been somehow part of our existence. Uh and therefore we should embrace them. Yeah, and and the Helmsley Building is a great example of one that that has a beautiful base that contributes to uh the appeal of the street, whereas I don't think that's true of the uh that former Pan Am Building that sits behind that um offers really a lot less uh in terms of urbanism and Helmsley does. The amazing thing about the Helmsley Building as you know, it used to be called Grand Central Tower and stand at the end of Park Avenue and you drive through it. It looks like a building from the '20s or '30s embracing with its arms the adjacent fabric across the street, but it blocks Park Avenue. And those two archways on either side are literally a place that cars, not trucks, but cars and taxis drive through and down to 42nd Street beyond the other buildings in the block. Uh it's it's an amazing modern dynamic Yeah. What what do I what would you call it? Uh Experience. Spacetime experience. It's always It's still exciting to drive through there. And and yet you walk through the middle. The thing's so integrated and surprising. But the lower portion of this relates to your walking down the street. The upper portion of this relates to the heights of Park Avenue all the way back up. This thing flips up into the air and has a final pinnacle. You walk in here to the elevators, which are on either side, and the cars drive in up around at this upper level and back down on 42nd Street. It's phenomenal. And it's all because it's urban fabric building. And yet this is the same city that is now seeing Hudson Yards come into being. I think you got us. Which is kind of the horrors of modern real estate development in a big city. Um Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, wrote something about Hudson Yards epitomizes a skin-deep view of architecture as luxury branding. Each building exists to act as a logo for itself. Um and then he goes on to say that the buildings look like uh perfume bottles on a shelf in a department store window. Um so um all the buildings are you see that in that that central uh image here. Um and you came up with uh an analysis of how you could actually do the same amount of development and yet and yet have good public spaces at ground level. Uh so if you want to say something about that? All right. Well, the plan on the upper left corner with a little blobs floating down in the blue is the master plan for Hudson Yards where everything is a separate object freestanding. Mhm. Drawing below it is the official master plan and the picture at the bottom left is these perfume bottles standing there. They're all lined up but they don't make a space. And they each has to be a less autonomous autonomous individual piece. And look at the landscaping that has to occur in that photograph on the left bottom. It has to be filled with trees and plants and objects of interest because the void in the architecture of the buildings themselves do not assemble into a common form such as you see in Chicago's Michigan Avenue opposite Grant Park. What we did just out of curiosity was to try and see if we could plan typical not typical but exceptional New York spaces, urban space. The one at the Hudson Yards open landscape plan on the left was negotiated with the local neighbors because they demanded open space. Mhm. Always being involved but open space is not what is needed in an urban fabric. Urban fabric you need closed space. Mhm. Plan we made shows three typical three special New York conditions. On the right Rockefeller Center repeated in its scale enclosed in three blocks. In the middle It's Gramercy Park. No, the middle is uh Gramercy Park. Gramercy Park. And at the far left overlooking the Hudson River just like on the east side is Tudor City. We made it as as an urban fabric surrounding the the site and incorporating the next block to the north. What's amazing is the area of open space in the left plan and the area of urban fabric plan space and fine space is the same ratio. There's There's no less space in the urban fabric plan than there is in the open plan. But it's Yeah. the multiple And and you make a You make the point in your book that that actually facades really help to make good urban space. Uh that it's not just the skin of the building. It's It's It's really creating a an appealing open space uh as we see in that uh bottom uh center slide. Yes. I don't know what to say about facades. Facade is a subject that needs to be elaborated on uh in future conversations because I think it's It is an art form that uh has not been studied much. It's certainly not stud- ied or given assignments in schools. Uh it's the uh The operative word is skin, not facade. Uh Mhm. tends to be uh like a Christmas box wrapping. Uh so facade is absolutely essential to the ultimate quality of an urban experience. Well, we we had a debate in giving the book a title was between space and anti-space and calling it when buildings touched. Because the whole idea of buildings coming up to each other and sharing a party wall is an anathema to modernism and modern architecture. Every Every developer wants to have his free-standing object to sell. Every architect wants his own autonomous image to define him in his place. And the common the face of facades is gone completely. So, we're going to turn to Q&A. Um I wanted to remind everybody um in a in a moment that uh we're going to be doing Q&A, so please put your questions in the Q&A section. We have some already. Should we go through the last slides and wait for the I mean, quickly. Quickly. Okay, Twin Towers. Should I Should I have a Sure. We could do it here. Uh to case in point, the proposal for four World Trade Center urban fabric on the ground, the towers up in the air. This was uh the theory was put into uh effect in our proposal for the Trade Center. Next. Uh open site World Trade Center, replica of two scale of Rockefeller Center and how one could have been built on that site quite comfortably, 10 million square feet represented in that little wooden model. 