This is Bourton-on-the-Water, a tiny idyll in the English Cotswolds. It's my friend Michael's favorite spot in the
whole world.
To understand why, it helps to know that Michael is a latter-day, non-Tory — i.e., altogether more complex and interesting — incarnation of the Englishman most of us non-Brits have in mind when we hear that Gilbert and Sullivan song: a tweeds-and-cravat-wearing gentleman scholar who — although he wasn’t born until 1960 — still can't completely forgive the Germans; still can work himself into a righteous tether over the decline and fall of old English carmakers like Rover, Morris, MG and Triumph; and is never happier than when he's ambling around a place very much like the Leicestershire market town he grew up in.
Which is to say, a place very much like Bourton-on-the-Water.
Michael introduced Bourton to me sometime in the late 1980s, when we were students together at St. Andrews University in Scotland. That was around the time he also introduced me to The Kinks by playing me their classic 1968 album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.
It turns out that the early prophets of the British Invasion and the quintessential hamlet of the English Midlands hold some of the most important lessons for ground zero, which I'll come to shortly. The convergence couldn't have been more fitting, even then.
For it was little villages like Bourton-on-the-Water — and the very particular fading way of English life they represented — that members of the title song's Village Green Preservation Society (together with their fellow travelers in the Desperate Dan Appreciation Society, the Draught Beer Preservation Society, the Custard Pie Appreciation Consortium, the Sherlock Holmes English-Speaking Vernacular, the Office Block Persecution Affinity, and the Skyscraper Condemnation Affiliate) were trying to save from extinction:
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do
If the title of the album — The Kinks Are the Village
Green Preservation Society — is ironic, it's an irony that
owns up to itself. Listen closely, and it's as if Ray Davies
& Co. have poured themselves and all their provincially minded compatriots — the real-life preservationists of
1968 England — a cup of tea and said, "We know, we know. Life is complicated and cities can be mean. We want to save the village green, too. Little shops, china cups, strawberry jam — all of it. But it's a fast, modern world we live in, so let's go into it with eyes wide open, knowing that at least some of the old is going to fall by the wayside to make way for the new that needs to replace it."
That honesty is what keeps the honest listener from dismissing VGPS as an escapist retreat into Mary-and-Bert-on-a-jolly-holiday nostalgia. That's how it can seem at first, and indeed the risk of a charm offensive this charming is that it fails to disarm.
But listen closer still and you’ll hear the sound of satire trumping sympathy. In "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains," is Davies singing about an actual train, or does he have in mind the diehard founding chairman of the VGPS?
I'm the last of the good old renegades
All my friends are all middle class and grey
But I live in a museum, so I'm okayI'm the last of the good old-fashioned steam-powered trains
Like the last of the good ol' puffer trains
I'm the last of the soot-and-scum brigade
And all this peaceful livin' is drivin' me insaneI'm the last of the good old-fashioned steam-powered trains
More likely than not, the real message of VGPS is that the future is never with anti-moderns of whatever sentimentalist or reactionary stripe; with those who want from tomorrow only that it be like today or, better yet, yesterday; with those who hunker down in some idealized urbanity, as they desperately try to keep everything around them just like they remember it was — or always wanted it to be; with those who see every building's demolition as a call to batten down the architectural hatches.
:: :: ::
IF it isn’t obvious by now, you need only to recall who
was first on the scene at ground zero (and New Orleans) to know who I'm really talking about. For yesterday's village preservationists are today's New Urbanists, the same parsimonious, fearmongering, paternalistic hall monitors of urban development who in the 1980s regarded the souped-up neo-traditionalist suburbanity of Battery Park City, across from ground zero, as an Appolinian ideal — and who wanted more of the same for ground zero itself.
More Westchester than Wall Street — and with architectural values perfectly attuned to the post-9/11 security state — this loose collective of retro-voguish architects, critics, planners, and miscellaneous hired hands has long regarded architectural New York as a problem to be solved by downsizing.
Galvanized in the wake of 9/11 as ground zero's own Skyscraper Condemnation Affiliate, what they wanted more than anything else for the next World Trade Center was that it become a "human scale" development — a warm and fuzzy enclave of "traditional streets and blocks" lined with shops and restaurants at the street level and not-too-large-not-too-small-but-just-right buildings above. All to redeem the unpardonable urban sin of the original World Trade Center. And all in the precious holy name of Jane Jacobs.
The promised key to all this wonderment? Restoring some of the streets that were taken out the build the trade center in the 1960s. Now, there was always a real estate angle to this. Running one street down the site and one street across (two smaller streets have been added since that "basic version" was brokered in late 2001) would create four convenient development parcels: one for a memorial and three for the standard-issue office buildings leaseholder Larry Silverstein had long said he was going to build.
Freedom Tower architect David Childs — Larry Silverstein's house architect on 9/11 and a Street Grid True Believer since long before ground zero made it an issue — was probably the first to tell Silverstein this. Indeed, Childs had a particular streets-and-blocks ax to grind on the World Trade Center site. He made no effort to hide the fact and, if anything, was almost messianic about it, telling Time magazine in May 2002: "What they did to lower Manhattan [in building the original World Trade Center] was an act of vandalism just as complete as September 11th.”
