Text Size

Email Post

Print Post

Comments (6)

Save Article

New York City - Just in time for the election, New York Magazine checks in on New York City architecture and development during the Bloomberg years.

Instead of dwelling on the development delays and failures of recent years -- cough, Atlantic Yards, cough Willets Point, cough, Coney Island -- the magazine puts a positive spin on things. The Bloomberg administration has been "doggedly smuggling high-level architecture" to previously architecturally underserved neighborhoods. How devious!

Read below

The map of Michael Bloomberg’s New York bears the scars of vast, unfinished dreams of renewal. Hudson Yards, Atlantic Yards, Coney Island, Willets Point, ground zero, Governors Island, the Gowanus Canal—all those glittering megaplans, derailed, deferred, or debased. Yet the Bloomberg administration can claim triumphs at a tiny scale: Station house by station house, library by library, the city has been doggedly smuggling high-level architecture to the neighborhoods that need it most.

In the Bronx, a shiny new firehouse stands out on its block of Washington Avenue like a bright plastic bucket on a rainy day. It’s not just the flame-colored aluminum façade, or the jaunty way the zinc cladding is slung across the roof, that makes it distinctive; it’s a combination of toughness, efficiency, and whimsy. Instead of the classic rowhouse with a big red door, the architects at Polshek Partnership have made Rescue Company 3 a showpiece of logistical economy, a tightly organized locker for equipment, vehicles, and men. The upper story looks as if it were hinged to the ground floor; you want to flip up the top and pop out the trucks.

The Fire Department has traditionally considered architecture a priority only when it’s burning down. It no longer has a choice. For decades, the trinity of quick, cheap, and ugly dominated the city’s building program. Quick was always a chimera, and cheap remains sacrosanct, but ugly won’t cut it anymore. Agencies that once indifferently crammed schoolkids, cops, low-income residents, and garbage trucks into an assortment of interchangeable brick boxes now hire brand-name architects to infuse public buildings with panache.

The change can be traced to the influence of David Burney, a British-born architect whom Bloomberg appointed commissioner of the Department of Design and Construction in 2004. Those few New Yorkers who have heard of the DDC may think of it as an invisible but omnipresent entity that keeps water mains flowing and sidewalks smooth. But with over 600 building projects in its portfolio, valued at $6 billion, the agency is also New York’s single most voracious consumer of architecture. One of Burney’s first acts as commissioner was to reject an anodyne design for a new firehouse in Bushwick that was trudging its way through the approvals process. Engine 277 and Ladder 112 deserved a home that was better than basic, he insisted, and he told the fire chiefs and the architects at STV to come up with something more distinctive. The happy result resembles a building-size fire truck with a rounded body and a windshield expanded to a curtain-wall façade.

Read the full article here