Island in the Stream

My latest excursion was a trip to see something really unique in New York. I'd been there I think only once before. This time I saw much more of it and looked much more closely. It's accessed by an unusual form of transportation that I think most people would be shocked to find in this city: a tram that was intended as a temporary measure and quickly became iconic. I'm talking about Roosevelt Island.

This was another event planned by the folks at DOCOMOMO New York Tri-State, and it was incredibly impressive. The best thing was the people they arranged to have speak to us, all of whom were so integral to the project. First to speak was Theodore Liebman, who was Chief Architect of the New York State Development Corporation that built up Roosevelt Island. Next was Lo-Yi Chan, who worked for I. M. Pei and designed the tram stations on both the Roosevelt and Manhattan sides of the river. And then there was Ashok Bhavnani, who I mentioned in a previous story. Finally, a well-spoken resident of the island since 1981, Marianne Russem.

There are a ton of interesting things about Roosevelt Island. One of them does not seem to be its nightlife. There are a few restaurants that look fairly nice, although I didn't have an opportunity to look at any menus. Other than that, there are a lot of empty storefronts. From some of the residents' reports, it sounds as if, after hours, it becomes a bit of a ghost town.

Getting in and out of Manhattan for an evening's entertainment sounds like a bit of a chore. The tram can stop running as early as 2AM. Cabbing it back to the outer boroughs for anyone who lives close enough to bother will generally cost around fifteen to twenty dollars, which seems even more worth it if you can share the ride with a friend. But keep in mind that, although it's geographically closer, a cab from Manhattan has to go over the Queensboro Bridge, make a U-turn, and cross back over another bridge to get to this island. It's served by only one subway line, the F train. If the F isn't running, you're $#!+ outta luck, and I wouldn't call the F the most reliable train. I think it would take a somewhat particular kind of person to want to live there, but that's still evidently a lot of people. The waiting list for an apartment there is estimated to take twenty years to turn over.

The uniqueness of Roosevelt Island stems from a few facts. It was a parcel of available land on which to build extremely late in the game, yet extremely close to the island of Manhattan. Although there are swaths of green at its northern end, the entire island of Manhattan had been more or less completely covered with development since the 1930s or '40s at the very latest. By the early-1970s, housing developments that would require the displacement and demolition of existing neighborhoods were almost universally seen as the most sinister of urban evils. Housing projects had promised so much and delivered so little, often making worse the very problems they had proposed to solve. It was the great, ironic, and miserable failure of the tower in a park ideal that had guided urban planning for forty-some years.

Despite the fact that many valuable lessons had been learned the hard way about this type of large-scale residential design and construction, it was all but impossible to put any of the new philosophies into practice. Grassroots neighborhood organizations had become much too vocal, much too savvy, and much too powerful to ever permit the wholesale destruction of urban areas again. And there was nowhere left to build on a large scale, except on Roosevelt Island. So what can be seen on the island is rare: large-scale, high-density, early-1970s residential architecture. What was built there was essentially a brand new town, built from the ground up, and built on late twentieth-century principles of urban space. The only comparison in scale might be gated, suburban housing tracts, but the fundamental differences are too obvious to bother discussing here.

A sort of side-effect of all this is the fact that Roosevelt Island's architecture by Johansen & Bhavnani is vaguely Brutalist, but displays a wonderfully domestic, sometimes even homey character, especially as it relates to the main street. One of the things I noticed on my first trip out many years ago was how modern the forms were, but yet seemed scaled almost like traditional row houses at times. Of course there are many towers to be found as well, but I think their proportions are sensitively handled.

It was originally called Hog Island when purchased from the Canarsie natives, then Manning's Island (1666), Blackwell Island (1686), and Welfare Island (1921), but was named for former New York State Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1973. The Blackwell House is the oldest building on the island and one of the oldest buildings in New York. It was finished in 1804 and restored in 1973.

Around the Blackwell House and here to its north is a nice little green area and fountain designed by landscape architect, Dan Kiley.

Mostly Roosevelt Island was used for the sequestering of people nobody wanted to have to deal with in Manhattan: criminals, the insane, the diseased, and the disabled. It's been home to prisons, asylums, and hospitals for the treatment of smallpox and polio. The focal point of the asylum was the Octagon (with the clever address "888," Alexander Jackson Davis, 1839), which is now the lobby of a high-end apartment building converted in 2006. Why anyone would want to live in an insane asylum I'm not sure, but it does look like a pretty fancy building now.

