New York City: NEXT

A year or so ago, taking a walk down the streets of New York City felt like walking through an enormous construction site. You couldn’t venture out more than a street block without walking underneath one of those tight, dark, and rusting scaffolds with their “Post no Bills” signs, shamelessly posted next to a row of future motion pictures and music album posters. Hard hats were beginning to feel like fashion statements. They even started making them in different colors and shapes, in case the normal white color didn’t match your suit. Old, and purportedly, “useless” buildings with their intricate details were being knocked down to make way for the slender, colorless, and quite often, tasteless glass buildings that were sprawling in their places. In the midst of all this madness, one couldn’t help but wonder; who is occupying all these pricey new spaces? Wait a minute. What’s being done to modernize and update this crumbling city’s infrastructure to accommodate this new wave of New Yorkers that seems to be growing by the minute? From what I personally see; not much is being done, or in other words, not enough. We pretty much have the same amount of train tracks, bridges and highways that were built decades ago, in the meantime the population of the city is sprinting towards its 9th million. Which leads us to question, why city officials are not scrambling around pulling their hairs out trying to catch up with the fast growing population of this city with new, more efficient infrastructure?

I believe that the answer to this question lies in the actual programs being accommodated within several of these new buildings and in the technologies used for their construction and operation. The combination of each of these, in a way, will help eliminate the need to majorly upgrade the city’s infrastructure, by eradicating the need to use it in the first place. Smart choice but, what are the implications?

In recent years, the city of New York has been slowly encouraging the construction of buildings with multiuse programs. The reason is fairly simple; to keep the residents within the property lines of what I would like to call Mega Structures, for lack of a better word, by providing them with all they would need throughout any normal day; food, work recreational, shopping etc. in addition, New York City has lately been encouraging and sometimes even mandating sustainable architecture for new or renovated buildings. This seems to be leading towards bigger structures that would operate as cities within themselves while, at the same time, having the least impact possible on the city’s infrastructure. Given the amount and diversity of the program to be incorporated within these structures and given the fact that they would have to be self sustainable, I would imagine that their footprints would have to cover at least about 10 city blocks. A building this large can reach an unfathomable height. This, of course, wouldn’t have been conceivable a few years ago. However, given the technological advances we have been witnessing in the last decade or so, this scenario is highly possible. this would lead me to ask three main questions:

1. How would this affect the architecture of the buildings within itself?

According to his “Theory of Bigness” essay, Rem Koolhaas believes that once a building reaches a certain scale, it can “no longer be controlled by a single architectural gesture, or even by any combination of architectural gestures”. To avoid this, I would imagine that architects and designers would lean towards oversimplifying the architecture of their buildings to the point where they become banal structures and start all looking alike, something we are already starting to see. Koolhaas also points out that “in Bigness, the distance between core and envelope increases to the point where the façade can no longer reveal what happens inside”. This would entail oversimplifying the facades as well, what we would be left with are boxes, another thing we are starting to see. Moreover, who cares what the outside looks like if the point is to keep everyone in the inside in the first place. At that point, a repetition of the same façade would be unquestionable but even desirable.  As for the interior of these structures, practicality and ease of movement will be the common denominators. The easier it would be to travel within each of these look alike boxes the most successful it would be considered, another thing that could be achieved through simplifying the architecture. In that case, it would be safe to conclude that these buildings would be built per the module that would work best thus exposing the redundancy of architecture at that point, or as Rem Koolhaas concluded: “preempting architecture’s actual disappearance”. At the same time, we have to keep in mind that each of these Mega Structures will be operating completely independently from the others, which means they will no longer be “part of any urban tissue”, which leads us to our second question.

1. How would this affect the architecture of the city as a whole?

Let us take each of the five city elements introduced by Kevin Lynch in his chapter “The City Image and its Elements”, and apply them to our futuristic beloved city.

• Paths: recognized by Lynch as “the predominant city element” they were defined as “channels” along which movement occurs, including streets, bridges, trains… These would be practically redundant in our city since each building is independent from the other ones. Since each one of them offers exactly what the next one has to offer, the need to travel from one building to another is close to nonexistent.
• Edges: defined as the “boundaries between two phases, linear breaks in continuity: shores, railroad cuts, edges of developments, wall”. Except for the natural edges like the two rivers that board New York City, all edges would look the same in a city constructed by copying the same module over and over again, thus nullifying its main purpose as “organizing features”. This element wouldn’t completely be lost but its importance will be minimized or restricted to a fewer areas.
• Districts: which are the “medium-to-large sections of the city…Always identifiable from the inside, they are also used for exterior reference if visible from the outside” We will again be safe to add them to the list of completely lost elements for two reasons. The conformity of the building size throughout our future city and to the unfeasibility to recognize them from the outside in a city where all buildings look alike.
• Nodes: these are “strategic spots in a city in which the observer can enter, and which are the intensive foci to and from which he is traveling” Lynch goes on to explain that nodes may be junctions or spots where the traveler can clearly see a change in the fabric of his surrounding, at the same time they could be a convergence point of two or more different characteristically identifiable objects or elements. One could argue both ways when it comes to this specific element for the simple fact that its definition is too broad. We can predict that the points of entry to the city will be mainly unchanged but at the same time there will not be any two object with different characteristics within the city.
• Landmarks: identified as another “point-reference” they are mainly perceived as external elements, “they are simply defined physical object: Building, sign, store or mountain” we’ll be inclined to shelve this element as well since we will again be restricted to natural elements and points of entry to the city.

Thus, we can easily see that we are left with less than one of Lynch’s elements out of the total five. Which would incline us to conclude that the city would be identifiable only if we are standing at its edges, and that’s only if the elements, visible at that point, are not tampered with themselves by that time. At the same time one could almost argue that all these elements would be easily indentified within each one of our Mega-structures. But that would totally be dependent on the design of their interiors and it would not be solely specific for each building since the traveler can identify the exact same elements in another building. This would reinforce the idea that each one of these buildings would operate and look like it’s its own city, except that the traveler can’t make a difference between them. Each one of them is completely detached from the “urban tissue”, and does not contribute in any way to the city as whole. But maybe they don’t need to. Maybe each one of these building will be better off operating individually. Individuals within each of them won’t need to interact with others outside of their own walls. Consequently, the city streets would be mostly deserted because of this seclusion. This leads us to our next question.

1. How would this affect our social life and interactions with each others?

It is also interesting to imagine this aspect of it. How would the residents of each building interact with other residents from another one? Would they need to in the first place? Each one of these buildings will host millions of people given the buildings inconceivable height and footprint. Why would any individual have the need to go outside of their building for socializing? Would residents from each one of these buildings feel any connection to New York City as a hole, or will they be the residents of a numbered building only? To investigate this a little further I would like to refer to H.D Kitto’s “Polis” essay.

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