10 million square feet was the size of the two original towers, exactly the same as uh the RCA building and surrounding Rockefeller Center. Uh here again, uh just a comparison of the spatial solution versus a anti-spatial solution uh and an image of the two built towers, no facade, no recognition of each other. You could sort of see Calatrava's train station budding in there on the corner of the upper uh right photograph. Uh no coordination really. Okay, is that the end? Pretty much. And then there was just this last one which was still like this one of a redesign for Battery Park years ago. Again, trying to form the open space. Yeah, that was from your 1993 or four plan for Lower Manhattan. Right. Um which was not carried out for the most part, but still it has some some great ideas for shaping of space um that um really would make a better city. Okay. That's it. Okay, so we'll go now to Q&A, see if we have some questions. Okay, so first question is, can can defined urban space, not anti-space, be successfully populated by glass modern buildings? I.e., can there be a good city with modern buildings? Yes. There are examples of good cities with modern buildings, not glass buildings. Modern buildings. The two glass towers you see on the right have no capacity to define space because they reflect and mirror everything around them. They're insubstantial. Which is a little bit of Mies's problem as it turned into other people's hands. But modern cities can be made. Uh Istanbul, south of the uh river, whatever it's called, I forget, is all made of modern buildings. Parts of Athens are made of modern buildings, they tell me. Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv in Israel is made of modern buildings, and the blocks are finished, contained, surfaces are produced, and the public realm is established in a very organized way in those cities. And maybe many others. I think there are cities in Spain that we sort of played with online since the book was written that are all made of modern buildings. So glass glass-walled buildings would not work well as you see it? No, you can you can make give the appearance of solids with a lot of glass in the facade like in Amsterdam. Mhm. Facades of the individual buildings are 80% glass in some cases. But the bounding surfaces of the holding the wall together and defining the subdivisions of the glass are such that it gives the appearance of a surface and a solid membrane. The reason we use the word membrane to describe the outer surface of the block because it is not necessarily solid walls. It does not have to be old-fashioned masonry construction or just Yeah, or punched windows. You could have a frame expression, which is what Amsterdam is really so interesting. I mean, they knew how to get those light in the building and maximize the glass surface and yet nobody would ever suggest Amsterdam is not an urban place. I think yes, it can So, there's here's an interesting question. Do you see a correspondence between space, anti-space in the making of public place or lack thereof and the communitarian {slash} libertarian conflict in US political life? Oh, yes. But, there's something that's very difficult to describe in a conference like this, but it is definitely there. Yeah, I mean, we The thing about anti-space is that it appeals to all of us at one level for completely free choice of where we go, what we do, how we get there. It's the illusion of autonomous individual acting in his own, but does not take account of collective responsibilities that are there also part of our lives. Mhm. Yeah. Um another question. Can you tie these important concepts to addressing climate change, the biggest challenge facing humanity? Well, uh people have made arguments that dense cities are far more uh efficient uh energy-wise. Uh they don't sprawl, they don't take up roads. They don't require automobiles. So, uh, we begin with the presence, uh, the on the premise that a dense urban place is more, by definition, more efficient. Uh, now, the degree of densification that you could take it to a Manhattan steroid level or you could apply it to smaller communities, uh, where four, five, or six-story buildings that are joined together. You could produce the density, uh, accommodate, and I think Michael Dennis talked about this last time. Uh, the the expanding world population and urban population. Uh, but our attempt here is to accept the tower as the mechanism for that densification, uh, but maintain the livability of the place and the ability to make place within that dense urban or dense condition. Yeah. Um, And that way, actually, it occurs to me, uh, in answer to your question, looking at the two towers on the right, the anti-space exists up in the air. And you I in the clouds, above the base of the building. And space exists, you know, exists on the ground. Inevitably, the two are wedded together in such a way that there is a an availability of the autonomous tower and the collective base jointly working together to make a city. And urbanism is