The Smallpox Hospital (1856), designed by the architect of St. Patrick's Cathedral, James Renwick, is probably the best known building on the island, especially amongst people who have never visited the island itself. It's lit up at night and quite visible from Manhattan. It's an extremely beautiful building and would have to be the absolute greatest place in all of New York City to have a Halloween party. I'm sure they'd never allow that. I've been wanting to see it in person for years, but I'll have an opportunity to do so soon, as I discuss below.

This gorgeously eerie photograph courtesy Too Much Glass.

It's appropriate that the island should be named for a president who happened to suffer from polio, considering a hospital dedicated to the illness was located there. As many of you may know, Louis Kahn designed a monument to Roosevelt which was intended to be built at the southern tip of the island around the time of its redevelopment. Almost thirty years later, Four Freedoms Park will finally be built there, just south of the Renwick Ruin. It will be this city's only work by Kahn, sadly (who designed the incredible Salk Institute and, for my South Asian readers, built this in Bangladesh, which must be absolutely astonishing in person). Although there are a few of his works in the tri-state area that will eventually be discussed on this blog at some point. It was pointed out that a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt stands at the United Nations directly across the river, so now husband and wife will be able to "talk" to one another.

Speaking of polio and the wheelchair-bound patients of the hospitals, it was decided from the start that all of the new construction, the entire island in fact, should be fully accessible by wheelchair. The planning was begun by Philip Johnson and John Burgee in 1969, and most of the major construction was complete by 1974, '75, and '76. But the point is that the Americans with Disabilities Act, which states that all new construction and alterations to any building accessible to the general public must be equally accessible to persons with different types of mobility, didn't go into effect until 1992, over twenty years later. In the early-'70s, it was as pioneering an idea as it was socially conscious and socially conscientious. Most of the ramps and similar features are well integrated into the design as a whole. These buildings could be a fantastic model for the seamless incorporation of equality in accessibility even today.

Another very interesting thing you likely would never know unless you lived there is that the island's waste is collected by a pneumatic garbage disposal system. It's the only residential community in the country to use such a system. We went to see the garbage plant and look in the window, but you can't really see much from outside. There's been a short documentary produced about it, which is surprisingly fascinating and fairly funny.

Nature Abhors a Vacuum from gregory whitmore on Vimeo.

Although it hints at it in calling attention to the narrow streets, the film doesn't mention that originally cars were banned on the island. Residents and visitors would drive over the bridge which led directly into the huge parking garage--called "Motorgate," in delightfully 1960s fashion--and just leave their cars there. Transportation around the island was (and is) supplied by electric buses. It's remarkably futuristic, if you think about it. But at one point I said aloud, "wait a minute...there are cars here." It must tell us something about our automobile culture that I'd already been on the island for a couple of hours before I noticed there were cars where there were not supposed to be. Even if (electric) garbage trucks had been allowed along with the buses from the beginning, the only other vehicles on the roads being garbage trucks would have been singularly unattractive.

The parking garage I think is a fantastic building. It was designed by the architects of Boston's wildly controversial City Hall, Kallman & McKinnell, and finished in 1974. The island resident, Marianne Russem, was able to half-heartedly agree that it's an aesthetically interesting structure. But she said most of the residents hate it because it's especially dirty and practically impossible to keep clean. Although photographs I saw of the interior looked pretty spectacular, I didn't have time to go inside it on this trip.

Roosevelt Island's school system was also a bit unconventional. All the residential buildings had small classroom wings incorporated into their designs. So from one year to the next, students would move from building to building to attend school in a different place. Russem said there were problems with this because the arrangement provided no centralized spaces like a gym or auditorium to accommodate school-wide functions. A main public school was built in 1992.

For anyone who might not know, New York City has an interesting public school system where, after their eighth year, students can choose and apply to attend any of the other public schools in the system regardless of location. As far as I know, the admissions process is similar to college applications, and many of the schools are specialized toward a certain field like science, technology, or the arts. My point being that after year eight, students from Roosevelt Island could choose to study elsewhere anyway.

