Hudson Yards under construction, June 2018 (my photo)
How can such an unimaginably large megaproject be relevant to our work here in little Eugene, Oregon? What are the lessons we might take from what is already evident about Hudson Yards, and how can we apply those lessons here?
Much of the press about Hudson Yards on the occasion of its opening has been harshly critical. Alexandra Schwartz of The New Yorker magazine lamented its “unremitting artificiality,” with a “frictionless sameness” about it, “an enclave, a high-end corporate park buoyed by six billion dollars in tax breaks.” She described its centerpiece—the Vessel, a permanent art installation designed by Thomas Heatherwick—as a “triumph of vapidity, banal to its hollow core.”(2) Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times popped the project’s bubble of urbanistic pretension by rightly characterizing it as “a gated community catering to the upper class . . . a relic of dated 2000s thinking, nearly devoid of urban design [that] declines to blend into the city grid.”
Other critics have similarly been less than charitable. Like Kimmelman, Mark Alan Hewitt of Common\Edge questioned Hudson Yard’s inward-focus, exclusivity, and particularly its incorporation of a glitzy shopping mall for the wealthy. “Having a shopping mall, a ‘museum of commodities,’ attached to both housing and arts venues is an inevitable consequence of our conflation of money with culture,” he wrote. Many detractors draw unfavorable comparisons between the 28-acre development and Rockefeller Center, itself a mega-development in its own time. As Michael J. Lewis of The Wall Street Journal said, “Hudson Yards, it is now clear to see, is no Rockefeller Center … it lacks the gracious integration of outdoor space with the architectural order of its surrounding buildings.” Matt Shaw of The Architect’s Newspaper sardonically refers to Hudson Yards as “Little Dubai” because its genesis is not unlike how development has occurred in spectacular fashion in Dubai, via a marriage of government and private interests that confers power upon technocratic consultants to plan whole districts in one fell swoop.
Witold Rybczynski, one of my favorite writers on architecture, remarked most succinctly of all: “. . . the whole thing adds up to—well, nothing, really.”
Do I agree? For the most part, yes. Hudson Yards seems remorselessly sterile. This much was immediately apparent to me during my visit to New York, well before its opening last week. Additionally, nothing about the project suggests it grew in a piecemeal and organic way; I suppose in this respect it is at least “honest.” There’s no room for clutter, chaos, or a diversity of experiences. It’s all carefully curated, programmed, and choreographed, mostly for the benefit of the uber-rich. Access to the Vessel is by appointment. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that order is enforced by a squadron of Segway-riding mall cops.
Hudson Yards seen from the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building, November 2018. Photo by DigbyDalton [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]
What’s especially
remarkable to me is the persistent sameness of the architecture at Hudson Yards,
which is peculiar because the developers—Related Companies and Oxford Properties—commissioned several architectural firms(3) to
design the project’s various office and residential towers. And yet, there they
are, all so much alike: same silvery blue glass curtain walls, same stark
geometries, same Brobdingnagian
proportions. Moreover, they’re indifferent to one another, an upmarket gaggle that
happens to rub shoulders only by circumstance, nothing if not like uniformly pinstriped,
mute office workers in a crowded elevator cab.
Equally peculiar is its street-level desolation.
From what I gather, the pedestrian experience since Hudson Yards’ opening is
nothing like that of the city to which it has been grafted. New York is famous
for its authentic street experiences, its spirited juxtapositions, and the messy
vitality of its crowded, dirty sidewalks. It’s a wondrous mélange of public
spaces where serendipity rules and one ever is alone. It’s a city that never
sleeps and where everyone walks. It’s a place with few barriers and welcoming
to people from all cultures and walks of life. By contrast, Hudson Yards is an
elevated office park, an icy monument to private influence over public space. It’s
possible the passage of time and the acquisition of patina will soften its
edges, but for now it hardly resembles nor meshes with the great city from
which it springs.
In its defense, the Hudson Yards project isn’t a
byproduct of neighborhood-busting “urban renewal.” Nobody was forcibly displaced.