this combination of the two. Yeah. Um, there's a suggestion came in. Can Marvin and Steven make their microphone louder? Uh, is that something you can adjust or I don't think so. Yeah, somebody could, I'm sure. Let me see. We could try talking louder. How's that? We'll get closer to the microphone. Or closer to the microphone? We'll get closer to the microphone. Sorry about that. Okay. Um, next question. How can you both change the trajectory of current planning in in York City? Hm, that's a good question. That's impossible. The thing is that in Lindsay's era, there were 750 employees at the city planning department. There may be 60 now. The priorities of public policy and government have changed significantly. When we did the plan for Lower Manhattan, which was the last slide in '94, it was done under Dinkins administration. When we issued the the plan, Giuliani took over as mayor for two terms. And things changed radically in terms of policy decisions and planning uh efforts that were going in. I don't know how you do it. The the the great fortune is that uh the great strange thing is that Hudson Yards is part of Manhattan. And why in God's name it they was treated like an autonomous private development or a gated community instead of following the commissioner's grid and extending it, it's just beyond the imagination. But I feel Barbara and I both feel that urban design, not planning, planning that Hudson Yards was planned up to the gazoo with all kinds of definitions of open space and square footages allowed for this and the other thing, but urban design, which is the image-making spatial possibilities being put forward in some drawn illustrative form, is essential to get a dialogue going that could change things. Now, no architect alone and no planner alone can change all the agencies and budget conditions and situations required to make a unified plan. Look at the World Trade Center. It had everybody involved and it's a total mess now. Yeah. That's not a simple answer for sure. I I know another How much does it? Another question. How can pedestrian-friendly urban design be used to address sea level rise? Well, build above the rise of sea level. It's a problem. It faces a lot of coastal cities including parts of lower Manhattan. Much of Manhattan and the upper areas of this of the island or or or Brooklyn or Queens are subject to flooding. I don't know what's going to happen with that. But building bridges and walking in the air is not the answer. Mhm. Um a comment. Uh one person writes, CNU is not anti-tower. Um I don't know if you want to discuss that. I mean, certainly there are some people among new urbanism who have who have promoted, you know, buildings no more than three or four or five stories high. Um what do you think? I'm glad CNU is not anti-tower. I think we're we're familiar we're we're we're sort of beyond that CNU is beyond we were in the book of the new urbanist book as someone said at the beginning and we were designing towers at that time. I we're we're familiar with our friend Leon Krier who takes the position, not Rob so much but Leon, who's taking the public position that only four-story three-story buildings should be allowed in cities. And we were kind of talking in relative terms to him. Who whose work is quite wonderful and amazing but you can be kind of stubborn about certain things. So, there's differing opinions. Yes, but Well, I think the CNU has certainly moved beyond that sort of dogmatic rigid definition. Leon never liked New York. He doesn't like big cities. So, I think as the CNU addresses issues and projects in large cities that require a dense response, I think it is adjusting quite well. And hopefully this book would be of use in trying to accommodate those both of those goals. Yeah. Um another question. So, SoHo has beautiful buildings from the 1880s and 1890s that are mostly glass, inspired by other examples such as Venetian palaces. Are these {quote} glass {unquote} buildings something to look toward as positive examples of urban glazed surfaces? Absolutely. Yes, for sure. Yes, one can find it. Sure. one of the most urban places in the world is SoHo. With the buildings and the grids, the the framing of of the facades with classical elements could also be abstracted and become just purely gridded elements. And that that makes an amazing surface on a street wall. And I would say Venice is very interesting cuz you know, Venice is a city built on piles. So, in a certain sense it is emblematic of a modern building construction. It is not a wall-bearing city. So, in that sense it's it's very modern. So, that the idea of frame, which is not talked about, the frame itself is something which has enormous capacity, elastic capacity to mix solid surface and glass areas that produce extremely successful urban surfaces. There's a bunch sitting right here on Michigan Avenue. I'm thinking that slide. Chicago frame was was the most urban of architect modern architecture. And that's basically made up of Michigan Avenue's buildings are all made of that, not solid masonry walls. Right. The building on the right there is just it's not very good architecture. On the left. On on the left, sorry. Then on the right, it's quite good. Um another question. Would you mind speaking on how better urban spaces could be redeveloped along waterfront in places such as Pudong where there's little to no pedestrian access to the ground? Put it in an urban fabric. I mean it's it's it's that this is it's not a it's not one architectural choice at a time that will