:: :: ::
BUT look at what kind of buildings — and, more
important, what kind of resulting urban environment — the self-righteous, know-it-all determination to run streets through the site actually produces:
The four towers proposed for the World Trade Center site would be the bulkiest buildings in New York's history. According to an architectural analysis by Eli Attia (download CV), these towers range from nearly 2 to almost 4 times larger than City zoning laws allow. Others have reached similar conclusions.
For years now, the rebuilding authorities have been performing an environmental impact sleight-of-hand, arguing that the density of the site as a whole is lower than the trade center it replaces, and what a good boy am I.
The authorities are saying, in effect, that their monolithic boxes get a public space credit for the adjacent memorial.
But no one on either of their boards thinks we should build a half dozen Freedom Towers along Central Park West. And the New York City Zoning Resolution doesn't provide them with an "averaging option" for a streets-and-blocks design.
Indeed, precisely because of the streets and blocks that the New Urbanists just had to have, the Zoning Resolution — written 90 years ago, in the wake of another "bulky building" scandal, to protect the City from what is being perpetrated downtown — requires that the density of those blocks (which in this case means buildings) be measured — and judged — individually.
What does this mean for the next World Trade Center?
It means four Empire State Buildings in a two-block radius. It means virtually no public open space. It means that the Freedom Tower, on its own — actually not the worst of the four — is twice as bulky as this building in Columbus Circle:
Today, the densest intersection in Manhattan is in Times Square:
Got that in your mind's eye? Now think what it would be like to have even less sky visible from the street; even less sunlight reaching the street (or surrounding buildings); even more congested streets and sidewalks; even larger shadows; even poorer air quality; and even harsher wind effects on the ground.
That's what the proposed plan means.
Human scale? Far from it. And yet, the New Urbanists — including the ones sitting on the editorial board of
The New York Times — have beseeched us again and
again to "save the Libeskind vision," just as surely as the village preservationists summoned God himself to "save
the Village Green."
:: :: ::
WORD on the street, these five years — one guess who put it there — has been that zoning is a moot point, since the bi-state Port of Authority of New York and New Jersey, who built the World Trade Center and owns the land, is outside the City's jurisdiction.
Wrong on both counts. To justify its position on zoning, the Port Authority uses the 1962 law authorizing it to build the trade center. But look at what the jurisdiction clause of the 1962 law actually says:
"So long as any facility constituting a portion of the port development project shall be owned, controlled or operated by the port authority...no agency, commission or municipality of either or both of the two states shall have jurisdiction over" it. [emphasis added]
Stated another way: Whatever jurisdictional authority the Port Authority has over any facility at the World Trade Center, it has that authority only for "so long as" it owns, controls or operates the facility. It is a temporary authority.
Stated yet another way: Because the law, as it must, contemplates a time when the Port Authority might, in the course of its business, dispense of its ownership, control and operation of some or all of the World Trade Center, the law gives the Port Authority the authority to do only that which can be reversed.
Are we designing a temporary trade center? Of course not. We are designing it to stand forever. If we design and build the worst urban environment in the City's history, in unprecedented violation of the City's zoning laws, that too will stand forever.
But "so long as" is not forever. The 1962 law never gave the Port Authority the right to establish a permanent, illegal state of general physical harm against the public by building anything like what is currently proposed for ground zero.
The proposed plan is illegal. Period.
:: :: ::
ANOTHER piece of the received wisdom is that ground zero's hyperdense clutter begins and ends with one number: 10 million. (Actually, the site proper is only 8.8 million square feet, since that's all the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation could fit on it under their plan — the other 1.2 is across the street — but....)
Wrong again. Please understand this: For this site, 10 million square feet is a problem only when it is balled and chained with a matrix of streets and blocks.
Here is a look at Three for the World, Eli Attia's 2002/3 design for the World Trade Center site (download PDF):
Although the complete pre-1962 street grid is rendered as pedestrian pathways, there are no vehicular streets. The LMDC had made clear that it was not interested in such a design — and Attia knew that no architect designing to the LMDC's streets-and-blocks mandate would be able to achieve the benchmarks he knew were possible by laying the mandate aside.
This — and because he was unwilling to sign over his intellectual property rights, as the LMDC required of all participating architects — is why Attia declined former LMDC chair John Whitehead's August 2002 invitation to enter and participate as a finalist in the LMDC's "competition" (an offer Whitehead made before seeing Attia's qualifications or his design).
But notice what can happen when streets are taken out of the equation.
The towers are centrally oriented on the site, rather than being pushed to the edges. Their aspect is centrifugal and dynamic, rather than linear and static. They register visually as sculptures.
Most important, centering the towers on the site reveals the full physical and human scale of ground zero and enables this ground zero to be the chief memorial artifact and the chief architectural resource.
The site we all have been looking at for the last five years — the site that arrests and transforms us, even as it continues to resonate with 9/11 — is not 16 acres. Rather, it is the great three-dimensional volume framed by the buildings that surround ground zero. Not 16 acres. 32 acres.