In discussing the experience of her own school-aged children, Russem touched on a topic of relevance on this blog. Because this was a state project, it was required to house residents of a variety of economic levels. This would all seem perfectly great except that, as she pointed out, residents of different economic levels were divided up into separate buildings. She said it "created slums," not at all unexpectedly.

She was fully against the practice, as well, and likely her children's experience only amplified this. "Oohhh, you're from Rivercross..." other kids would say to hers, referring to the only co-op building in the bunch. Although all the buildings were built with swimming pools, the one at Rivercross is the only one that remains operational. Furthermore, it's extremely well maintained. The other pools sit dry, cracking, and unusable, which I found quite sad. I'm going to risk sounding naïve by saying I'd like to think this policy would be implemented differently--better, and with more integration--today.

It was during our stop at Rivercross for refreshments that Mr. Bhavnani spoke to the group, along with Ms. Russem. The enthusiasm for this project, the whole concept of this island, was palpable from all the speakers involved.

Knowing that this post was in the works, I recently went also to see Bhavnani's Kaufman Center Building (1978), on West Sixty-Seventh Street, which is of course very close to where I work. But it was substantially (though respectfully) redesigned by Robert A. M. Stern in 2008.

A few things became apparent inside Rivercross. One was that all the buildings are vividly color coded, as can be seen in the tile-clad elevator lobbies and the ornamental ventilation tubes.

The tubes, by the way, are a wonderful industrial detail, vaguely nautical in tone for the riverside site but without being too obvious about it.

Another was the way the interior spaces are interconnected with an amazing progression both horizontally and vertically. Hallways provide long vistas with distinct volumes cut out, brightly colored, and bathed in sections of natural light.

I had the idea in my head that we were going to see one of the apartment interiors and we didn't, but what we did go up to see was pretty cool. It was a tiny moment of futurism from Archigram that links two wings of the building. The tower it leads to feels surprisingly domestic, shows how much individual personality was possible in each unit, and can be accessed only through these tubes. It would never hold up under fire safety laws today. The tubes need to be replaced and for various reasons, namely that maintenance staff needs to access the top of them, sadly, they need to be reinstalled with roofs.

These may be some of the last images of the tubes in their original form.

This had actually been the official end of the event, but many of us continued along with Russem, who kindly offered her time to tell us more and answer additional questions. We walked north and discussed the school, I asked her about the wheelchair-bound residents and other questions about life on the island. We saw Motorgate and the turbine house for the garbage system. Finally we ended at the Octagon, where photos were not allowed inside. Most everyone opted to take the bus back, which was there as if on cue and I believe costs only fifty cents. It was a really beautiful day, so I decided to walk back, instead. Strangely, I still made it back in time to ride the tram with a couple of the people from the DOCOMOMO tour.

I had considered walking down to see the Renwick Ruin, but at that point I was a bit tired, it was getting late, and most importantly I was losing sunlight fast. I'll return when the Roosevelt Memorial is completed. In the meantime, I feel as if yet another corner of this city is within my conceptual grasp, and hopefully...yours, too!

All text and images ©2011, Ryan Witte, except where noted.

Dis Connecticut--Part Two

Normally, I might lament the fact that other projects needed to take priority over this story for a while. In this case, it actually worked out quite fortunately. While this part of the series remained under construction, I got the opportunity to meet the architect of this building in person, purely by accident. I'm not referring to John Johansen, but his partner, Ashok Bhavnani. Johansen's mentor was Breuer, Bhavnani's was Richard Neutra; I can imagine few marriages of architectural lineage with such potential for greatness. How I came to meet Mr. Bhavnani is for a future post, but he told me he was heavily involved with the design of this building. It's the Intermediate School (1968), right up the road from Litchfield High School.

There are three entrances to the building, a new one on the north side (right), that one on the west (above), and one on the south. We first came upon the new one on the north façade, a redesign by the same firm that renovated the high school. They chose to employ brightly-colored corrugated metal as a nod to some of Johansen's later work.

In honor of this post, I decided to finish a book I'd begun a while ago but for some reason never finished. I think it was not quite meaty enough for me, which I'll explain in a second. It's Johansen's Nanoarchitecture--A New Species of Architecture.

