Lord Foster, the renowned British architect, was in midtown Manhattan when the first reports came in that the World Trade Center was under attack. Foster was presenting his plans for a gleaming new steel and glass office tower to his clients - executives of the Hearst publishing company - but on hearing the news he naturally cut it short. He and Frank Bennack, then Hearst’s chief executive, retreated to a boardroom to watch the catastrophe unfold on television. Foster, unable to disregard his architect’s training, explained to Bennack what was happening to the structures as they weakened and collapsed.
In the mournful, confusing weeks that followed, Bennack and Foster were consumed with the question of whether to go ahead with their project. Had the world just witnessed the end of the skyscraper era? What kind of message would it send to build a big, bold office tower in Manhattan? Could New York spare the manpower to build their project, or would the city’s construction crews be needed for the colossal job of rebuilding lower Manhattan?
By November, Bennack had his answer: the Foster design would be built. Foster and Hearst officials took the design to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, which approved it unanimously - a rare event in the fractious world of New York development. Everyone on the commission knew the significance of Hearst’s decision to build: just weeks after terrorists had destroyed Manhattan’s most visible buildings, a major corporation was making a long-term commitment to a traumatised city.
Four years on, there is an architectural renaissance in New York that would have been difficult to imagine in the weeks that followed 9/11. Since the 1960s, the shape of New York’s skyline has been under the control of savvy developers who made fortunes erecting uniform brick apartment towers and boxy office buildings. Architects wanting to do something new had little choice but to look to Europe or Asia. This is changing: New York is once again becoming a city where adventurous architecture can happen. Many of the world’s top architects are, like Foster, working in the city for the first time.
The outbreak of adventurous design is extremely broad-based. There are public works, most spectacularly Santiago Calatrava’s design for a new transportation centre near the World Trade Center site. There are the midtown office towers: Foster’s Hearst building, Renzo Piano’s design for The New York Times and Cesar Pelli’s new office for Bloomberg LP, all departures from the corporate glass boxes that dominate midtown Manhattan. There are great new cultural designs, including Yoshio Tanaguchi’s elegant expansion of the Museum of Modern Art. Restorations include David Childs’ plan to convert the 1912 beaux-arts Farley Post Office into a desperately needed new Pennsylvania Station. And then there is the High Line, one of those priceless ideas that is often conceived but too rarely executed: the plan is to convert a 1.45-mile-long stretch of disused elevated train track into a public park 30 feet above Chelsea and the Meatpacking District. But perhaps the most heartening of all is the return to interesting residential design, spurred on by Richard Meier’s work on Manhattan’s west side.
I went first to Childs - whose firm Skidmore Owings Merrill has been a dominant force in the city’s architecture for 50 years - to find out why all of this is happening now. “There’s always something about the turn of the century that makes people begin to think about public spaces,” says Childs, who is lead architect of the Freedom Tower on the World Trade Center site. The great discussion about civic design started in the late 19th century in New York, and those concepts were incorporated in the building boom of the early 20th century. “It seems to me this is happening again,” Childs says. “It’s an energising moment.”
Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society, compares the mood in the city not to the early 1900s but to the period after the second world war. “There was an explosion of talent and a sense of optimism. It’s like that today.” New York in 1945 had the advantage of not having been blitzed, but today New Yorkers live with the knowledge that their city is a terrorist target. “One would have thought that in the aftermath of the destruction of lower Manhattan people would have been morose. That seems not to be the case,” he says. “The spirit of the city is very strong. Whether it holds up to rational analysis hardly matters. This is a cause for celebration.”
Though the terrorist threat is a legitimate reason for feeling uneasy about living in New York, it is also something that residents must put out of their heads in order to get out of bed each morning. The improved quality of life in the city - a result of years of lower crime rates - is more tangible. It is easier to feel optimistic about the city without the threat of encountering muggers, squeegee men or junkies. The residential housing boom - while hardly unique to New York - has been widespread for this reason. Yes, prices for Upper West Side apartments have risen dramatically in the past four years. But so have values on the Lower East Side and other neighbourhoods that were blighted by crime and neglect 10 or 15 years ago.
