What Ramps!?
In which Eva Hagberg takes the wrecking ball to Steven Holl Architects’ Hunters Point Library
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What Ramps!?
A whole lot of people who are not me should have been paying attention a lot sooner.
by Eva Hagberg
A few weeks ago I found myself at Princeton University for my twentieth college reunion. As I wound my way from the train station toward Poe Field, past what seemed like nothing but construction, I looked left at a white building with all sorts of geometric things going on and thought, oh, that’s the Steven Holl. I say this not to brag about how good I am at recognizing buildings, but just to say that Steven Holl’s work is kind of extremely recognizable, almost Libeskind-ian in some ways in its adherence to funny angles and weird cutouts and just a lot of wacky stuff going on.
The week before my reunion the City of New York sued Steven Holl Architects, with a couple of causes of action specifically naming Holl and Chris McVoy, the design partner behind the Hunters Point Library, for basically completely fucking up their design of the forty-some-million-dollar Queens Public Library branch that opened to significant fanfare in 2019 and then was immediately thrust into the limelight for, oops, totally failing to make the building accessible to people with almost any kind of physical mobility issue. I read the lawsuit, because I love the law and I love conflict, and I counted five areas alleged to be inaccessible—including the famous five-tiered central staircase (tiers 1 and 5 are accessible, we should note), the rooftop, and, most horrifyingly, the children’s area. The library is described by Holl’s office as a structure that “reimagines the traditional library model, providing diversity of spaces from intimate reading areas to active gathering spaces” and was supposed to be part of a big push to make libraries good again. Whoops!
Make It Less Bad
Two approaches to weighing carbon form.
The extent to which Confronting Carbon Form and Material Reform wrestle with similar issues is striking. Material Cultures’ observation that the dangerous—and, in some cases, even forced—labor practices involved in making construction materials is rendered invisible by the time a building product reaches the hands of builders brings to mind a mixed media piece from the Cooper show that debunked the technological triumphalism of the 1964 New York World’s Fair by highlighting the sites of human exploitation bound up in the project of modern “progress.” And the book’s chapter on “oil vernacular”—premised on “the ready availability of cheap oil-based products,” which enable high-performance, hermetically sealed buildings—strongly echoes the concept of carbon modernity itself.
The difference lies in the horizon of possibilities that each project opens up. Grand narratives like carbon modernity leave us with the sense that things are mostly very bad. But with this kind of totalizing argument, it’s hard to know where to even begin to change things—or whether change would actually make things better. It’s a conundrum that surfaces regularly when teaching about the climate crisis. Driving a Tesla might be “good” in that it reduces CO2 emissions, but once students learn that mining for lithium (a critical mineral for electric car batteries) is catastrophic for the environment and promises to wreak sheer havoc on Indigenous lands in Chile, Argentina, Canada, and the US, they realize there’s nothing about “ethical” consumption choices that makes a car fueled by renewables much better than a gas guzzler. In other words, in the quest to make things “better” for the climate, we risk merely trading off one set of injustices for another.
Give ’Em Somewhere to Go
The Star Wars–esque modular bathrooms have been kissed by a gentle coat of rust, from their corrugated metal facades to their tinny hand dryers.
When you approach someone in this city while holding a notepad and tell them that you’re writing a column about public bathrooms, they usually laugh and then answer any question you throw at them.
This is because New Yorkers understand how precious and rare a good public restroom is—worthy of discussion and scrutiny, praise and damnation. As the author of the Porcelain New York column for the website Hell Gate, I have toured pristine facilities overseen by saints and neglected Porta Potties filled with unspeakable horrors, all in the hope that more public discourse will lead to more public privies and thus more public dignity. Some locations are tougher to sample than others. Few exiting an MTA bathroom have time to chat about the smell or the soap dispensers. (“Nice having you look at me,” one elderly man quips as I try to ask him about the new lavatories in the Jay Street–MetroTech station.)
On a sunny Sunday in June at Rockaway Beach, the people are in a generous mood and want to rave about the modular restrooms installed high above the dunes.
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.
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