A new species it is, but you have to look for it. It's a small book and the majority of it is photographs of models, computer renderings, and drawings, not text. It's a collection of hypothetical projects of Johansen's that he worked on to push boundaries and explore new directions architecture might take as a result of new and emerging technologies. Most of them are extremely interesting conceptually, but I'm tempted to believe most of the conceptual breakthroughs, or at least most of the lines of inquiry that could lead to them, were mapped out by Archigram in the late-1960s. Coincidentally, there are traces of Archigram to be found in Johansen's own Mummers Theater (1970) in Oklahoma City.

The models also come off as being rather homemade. I'm not saying I have any skills whatsoever in taking an Exacto knife to balsa wood and foamcore. But computer renderings that are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from actual photographs these days I think have left me somewhat spoiled.

The last few projects in the book, a discourse on the title subject, and the epilogue are all mind boggling, however. What he calls "molecular engineering" is something I've thought about for years. To oversimplify, the "blueprint" for the house is basically a human-engineered DNA sequence. The organism that results has all the functionality and structure of a house. Nature does pretty much everything a house would need to do, and much more, except for perhaps the ability to connect to communications technology. A single redwood tree represents more mass and structure than most people's houses. Nature can create electricity and light, convert organic waste into energy, moderate temperature. You could even conceivably grow a television or computer monitor by carefully ordering DNA. Once computers start getting more powerful and can be used to analyze genetic code faster and with more precision, I don't think this will sound all that far-fetched.

The epilogue covers what I'd expected more of the book would have, the use of nanotechnology in building. Much faster than a tree, nanobots could be programmed to "grow" a house in much the same way as our organic programming. To me it would seem there are benefits to both. If both genetic engineering and nanotechnology were used together, it's even more incredible to think what could be accomplished. This would have all the capabilities of computer technology and electronics, with all the efficient expenditure of resources and sustainability of the natural world. Certainly people will still want to put up their own structures like they always have. Beyond that, the entire idea of what Architecture even is will change so drastically and in such fundamental ways, it will barely look like the same profession anymore. I'm not sure I can say with any confidence that I will be around to see it happen in my lifetime, but I can only hope.

Back to the Intermediate School, this was a designation I was unfamiliar with and had to ask someone there. "Intermediate" is years four through six. I could find no photographs of what this building originally looked like by Googling around, but it appears that it very much turned itself inward, with the exception of the central entrance. 

At the central façade, seen in the first photo above, windows punch dramatically outwards to meet the street. The addition on the north looks to have broken through a solid masonry wall with its aluminum(?)-framed glass box opening it up. The upper story, like the wing to the south, has no fenestration, although that doesn't necessarily mean there were no windows or doorways on the ground floor.

Subtracting the addition, the main building reads as a transparent glass volume in the center, framed by massive concrete and masonry construction, with a solid, opaque concrete and masonry volume on either side of it. Almost entirely imperceptible in person is the fact that the two side wings are turned outward at the very slightest angles from the central section. The effect is more subconscious than anything.

At the junction of the north and central sections is the first hint that this building is truly a work of art. The first thing to notice is the illusion that these are two separate buildings due to the corridor connecting them being on the ground floor. About a third of it is below grade as seen from the front. Whatever is above grade is hidden by plantings. The other thing, which becomes clearer at the junction between the central section and the southern one, is how the views have been so carefully composed. The two sections have been pulled apart to here reveal a chimney, only very fleetingly, which stands in the courtyard like an ancient obelisk.

The central section does something very interesting with (a)symmetry that reminded me of Breuer's work. The volumes that project outward display a conspicuous, rigid symmetry, while the recessed volume underneath is very much asymmetrical. It's as if the building wants to project a sense of formality to the outside world, but takes a more casual tone for its interior. As I was talking about this, I was evidently being overheard by one of the faculty members, who stared at us out that window in the center until we were out of sight again. I know I'm very interesting to listen to, but it was a little bit weird.

The next junction I found extremely interesting on a number of different levels. First, the two wings are way too close together. In other words, they're so close that they ought to be simply brought together into a single structure. If they were to be separated, they really ought to be further apart from each other. As it is, it frames the view of the obelisk chimney even more specifically than the opening to the north. The corridor that connects the two wings is concealed from view at most angles, amplifying the illusion that these are two separate structures.