It’s built over a working railyard, multiplying the value of that real estate many
times over. Despite relying upon substantial tax waivers and subsidies to “pencil
out,” the property will ultimately contribute orders of magnitude more to New
York’s property tax rolls than it would if left as it was. Hudson Yards also
needed to be a very large project to warrant the enormous investment in improvements
to the site’s infrastructure.
So, what can we here in Eugene learn from a
project like Hudson Yards, one that seems alien to the reality of our urban
situation?
It’s clear one lesson from Hudson Yards is endless
buckets of money do not guarantee good architecture and urban design. Another is
that bigger is not synonymous with better. Those with the benefit of hindsight
recognize the damage wrought upon downtown Eugene by the injurious union of imprudent
redevelopment, slavish devotion to the needs of the automobile, and the flight
of retail to newfangled malls during the 1960s and 70s. Those broad strokes condemned
our urban core to decades of decline from which it is still now only recovering.
Eugene’s modest scale cannot withstand similarly misguided ventures. The
misbegotten Capstone student housing development approaches the limits of what
our downtown can withstand; as it is, Capstone serves as a prime example of how
not to create a pedestrian-friendly streetscape and as a poster child for missed
opportunities.
1 Manhattan West under construction with Hudson Yards beyond, as viewed from my room on the 26th floor of The New Yorker Hotel, June 2018
I’ve long championed the principle of incremental growth. Incremental growth is by definition inconsistent with huge megaprojects
like Hudson Yards. The benefit of piecemeal or
incremental growth is that it allows for fine-grained adjustments over time.
Assuming growth is desirable at all—in the case of downtown Eugene, I believe
it is—development in smaller increments is less likely to result in undesirable
outcomes.
Fundamentally, we can
view the urban fabric as a complex adaptive system subject to the effects of
interrelated groups of activities. Because of their complexity, it is difficult
to fully understand cities, let alone plan them well. Another analogous model
is to view cities as living organisms. Like any life form, they are vulnerable
to structurally disruptive effects. Predicting the impact of changes carried
out in big chunks isn’t easy if we factor in the highly interdependent systems
of which cities are comprised.
Arguably, one
effective mechanism for improving the urban environment has been trial and
error. Minor missteps provide feedback useful for recalibrating future choices.
Small errors are relatively easy and inexpensive to correct. Bigger, coarser
mistakes are far less so.
The redevelopment of the former EWEB site along the banks of the Willamette River is
monumentally important to Eugene. As a matter of fact, it may be our Hudson
Yards. Perhaps it’s a stretch for me to suggest there are considerable
parallels between the two projects, but they are clearly there. Both developments
are being undertaken by a single development team on sites brimming with
potential. Both are the beneficiaries of public subsidies. Both are and will be
realized relatively quickly. Though perhaps inconceivable given the disparities
between them, the EWEB riverfront redevelopment may be even more significant to
Eugene than Hudson Yards is to New York.
Again,
bigger isn’t necessarily better. What’s clearly needed for the EWEB riverfront
project is good design, fine-grained and attuned to the specifics of the site
and its connections to the river and urban fabric. Good design will be
necessary to avert the possibility of “unremitting artificiality” and “frictionless
sameness” that afflicts Hudson Yards. Indeed, what Eugene needs of its riverfront
redevelopment project is to avoid making the big mistakes by utilizing an
iterative design process that models as closely as possible what piecemeal
growth might be like if it was actually implemented that way.
Regardless
of their size, location, or cost, there are lessons to be learned from any
project. Hudson Yards may be huge and expensive but not so much so that it
doesn’t have something to teach architects here in Eugene.
(2) The Guardian dubbed the Vessel “a 15-story high answer to the question: ‘How much money could a rich man waste building a climbable version of an M.C. Escher drawing?’ (The answer is $200 million).”
(3) KPF, SOM, Roche-Dinkeloo, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed the Phase 1 towers. Phase 2 will include towers reportedly designed by Santiago Calatrava, Robert A.M. Stern, and Frank Gehry.
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