The proposed plan eviscerates this site, along with the history and memory and power that reside there.
Attia's design preserves it, initially with a piazza that begins at Church Street, the eastern perimeter of the site; stretches west across the site; decks over West Street, the western perimeter; and connects to the second level of the World Financial Center, on the other side.
This expands the maximum size of the zoning lot from
16 acres to 24 acres.
What does this mean for the public realm of a World Trade Center built as Attia proposes, rather than with the failed New Urbanism currently on the table?
It means that, although the buildings locate 10.5 million square feet of floor area on the site — instead of the 8.8 proposed — they create an urban environment that, in zoning parlance, is 2 to 5 times less dense.
It means that although the buildings are taller and larger in absolute terms, their tapered forms make them much less bulky than the proposed buildings, resulting in much more sky visible from the street; much more sunlight reaching the street (and surrounding buildings); much less congested streets and sidewalks; much smaller shadows; much better air quality; and much more sympathetic wind effects on the ground. (The tapers are safer, too: The forms are more stable, and they place more people on lower floors. Two-thirds of the people in each building would occupy the bottom third of the building.)
It means 18 acres of public open space.
It means human scale.
It means, ironically, that designing the next World Trade Center as a "village green writ large" promises the best future of all.
:: :: ::
THE KINKS didn’t blame the village green preservationists — nor should anyone blame the New Urbanists — simply for wanting what they want. The blame is with those who want what they want and are prepared to get it at all costs — who are so selfishly and corrosively embedded in their personal ideals that they mistake them for moral absolutes and thus are blinkered to even the possibility that the greater good might require them to lay aside their ideals and think about matters in a new way.
There's a word for this: arrogance. David Childs used it in the Time magazine interview, saying that the Twin Towers were symbols of "the midcentury arrogance of architects."
But what could be more arrogant than Childs — perhaps the architect of the City's power elite — using his club access to advise his fellow elites on the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to put a streets-and-blocks fix on ground zero, so that, on at least this point — architecturally, the most important and limit-defining point of all — every architect who came through the LMDC's doors would be forced to design ground zero like he would?
What could be more arrogant than the architectural chattering classes — planners, critics, reporters, think tankers, activists, and politicians of every kind — jumping up on the design bandwagon, when none of them has any professional experience designing a project of such urban complexity as the next World Trade Center? (Even Larry Silverstein knew enough, on the Freedom Tower, to tell Daniel Libeskind, "I don’t want you touching my building. Danny, you've never designed a skyscraper. If I'm going to have heart surgery, I don't want the hospital administrator.")
And what could be more — how else to say it? — cowardly and debased than virtually every name architect sitting on the sidelines, folding their hands, and allowing this to happen to the project that, probably more than any other in their lifetimes, has such potential to be a laboratory of ideas for how, architecturally, to deal intelligently with our cities in this and future generations?
In every sense the most damning aspect of this whole process has been the inability, indeed bloody-minded refusal, of non-architects on all sides — which is just about everybody — to make the crucial distinction between creating a program and creating a design. It was never: "Here's an activity or a quality we'd like to have on the site, now let's ask the architects to tell us what's the best way to do it." Rather, it was: "Hello, Architect, here's the quality we'd like and here's the exact physical solution. When do you think you'll have the drawings ready?"
The most insidious example of this has been the rebuildiing authorities' determination to carve up the World Trade Center site with streets. This is a design solution for how to achieve the program brief for better connections across the site than were there before. It's one design solution. There are others. That it was politicians who made this call preemptively — rather than architects who made it as part of their own integrated design process — should have been anyone's first clue that we were well on our way to nowhere.
Edmund Burke, the 18th-century Anglo-Irish statesman
and orator, is credited with having said that the only thing necessary for evil to prosper and succeed is for good "men" to do nothing.
Want to do a good something for the next World Trade Center? The only way to secure the site's best future is to set architects free to do what they know how to do: Design. Not decorate. Design. That has yet to happen.
So let's do the right thing. Let's set the architects free, at long last. Of course, we'll have to start over first. The freest architect in the world isn't going to fix the mess that's there now. And "staying the course" of a rotten plan is never a very good idea to begin with.
Need courage? Be not afraid:
Ground zero is not yet Bourton-on-the-Water.
Burke's law still stands.
And "The Village Green Preservation Society" is still
one hell of a good song.
THE VILLAGE GREEN PRESERVATION SOCIETY
We are the Village Green Preservation Society
God save Donald Duck, Vaudeville and Variety
We are the Desperate Dan Appreciation Society
God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do
We are the Draught Beer Preservation Society
God save Mrs. Mopp and good Old Mother Riley
We are the Custard Pie Appreciation Consortium
God save the George Cross and all those who were
awarded them
We are the Sherlock Holmes English-Speaking Vernacular
Help save Fu Manchu, Moriarty and Dracula
We are the Office Block Persecution Affinity
God save little shops, china cups and virginity
We are the Skyscraper Condemnation Affiliate
God save Tudor houses, antique tables and billiards
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do
God save the Village Green
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