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High rises come in many, many forms, and particularly how they interact with the streets below them is critically important to whether or not they work. NYC do
by potatolicious 11y ago
High rises come in many, many forms, and particularly how they interact with the streets below them is critically important to whether or not they work.
NYC does this better than most places, but mostly by luck. Le Corbusier's Radiant City philosophy of urban design (sleek towers surrounded by idyllic parkland) gained a lot of traction in the 60s and 70s. This is why most American downtowns are wastelands - most developed under that model. It's characterized by lack of street life, lack of ground floor usages, lack of mixed use, and mechanical features that separate buildings from the city rather than integrate it (deep staircases leading to the base of the building, large setbacks from the sidewalk, etc).
NYC has the benefit of predating that model, so besides the ubiquitous housing projects and some 70s-era highrises, has survived mostly intact.
It's frustrating that in some American urban planning circles Le Corbusier's name is still uttered in awe instead of derision. I think his ideas have been thoroughly debunked by reality, but not everyone agrees.
There's nothing inherently wrong with highrises, there's everything wrong with the prescriptive school of architecture and planning that are more concerned with fantasy scenes of tower-dwellers living idyllically in the surrounding parkland, than how people actually want to use that space.
- ghaff 11y agoFully agree. Even Boston, which is a generally walkable and mixed-use city by US standards, has its monuments to 60s/70s urban planning like the Brutalist monstrosity that is City Hall and its generally vacant windswept surrounding brick footprint. One of the problems has been that when cityscapes were planned, commercial activity has often been seen as this impure thing involving people making money on public space. While you don't want to just give developers and retail/restaurants a free ride, they have to be part of the mix or you end up with these sterile spaces that no one wants to be a part of.
- potatolicious 11y agoIf you haven't read the book, Jane Jacob's Life and Death of Great American Cities digs deeply into this, and really nails the prescriptivist design philosophy that contributed to this whole mess. It's not necessarily that commercial activity was rejected - it was often accepted but only in spaces designated by the designers, which in turn bore no resemblance to where people actually wanted to shop, eat, entertain, etc. And so businesses failed to populate these spaces, and they became wastelands, with crime and decay following shortly after. This philosophy extended beyond commercial spaces - these communities inevitably had spaces set aside for children to play, adults to entertain, etc, and deeply restricted the use of these spaces to these things, and these things only. There's a deep, controlling, Big Brother-esque undercurrent to that entire branch of urban planning. And through all of this those same urban planners seemed to blame residents to failing to uphold their utopian urban vision than realize that a reasonable bit of laissez-faire is fundamental to functional cities.
- ghaff 11y agoI ran into that recently as I was following some links. I guess I should read it. (Funnily enough, I've mostly been largely rural--or at least exurban--but I've long had an interest in this topic.) Thanks.
- Animats 11y agoThe ground floor usage thing on mixed-used buildings seldom seems to work. SF has many such retail slots, and they seem to be about half rented, or rented to nail salons and such. https://goo.gl/maps/WiT6s1cmk6y https://goo.gl/maps/WiT6s1cmk6y https://goo.gl/maps/X3SeQrQwr6K2 https://goo.gl/maps/X3SeQrQwr6K2