remake the city. Pudong had a had a master plan that was a big circle. Circle of park which Richard Rogers did. Mhm. It was abandoned in the process of doing the city. I don't know why. Uh but the the essence to getting on the dealing with the waterfront. I mean this picture of Michigan Avenue is not is far from the waterfront, several thousand feet, but it could just as easily be a waterfront street with these buildings leading up to it, making the waterfront space itself powerful. Just across the river from Pudong is the Mhm. Shanghai Bund which is a semi-European developed urbanist place made up of facades of buildings that define the quay along the river perfectly and urbanistically as well. Yeah. Um do you believe that that green towers, hanging gardens of architectural towers, are reality or a realistic design? I'm personally very dubious. Uh people have to water them on an individual basis. So, in terms of long-term sustainability, I don't think I think it's a lovely gesture. Uh and it clearly captures people's imaginations, but I'm I'm skeptical of of that as a primary solution to uh Well, I would I suppose that there are some places that have very wet climates where it rains every day. Would that Would that work then? I'm sure, more so. Yeah. Uh I don't know. What you do have one in mind, Phil? Well, I'm thinking of uh somewhere in uh South Asia. Where they have Where they have big rainfall that comes through every day and then it's then it's done. And presumably it could it could uh keep lots of vegetation hot. It could be if you can Plants die and re- re- get reborn and need to be weeded and sprayed and Mhm. all kinds of things. It's It's an ama- amazing maintenance issue, I think, that hasn't been faced yet. Yeah. Seems to me to be more of a gesture than a solution to anything. If you can't get the grass to grow on the ground or in parks, why can't it to grow on the facades of buildings and cover the roofs with ski- ski lifts and things. Mhm. Yeah. Um next question. While towers are to a large extent unavoidable, particularly in certain cities or metropolises, wouldn't a paradigm that is closer to Paris's five- to seven-story high blocks be more desirable? Density thus achieved is no smaller than New York's, and it tends to provide for better scale, less energy consumption, also safer under pandemic conditions, it turns out. I would never argue for fewer parises. I think the more the better uh for sure. Uh I think I think it goes back to the uh sort of relationship between the public entity. Uh Hausmann was quite those rules were very very strict. Uh people fought like hell to get around them but it only produced a more interesting urbanism. Uh and the economic forces that uh drive building development. Uh so these are a set of questions that that would have to be answered, I think. Clearly, they would be in my book preferable. Uh especially, you know, six, eight-story buildings as long as you have elevators, it's all good. And of course in New York, you know, over six stories, you have a different much more expensive form of construction. Uh whereas out in Queens and the other boroughs, if you build six, seven stories, you could use uh light metal framing and you could produce housing, for example, much more uh efficiently and inexpensively. So there are other arguments for maintaining lower scale urban buildings uh in terms of the money involved. Once you go over that, you have to have poured concrete and the costs go up and then you go to 10 stories, it's not efficient really, so you might as well go all the way up in a tower. So there are basic economic underlying uh constraints that do shape these things. An extensive urban fabric of seven or eight-story buildings is an is part of the main principal answer to affordable housing integrated into the higher priced towers that people from all over the world live in in their suites. I'm going to break in just for a minute and and just say that we're at the hour and uh we still have plenty more questions. We can continue to go for a while. I doubt we're going to get to all the questions, but uh Phil, you can just keep on going. Okay, I'll continue. Um next question, can anti-space be used to help transition people over barriers? I.E. to get over the West Street Hudson Greenway to get back to the fabric on the other side. Help move people from space to space. I don't quite understand. I like I try to make a drawing of it. I don't quite understand the question, frankly. Do you, Barbara? Uh Mhm. I I suppose anti-space is uh has its purposes. Uh years ago we did a study for Mayor Bloomberg because they they were talking about taking down the uh East Side piece of the East Side uh elevated highway, the FDR Drive in Lower Manhattan, uh and put it on grade. Of course, then you would have had to take the people and move them over the highway, which sort of gets to that question. And our attitude was, "Why don't you just leave it up in the air and treat it like a big loggia and sort of renovate the underside and fill it with markets and other uses?" Uh that that would be a better way to move people through uh to the waterfront. So, um those depending on the situation, I I think the one could be flexible, but aspects of anti-space I think could be useful. What do you think? I have a perverse sense that the elevated highway that was torn down should have been replaced. On the West Side? On the West Side. The the piece of the elevated highway of the uh East River Drive that's in Lower Manhattan is an amazing success. There are