A Triumph Not of Design but of Designerliness
Reinier de Graaf’s disciplinary diagnostics, plus the MTA’s new subway cars and the RPA at 100
’Tis the season of tote bags. Pick yours up now and subscribe while you’re at it.
Adventures in the Scream Trade
In which a nascent futurist, seasoned operator, and master craftsman attends to his legends
by Thomas de Monchaux
The legacy media, cultural, economic, and ecological conditions in which a figure like Rem Koolhaas could prosper are no more: he was among the very first, and endured long enough to become the very last, of the so-called starchitects of the turn of the millennium, despite energetic efforts by such older OMA alumnae as Bjarke Ingels to revive that role. Many international designers who passed even briefly through that office, for whom it served as a kind of finishing school, have now surpassed its work—generally by not recapitulating its styles or postures—and constitute a golden generation of enterprising, skillful, serious-minded, imaginative, and idealistic designers and educators. Much as stints in the Berlin office of Peter Behrens yielded Mies, Gropius, and Le Corbusier, this may be OMA’s defining legacy and gift to the world.
Because its office culture, a preponderance of anecdotes convinces, was one of those that normalized a culture of cruelty in which romanticized genius figures were enabled to act—indeed sought to perform and confirm genius and status—with varieties of violence, others who aspired to status may have been inclined to imitate such action. Or merely to repeat a sadomasochistic cycle. This perpetuation—of screamers, of bullies, of master manipulators—is common in the profession of architecture. (The frailty may be compounded by the precarity of the practice’s economic models and the contingent liminality of its practitioners’ social class.) More and more, for my part as a critic and fan, the extent to which such culture seems somehow to leach, like a karmic brownfield, into the resulting built work is the same extent to which that work drains itself of interest. Reinier de Graaf, somewhere in that golden generation, is one heir to all this.
Departing Trains
The new R211 subway cars represent a high-tech distraction from the system’s deeper woes.
by Chenoe Hart
When I was a child visiting New York City, the lights inside subway cars would sometimes flicker as the train crossed aging, uneven tracks. Once, the luminaires went dark for a few seconds. I closed my eyes. If the lights were still out when I opened them again, I told myself, using a ten-year-old’s logic, it would mean I could see the future. The setting that inspired this train of thought seemed to bear witness to hidden backstories accumulated over time. Leaning my head against the window and hearing a clang or thud, I’d think about all the unseen events happening within the murk of the tunnel walls. I still do. Crumbling infrastructure bespeaks tales of administrative neglect, but it also trembles with mystery. Train car lights flickering like a haunted house could signal either distressed electrical wiring or the presence of ghosts.
A few old remaining gremlins still lurking within the subway will soon be banished. A high-tech line of trains, designated R211 in the nomenclature of the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, began trials in March and promises modern standards of regulated efficiency. When the new trains pull into stations with their sleek, oversized, glazed front fasciae, they might appear to be the public transit equivalent of an old independent storefront being renovated into the polished gleam of a chain convenience store.
Yesterday’s Future
The Regional Planning Association represents the status quo even as it also urges bold intervention.
by Gideon Fink Shapiro
New York has been unlivable since forever. One hundred years ago, a group of visionary citizens—well, a Prohibition-era cocktail party’s worth of politicos, social reformers, planners, and businesspeople—decided to do something about it. They gathered loads of data and made a series of studies and plans. Not just for the city, but for the whole metropolitan region, cutting across jurisdictional lines, looking at flows of water, people, goods, and capital. Seven years and $1.3 million (about $22 million in today’s dollars) later, the newly incorporated Regional Plan Association, an independent nonprofit, published the first “Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs,” running over one thousand pages across two volumes. To their surprise, over the next decade, many of the bridges, parkways, and parks proposed in the plan were built by Robert Moses, who earned RPA’s “enthusiastic support—until the day in 1939 they opposed one of his projects, and were stunned by the arrogance, dishonesty, and outright cruelty of a man they had once admired.”
This I read at RPA’s pop-up centennial exhibition, The Constant Future: A Century of the Regional Plan, which closed October 25 after a seventeen-day run at Grand Central Terminal’s majestic Vanderbilt Hall. The retrospective, composed of printed boards and banners mounted on a two-story-high steel framework designed by James Sanders Studio, represented the highs and lows of twentieth-century planning—from the transformative Triborough (Robert F. Kennedy) Bridge and the miraculous Fire Island National Seashore to the outrageously destructive Cross Bronx Expressway—and the generational shift toward more inclusive, stakeholder-driven planning efforts. Lacking a strong argument but packed with strong images and a clear historical narrative, the show schooled me on RPA’s role in shaping modern New York. That role is larger than I had realized, though the group’s tactics remain subtle: RPA loves when governors and CEOs steal its ideas.
New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our Editor is Samuel Medina and our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc. For their support, we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Thomas Phifer.
To support the work and receive NYRA by post, subscribe here.