Urban downscaling urged

Some architects, planners push cities without skyscrapers

By Anthony Flint, Globe Staff, 9/19/2001

 

A group of architects, planners, and critics, saying that the World Trade Center attack has prompted a backlash against skyscrapers, is laying the groundwork for a post-skyscraper urban landscape - one that resembles Back Bay more than Lower Manhattan.

Those pushing a downscaling to five- or six-story buildings reject high-rises as grandiose and excessive - and now, places that people are fearful to live and work in. They say last week's tragedy points to the need to build cities differently, to try new ideas just as in Europe after World War II.

The suggestion has sparked a fierce debate in architecture and urban design, as professionals consider not only rebuilding on the World Trade Center site but future development in cities everywhere. Defenders of modernism argue that the World Trade Center should be rebuilt for symbolic reasons, and more generally that tall buildings respond to the market demands of major cities, and are the most efficient places in which to live and work.

''We are discovering that a lot of what we built over the last 50 years is an exercise in grandiosity and futility. We have to downsize, and recondense our national life at a much more human scale,'' said James Howard Kunstler, author of an essay ''The End of Tall Buildings'' posted on Planetizen.com, an Internet site for the planning profession. ''First-rate, cosmopolitan urbanism can be achieved with much smaller buildings.''

Kunstler and Nikos A. Salingaros, an urban theorist and mathematician at the University of Texas at San Antonio, proclaim in the essay that ''the age of skyscrapers is at an end'' and that tall buildings are ''an experimental building typology that has failed.''

The authors suggest instead a style of building similar to the Back Bay. That style is embodied in the architectural movement known as New Urbanism, and draws on the ideals laid out by Jane Jacobs, author of ''The Death and Life of American Cities.'' Small-scaled buildings and blocks constitute a ''sustainable human ecology,'' Kunstler said, whereas high-rises have had a ''deforming effect on the organism of the city.''

Alex Krieger, chairman of the department of urban design and planning at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, said the backlash against high-rises has roots far beyond last week's attacks.

''For neo-traditionalists, bigness is bad, whether it's a skyscraper or a Wal-Mart or a big fat highway,'' Krieger said. Skyscrapers are seen as ''a vertical gated city,'' he said, an over-concentration of prosperity all in one place.

''The case is harder to make in New York, which is a community, a fabric of skyscrapers,'' Krieger said. ''And in Asia, they are building taller and bigger than anytime in New York. So I don't think this is a dying breed.

''But there is conflicting data on what constitutes the most efficient form of settlement,'' he said. ''If we live on quarter-acre lots dispersed across the landscape, it's inefficient in terms of transportation alone. But you can't say Bangladesh or the 19th-century city is the most efficient model, either. It's not a straight-line projection, where more density is always better than less density.''

Given the need to replace 27 million square feet of office space in lower Manhattan, vastly smaller buildings should not be considered if that will help spur businesses and residents to flee to suburbs, said David Lee, partner in the Boston architectural firm Stull & Lee.

The terrorist attacks ''were a major setback just as cities were making a comeback,'' Lee said.

''I do worry about concentrating so much of a particular knowledge base in one place. It may be smarter to have a more distributed venue. And skyscrapers are probably not environmentally the best way to go,'' he said. ''But I don't think four-story Victorian buildings are the answer, either. Somewhere in between makes sense - tall buildings that are environmentally sound, harmonious with their surroundings, and tied into public transportation systems.''

Martin Zogran, critic in urban design at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, agreed that ''Jane Jacobs's principles are not appropriate for Wall Street.'' Major centers of finance and technology need concentrations of people in one place, and 50-story residential buildings have their own sense of ''vertical community, just not with front porches and picket fences.''

But neo-traditionalists do have a point about reshaping the areas around the base of tall buildings, Zogran said. The plaza at the base of the World Trade Center was ''cold and alienating and without human scale,'' he said.

While Zogran noted that the collapse of the World Trade Center was ''being used to further people's own agendas'' about building and design, others said it was natural for different strategies to be aired at this moment.

A similar debate emerged in Europe after World War II. In Poland, some town centers were rebuilt exactly as they were, but with new materials. Other devastated urban landscapes were re-created using the new ideas of the time.

''It was seen as an opportunity to build anew, with more light and air, a chance to build a modern city,'' said Krieger.

 

Anthony Flint can be reached by e-mail at flint@globe.com.

This story ran on page A31 of the Boston Globe on 9/19/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.