very few Trucks are not allowed on it. The cars There's very few exits, only at certain spots. So, cars don't have to be crowded in there. And what Barbara said is that it makes an architectural canopy that allows you to interpenetrate from the city street directly into the park. And I think that the one of the big mistakes Well, I that mistakes are wrong word, but you can describe an alternative world where if they rebuilt the elevated highway, they never would have gotten trouble with the snail darter being destroyed at the underground highway that allowed Battery Park City to exist and you could walk directly from the World Trade Center underneath that highway into the Battery Park which would become a continuous connective tissue to Lower Manhattan. Lower Manhattan. In fact, we make a in the book we make a drawing redoing the whole urban fabric of the downtown area around the World Trade Center showing how an elevated highway would continue to make a better world out of it. So, it might be a situation where not anti-space but actual spatial definitions of continuity would be more powerful. Mhm. Um the next next we have a a question from somebody from Ankara, Turkey who spent some time visiting at Cornell where where you Stephen had a lot of time working closely with Colin Rowe. So, anyway, this this person says he visited Cornell and the late John Reps who very well known as a planning historian. And he says in our talk Reps sincerely told me he always criticized Colin Rowe also to his space for reducing urban design to the two-dimensional concept of urban fabric by the so-called figure-ground maps. Though it should be considered the art of 3D composition of urban form and space. Um I hope you're following this better than I am. As the students later on as as the students later on colleagues of Colin, how would you respond to this critique? Well, the figure ground drawing was like which is black and white, and figure ground is a Gestalt technique depending on the boundaries and and edges of things looking both positive in the negative sense and in the positive sense. It's a situation a drawing of a city plan where the space and the solids are highlighted and intensified. And it was Colin's exploration of the figure ground plan x-ray. Not It was never meant to be the actual drawing of the city as such but a kind of analytical tool that works best in if you look throughout the history of cities when they're drawn in figure ground terms. Means that the voids have an equal power of of imagery to as the solids, and you can feel that when you're in in streets and spaces where the city has that density. I don't think that Colin ever got to the point of wanting to make the urban design studio into an architectural studio. And you're he's maybe right that there is the uh Remember though that it was very early on in the '60s and '70s, just when the return to public prominence of the city as a legitimate form was just coming into being. So, the exploration of what urban design was was something that had to start from scratch. And there's no reason to expect that the architecture on those figure ground drawings couldn't have been made just wonderfully fine. Um another person asked, "Explain the need for a stable urban the public realm today in the condition of uncertainty of the public social media, perhaps seen as the virtual public realm. Well, you know, there there is a history of public space being the setting for public discourse. Uh I always think of Tiananmen Square and the uprising in China in the '90s 1990s. Uh that if that space, which was a Western space that was imposed on uh Beijing. Did I say Shanghai? Beijing. Uh actually allowed a place of gathering. That's where all the young people from the university went down to demonstrate. Uh that there is a a value to a physical public space that is clearly made and can be named uh and identified so that it can bring the public together. Uh clearly social rooms on computers have other effects, but I think the sheer uh ability to congregate at that massive scale has very strong uh political um value. The very the very incon- I think awkwardness of our meeting we're having today is an example of why the public square can never go away. Because you can't see I have no idea who's asking questions. I don't feel the audience. Um I I don't even in a darkened room with showing slides, you have a sense of common presence with people that is ineffable. Except when the lights go on and half of them are asleep. That was a bit disconcerting. But I I think you know, if you just named several incidences of the demonstrations, Jackson Square opposite the White House is a public space. Lafayette Square. And Lafayette Square opposite the White House is a public space that invited misuse, but also invited demonstrations and the coming together of viewpoints and positions that could be discussed in the media. online. The two interact and they'll never not interact in some ways. And the What was the Wall Street The city What was it? Take over Wall Street? Also Occupy. Occupy Wall Street was also focused on one public space that was created nearby the Chase Manhattan Bank. And that space was a void as a room, allowed people to gather and demonstrate. Yeah. Um another person says, "You say correctly Hudson Yards was planned as a standalone for developers. The original World Trade Center and Battery Park City were also {quote} uh a {quote} barge {unquote} and an ocean liner moored uh in {quotes} moored offshore of Lower Manhattan. This is government