A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

But unless the building is oriented toward the outside, which surrounds it, as carefully and positively as toward its inside, the space around the building will be useless and blank—with the direct effect, in the long run, that the building will be socially isolated, because you have to cross a no-man’s land to get to it.

Look, for example, at this machine age slab of steel and glass. You cannot approach it anywhere except at its entrance—because the space around it is not made for people.

I couldn’t help but think of the “Skip Intro” splash page as the realization of a building’s edge on the web.

(For those outside of NYC, the Hudson Yards is a large piece of undeveloped property in Hell’s Kitchen (or “Midtown West”), basically the last large piece of undeveloped property in Manhattan. As you might guess, it’s valuable. The Metropolitan Transit Authority owns the property and has been shopping around the development rights for some time.)

From the article:

Equally unsettling is how the project fits into the surrounding urban fabric. The towers loom over the High Line, forming a colossal barrier against the Chelsea neighborhood to the south. (Allowing 11th Avenue to run through the site will lessen the effect slightly, but not much.) Arranging the towers along an east-west axis — a break from the traditional Manhattan grid — is only apt to reinforce the site’s image as an introverted corporate enclave.

This seems to suit the transportation authority’s agenda just fine: it always has been more interested in how much money it could make off the site than in the impact that the development would have on New York. The city could build at much lower density without spending a penny of taxpayer money.

I’m surprised at the indignation here. It can’t possibly come as a surprise to an architecture critic that a developer would sell to the highest bidder. I honestly have no idea whether the MTA–a quasi-governmental agency, I guess?–has any responsibility to be publicly beneficent with the land it owns.

Let’s assume for a moment, though, that the MTA is responsible for championing the public good as Ouroussoff suggests. Surely physical architecture is not the only criteria by which we judge an organization’s contribution to the public good. Many G train riders would happily trade several acres of “miserably depressing” architecture in the already miserably depressing midtown Manhattan if it meant the MTA provided more frequent service and full-time connections to working class neighborhoods in Queens.

I am over-simplifying, to be sure, but so is Ouroussoff. The breathless article about the conflict between private profit and public good has been written before. Only a fool would believe that New York City landowners have a cut-and-dried choice between the public good and “hustling for money.”