How to Build a Better City How crowded should or can cities get? What should be driving tower design? By Moshe Sadfie
http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-build-a-better-city-1452031289
New York is now home to seven of the 100 tallest buildings in the world. The current building campaign will produce five more.
The flurry of high-rise tower construction now under way in New York will bring about a quantum leap in density, one that will forever change our urban environment. The city is now home to seven of the 100 tallest buildings in the world. The current building campaign will produce five more. They are a reminder that towers have become the dominant building type in most major cities around the world, increasing congestion as they accumulate.
These developments raise fundamental questions: How crowded should or can cities get? What should be driving tower design, be it residential, commercial or mixed use? Are our current planning and zoning regulations adequate in guiding this growth, in mitigating the impact of density? Or do we need new tools for a new era of mega-scale construction? Finally, towers create fundamental questions about the nature and character of the public realm.
Neither the prevailing tower designs nor current planning practice world-wide are able to cope with the new reality. The quality of life within towers is wanting. We still treat them, at best, as sculpture, and at worst, as utilitarian vertical extrusions of space. Many towers are designed from the outside in— elegant forms with decorative skins, hermetically sealed from the outside world. If instead they were designed as living, organic environments—with considerations of orientation, views, light and the capability to connect to the outdoors, creating terraces, gardens and solariums—tower designs would be dramatically transformed. The work space must also be rethought. Natural ventilation, diversity of workspaces and a connection to the exterior are all qualities that would help overcome the oppression of scale and crowding.
But addressing individual tower design is not enough. As towers become densely clustered, they affect each other and the public realm. Towers have a sphere of influence; they cast shadows, they block views; certain orientations are favored over others. Yet the New York Zoning Ordinances and those of most other cities don’t even attempt to place towers in optimal arrangements responding to these considerations.
There are some notable exceptions. Qinhuangdao, a Chinese city of three million people, has a local ordinance that requires that three hours of sunlight, as measured in the winter solstice, must reach each apartment. We, Safdie Architects, just completed a 2,400-dwelling-unit, 32-story beachfront development where we labored for several months to come up with a massing arrangement that satisfies this requirement. The resulting project certainly does not resemble the traditional housing complex of multiple, closely packed, extruded towers. Similarly, the recent European requirement that all workspaces have natural light has transformed office-tower design, reduced footprints and informed the shaping of towers. The embracing of such standards world-wide is inevitable, particularly as we seek greener and more environmentally responsive buildings.
Nor, I think, has the public realm fared well as towers have come to dominate the city. Of late, the typical patterns of development in many megacities are large projects with clusters of mixed-use towers atop a podium housing a retail mall. These structures are siphoning life from surrounding streets, and rarely connect to each other. They are privatized, exclusively commercial spaces lacking the diversity of uses and variety of activities of people we associate with cities. Clearly, new planning tools are needed to make these private-sector developments more public, better connected to their surroundings and to each other.
To reverse the trend, inventive planning and urban-design interventions are needed. We need to reestablish the respectability of urban design and planning after decades of little or no oversight. Singapore leads the way in guiding private-sector developments through their Urban Redevelopment Authority. We need to do something similar here in the U.S.
Consider, for example, the High Line: It is a popular success and also a catalyst for new development along its path. But as each developer seeks to place its tower as close as possible to the High Line, it is now threatened with canyonization, overwhelmed by mass and shadow. Imagine zoning requiring that building profiles be set back from the High Line, placing the tallest portions to the east and west, creating a valley-like space, would optimize openness and visibility without compromising density, while maximizing real-estate values. Cities can manage or mitigate density with good planning.
Fifty years ago, as part of Expo ’67 in Montreal, I designed Habitat ’67. It was an attempt to rethink apartment buildings into village-like hillsides, each dwelling with its own garden on the roof of the unit below and served by “streets” in the sky. The motto was ”For Everyone a Garden.” More recently, in Singapore, we built the Marina Bay Sands resort, where three 59-story towers are topped by a continuous, 1,115-foot platform with a 3-acre SkyPark. It demonstrates how towers can be integrated to form major open space.
Further evolution of cities will determine how dense they are allowed to get and how large. In the meantime, the task ahead of us—municipalities, architects and developers—is to embrace the tools, whether mandated by zoning or not, that will make the dense megacity more livable and workable.
Mr. Safdie is an architect, urban planner, educator, theorist and author, and the recipient of the 2015 AIA Gold Medal. ‘Global Citizen,’ a comprehensive exhibition of his work, is on view at the National Academy Museum in New York through Jan. 10.
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