knuckling under to the demands of risk-averse developers in order to {quote} serve the market {unquote}. This has become the norm across the country. How can we inspire How can we inspire public sector decision-makers to develop more spine to resist this trend? I don't know. Does the Does the questioner have an answer to that? No. Sounds like he's got an answer. The questioner is asking you for your suggestions. Yeah. It's It's alluded to later Later Lindsay had a huge planning department, the Office of Midtown Planning, Jack Robertson, there were wonderful people who ran those offices and worked in them. It was a whole generation of urban designers. These places don't exist in city government anymore. Uh and correctly uh you're correct in saying that it's basically given over to the developer to make decisions. They become pieces of private property. One of the most disconcerting things about Hudson Yards when you go there is it really is like a little police state. They have guards walking around every place with walkie-talkies and it's not in that sense it doesn't operate as a public realm. I would imagine large segments of the population might feel extremely uncomfortable in those spaces. It's filled with luxury brand shops and it's not exactly conducive to sort of casual meandering around like 5th Avenue would be by 6th 5th Avenue say. Um, so that's the question. I don't know how to retrieve that. education at the university level not only for architects and designers. But there should be a civic urban course given to everybody to learn how to appreciate what a city is. That everybody does when they go there. Everybody wants to go to Europe and go to see Paris and London and Hanover and Amsterdam and Rome and Florence. And New York before they die. Our people want to come to New York. What's the old phrase about New York is it's a wonderful place wonderful place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. Mhm. So everybody appreciates the urbanity of these places but it is not explained or illustrated well in our general education system. And I think awareness of the public public's appreciation of the aesthetic nature of the true dense urban fabrics of Western city is essential to our liberal education and it'll get nowhere talking to community groups about public open space and playgrounds. Mhm. And the truth of the matter it must be pointed out most of America lives in anti-space. Uh, even people live in perfectly wonderful places, they're really occupying the daily realm is confined to a world of uh endless spatial uh sameness. Uh, go around in your cars, you do your business, you go to shopping centers. This is the standard thing. Uh, so again, urban urban space becomes a matter of uh what would you say? Recognition, conscious embracing, and understanding its power. Um, another uh comment. Your example of the remake of the of the Chicago World's Fair compared the original space with the redo anti-space. Certainly, you're not suggesting that there is no place in urbanism for a Central Park type that complains that contains mostly anti-space according to your definition. No, Central Park Well, interestingly enough, Central Park is very big. And it is a natural You want to say it? antidote to urbanism, which is what Olmsted thought of it. Olmsted and thought of it as an an antidote, a healthy antidote. You could leave the city streets. Remember, this is 1800s. There were still horses dropping poop all over the place. You could leave the central streets, walk into a realm that managed to recreate, like a museum piece, like the Museum of Natural History, like the Museum of Art. It created a museum of nature to escape from and to experience. So, that kind of anti-space is definitely a part of part of our experience and capable of being made and should be. Yes. And of course, Olmsted himself thought Central Park was not a success in his own terminology. Uh, Prospect Park was his favorite design uh partly because you could literally get lost in Prospect Park and from within it within it, you could not see any aspect of the city outside. Whereas in Central Park, where we are now just a couple blocks away from, there's really very few places in the park where the city is not visible. So, you're always aware of being within the city. So, curiously, maybe Jackson Park would be more to Olmsted's liking than Central Park even. But, he he had written about how he thought it was and he he objected strenuously to the imposition of the crossroads moving across and various points in the park that it was a kind of intrusion that he took issue with. Yeah. Rod coming back on. Hi, Rod. Hi. I think that maybe we should bring this to a close. I mean, it's been a great discussion. I wanted to thank everybody involved, Stephen and Barbara and Phil and all of the audience. It's been a great discussion. I want to remind everybody that you can see this again. It'll be posted to the CNU website as have all of the authors forums or the on the park bench webinars. You can find them on on the CNU website. Should be posted within about 24 hours. Um so, once again, thank thanks to everybody and uh have a have a great day. We'll we'll bring this to a close. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for all the questions that came in. I'm sorry I wasn't able to get to all of them. And and buy the book. Oh, yes. Available on Amazon. It's a good read. It's a terrific book. Loaded with great illustrations as well as really informative text. Thank you. Thank you. Goodbye, everybody.