Despite fears of the bubble bursting, the housing boom has played an undeniable role in the city’s architectural renaissance. The old joke about architecture in New York is that form does not follow function - form follows finance. The powerful real estate developers who built most of the city’s housing in the 1970s and 1980s were known for their ability to navigate the city’s bureaucracy, not for their sense of style. They had no time for ambitious architects, who were viewed as prima donnas good for nothing but creating delays and added expense. Big stretches of Manhattan were transformed in this period - particularly on Third and Sixth Avenues, where rows of bland brick apartment buildings were built with great efficiency, but no panache.
Richard Meier’s elegant and slightly eccentric apartment buildings on Perry Street changed that. The minimalist 16-storey buildings, clad in laminated glass, are a perfect complement to the Hudson River, which they face. Built between 1999 and 2002, the Meier apartments sold quickly, and for millions, to celebrities such as Martha Stewart and Calvin Klein. Another Meier is being built on nearby Charles Street, and demand has also been strong. Developers have come to see a use for those fancy architects after all, with Calatrava, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Robert A.M. Stern, Charles Gwathmey and Michael Graves now designing residential buildings in Manhattan, while Meier is starting a project in Brooklyn.
”The very positive response to the two buildings we designed on Perry Street has led some developers to the realisation that good architecture can be profitable - and maybe more profitable than just banal buildings,” Meier says.
The result is that New York is edging back on to the international architectural stage after being perceived by the design community as a risk-averse, corporate city.
”There is certainly a shift,” says Michael Wurzel, a partner at Foster Partners, who is working on the Hearst project. “This can be observed by the number of foreign architects working in New York.” Wurzel, who is based in London, says, “New York always had bold and tall buildings, but in design terms it was not cutting-edge. In the design community it was a conservative place, difficult for architects. But I think this is changing.”
A strong force behind this change is mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, whose enthusiasm for public design paved the way for Christo’s Gates exhibit in Central Park this winter and the High Line project.
”It is probably the most visually sophisticated administration in the history of the city,” says Barwick of the Municipal Art Society. “They’re very conscious of good architecture, and they want to encourage it.” The mayor’s office has been working to remove some of the notorious red tape that enmeshes the planning and development process - including the monumental task of rewriting New York’s building code, last updated in 1968. The hope is to streamline construction, reduce costs and stimulate development. And Bloomberg’s planning commissioner, Amanda Burden, does not hide her desire to bury the complacency that had dominated development in the city. “If an architect wants to push the envelope, we will help them,” she says. “This is a time for innovation and design excellence. I push it as hard as I can.”
So can any of the city’s architectural re-birth be attributed to 9/11? The answer is yes, in two respects. First, the great public debate over the proposed designs for the World Trade Center site was perhaps the greatest architectural conversation ever. Given the often ugly back-and-forth over the redevelopment in the past 18 months, it is easy to forget the extraordinary public meeting that took place in the summer of 2002, when thousands of people rejected the original lacklustre proposals for the site. “It needs to be bolder,” they shouted, and they forced officials to hold a new design competition. The after-effects of that public conversation are still with us.
Second, some very high-quality designs have been proposed for the site still known as Ground Zero, despite a deeply flawed development process. (Rather than being a public works project, many of the key decisions are being made by a hard-nosed real estate developer.) Some of the world’s most talented architects - Calatrava, Gehry, Childs, Foster and Daniel Libeskind among them - are creating designs for Ground Zero that aim to symbolise the city’s resilience and rebirth. Even if politics or the vagaries of the real estate business prevent the project from living up to those goals, great architecture has already been reborn in New York.
Christopher Grimes is an FT correspondent based in New York
