The Ten Most Positive Architectural Events of 2009 Posted by Paul Goldberger

December 8, 2009
The Ten Most Positive Architectural Events of 2009 Posted by Paul Goldberger

New York has often built great things in bad times, sometimes by accident—the Empire State Building, finished in the Depression, was started in the boom times of the nineteen-twenties—and sometimes by intention, as when John D. Rockefeller, Jr., distracted us from our economic blues by building Rockefeller Center. We now live in a different world, more inclined to celebrate the fact that these dismal economic times mean that the biggest projects on the drawing boards, the mega-developments of Hudson Yards on the site of the West Side Railyards and Atlantic Yards on the Brooklyn rail yard, are not happening. Nobody thinks Bruce Ratner can afford to turn Atlantic Yards into his very own stimulus package, the way Rockefeller did with his project, and we are generally glad of it. In fact, it has seemed to many New Yorkers as if the economic downturn has allowed us to dodge some major bullets.

It would be churlish to call our financial troubles one of the best architectural events of the year, however much they give us a Scrooge-like sense of satisfaction. So in the spirit of this positive-thinking season, let me look instead at some things that have actually happened, rather than at some things that have not, and offer up the ten most positive architectural events of the year.

* Far and away the most uplifting thing to happen in New York this year was the completion of the first segment of the High Line, the magnificent promenade/public park atop the old elevated freight line running through West Chelsea. Designed by designed by James Corner Field Operations and Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, it is crisp, fresh, inviting, and comfortable, and if there is any shortcoming to this brilliant design, it is that it has made this area even more chic than it was before.

* 2009 really was a good year for public space in New York, since it also brought the conversion of Broadway in midtown into a pedestrian mall, thanks to the city’s extraordinary transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Kahn, who seems able to accomplish in a brief time what has frustrated others for a generation. The key here wasn’t just closing a portion of Broadway, it was in recasting the entire street before the closure for a mix of cars, bicycles, and pedestrians, phasing out the cars block by block. New York may yet become a bicycle-friendly city.

* If we can stay in New York, 41 Cooper Square, the new Cooper Union academic building designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne, is the most exciting, energetic, and well-composed academic building to go up in the city in at least a decade. The building is at once tough, strong, and deferential to its neighbors in the rapidly changing East Village; it is also at the cutting edge of sustainability, functions well, and did not cost an arm and a leg. You cannot ask for more than that.

* There are dozens of things not to like about both Citi Field and the new Yankee Stadium, but there are a hundred things that make them both better than the stadiums they replaced. Citi Field may be somewhat disingenuously retro, and Yankee Stadium self-consciously pompous, but they are both a hell of a lot more fun to watch a ball game in than their predecessors. On balance, they definitely mean architectural progress.

* Brooklyn, the borough that didn’t get Frank Gehry’s new arena for the Nets, got something a lot smaller and much more suited to its immediate needs, which is an exceptionally handsome and dignified community center in Brownsville by the architect George Ranalli. The Saratoga Avenue Community Center, built by the New York City Housing Authority, is a small, self-assured brick building that loosely echoes Frank Lloyd Wright, but is altogether original, and stands as a welcome—and welcoming—reminder that the city government actually is capable of being a good client when it wants to be.

* This past year saw the completion of the first stages of the ongoing renovation of Lincoln Center by Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, including Alice Tully Hall (below), reconceived as the heart of a truly inviting and usable public space; an expansion and improvement of the Julliard building in which it sits; and the subtle re-do of the main square of Lincoln Center, the Josie Robertson Plaza, which manages to be altogether different while looking essentially the same. 090202_r18169_p465.jpg (Photograph: Robert Polidori)

* Another mid-century relic also fared well this year: the Guggenheim Museum, which, astonishingly, marked its fiftieth birthday in 2009, and showed both curatorial and physical grace. The museum finally got around to mounting an exhibition about its architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and it completed a lengthy restoration project that, like all good facelifts, made it look exactly as it always has, only younger.

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(Photograph: Siegfried Layda)

* It has been a pretty good year for architectural publishing as far as New York is concerned, and two books in particular about the city stand out: “Twenty Minutes in Manhattan,” by Michael Sorkin, in which the architecture critic turns his walk from his apartment in Greenwich Village to his studio into an erudite but utterly engaging reverie on the nature of cities; and “Wrestling with Moses,” by Anthony Flint, which traces the long and difficult struggle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, a critical chapter of history oddly omitted from Robert Caro’s masterly biography “The Power Broker.”


* Because everything doesn’t happen in New York, it was worth looking at Paris this past year, and the remarkable decision to commission several architects of world stature to rethink the city. Some of what they came up with was fanciful nonsense, but it was impressive to be reminded that there are governments that care enough about major cities to dip into their national treasuries in search of ideas, and that the French have still not given up on bold vision. And they were smart enough to focus attention on the banlieue, the outskirts of Paris, which is where most of the city’s challenges lie.


* In 2009 Chicago marked the centennial of the Burnham Plan for Chicago, still the greatest plan any American city has ever commissioned, and the most effective, since it established much of the framework of the city as it is now, including its extraordinary lakefront. And the Art Institute of Chicago opened its new Modern Wing by Renzo Piano, the finest thing this vast museum has built since the nineteenth century, and the first time the Art Institute has let its own architecture acknowledge Chicago’s modernist architectural heritage. While Renzo Piano’s prolific output of museums all around the country has been uneven, the Modern Wing shows that he is still capable of creating a building of distinction, perhaps even greatness.


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