Next, a pathway leads straight toward that opening, but then forces a sharp ninety-degree turn to access the doorway it serves. The space between the two buildings, while too narrow for compositional reasons, is just wide enough to appear to be a passageway, probably around four feet wide. But the passage through it is decidedly blocked by a shrub.

Finally, framing this opening--which, all told, must be there only to control views--are two massive, monolithic masonry walls. Beyond the opening, what it reveals is an enclosure with glass on three sides, allowing you to see all the way to the back of the courtyard through first one glass wall and then the second. The contrast this creates between enclosures of opacity and transparency is extremely powerful.

The south entrance is turned at an angle from the great southern volume. Just enough to be perceptible, but not much more.

Around to the right, it's revealed that the wall has been extended out from the enclosure, to call attention to its qualities as a wall, but also drawing attention to the strong, yet false symmetry of the entrance facade. This is further amplified by the fact that it is obviously at an angle from the larger volume behind it that it accesses.

From this point forward, the building completely changes its character about once every yard (meter) you walk.

The first thing you see is this great composition of brick volumes clustered together. The sense of walking into an ancient Roman village is unmistakable and had to have been intentional. Perhaps Brutalism was at its finest at these moments when its Modernism was transitioning into Postmodernism, and recalling our architectural past to create moods.

This one little doorway was especially remarkable. Its masonry frame is easily a mere canopy, but it's deep enough to be surprisingly intimate, while retaining a sense of the monumental at the same time. It also means that from all angles save directly in front of it, the vistas of pure masonry volumes are uninterrupted.

A raised walkway finished in roughly textured concrete prevents the courtyard from coming into view too suddenly, but rather reveals it slowly and carefully.

Once past the walkway, the courtyard is a gorgeous space and truly the heart of this building. The façades on the east and west of the courtyard are the most glazed of any on the building, as I mentioned, turning the building inwards.

The one on the west, while similar to the entrance façade on the opposite side, has an entirely glazed ground floor. In a careful balancing act, these two façades present larger expanses of glass to the courtyard, but are still clearly framed by concrete structure.

To the north and south, glass boxes pop out of the corridors connecting the seemingly separate wings of the building. While smaller in surface area, the structural concrete framing is gone, allowing them to dematerialize more than the fenestration of the east and west walls. The other side of the glass box here, by the way, is the one that can be seen through the strangely narrow opening between the two structures from the front, discussed above.

With most especially these two façades, the architects managed to create something monumental but with intimate moments, as well, formal but not stuffy, somehow ancient yet totally futuristic. There is no doubt a lot of Breuer in this, but it is a fantastic building unto itself. I never did get around to see the east side of the building. It appeared inaccessible, although I suspect it could be accessed around from the north. There were a lot of other things to see that day, and I was getting hungry.

We had a nice lunch in the quaint town center of Litchfield. Only about fifteen minutes from there and out in the middle of nowhere was our next stop, a complete bust. It was Daniel Libeskind's 18.36.54 House.

Photo by Nicolas Koenig courtesy architect's website.

Just looking at the photos of it makes me want to weep at how breathtakingly genius this is. I should have known that a state like Connecticut would never allow something like this to be visible from the road. But that's a complete understatement here. I mean, you can't see anything. It's all the more ridiculous if you can imagine the most rural possible road this is on, it's almost surprising that it's paved with actual asphalt. My point being, if this were visible from the road, probably no more than about ten people would even see it on any given day, and at least one of those ten would be a mail carrier.

Nonetheless, what you see from the road is a fancy motorized gate, not even connected to a fence, and a lonely call box on a stand. Behind that, a cliff rises up about 300 feet (100 meters) at practically a sixty-degree angle, with a driveway snaking up it like Lombard Street. You would not want to try this after even the most minor snowstorm. In fact, I'm surprised there's no staircase up the hill just so they could park at the foot of it and walk up on foot in the case it got icy. Maybe the driveway is heated, I don't know.

In any case, I was not going to let this go so quickly. We turned around, I rehearsed a little speech along the lines of "I write an architecture blog and was hoping, if it's not a terrible intrusion, that I could maybe get a few photos of the outside of your house," worked up some courage, and pulled up to the gate. I pressed the button on the call box. It rang and rang, and rang...and rang. No answer. The thought did cross my mind that, if there were no one home, we could probably just climb the hill on foot and walk around. Who would know? But all along I was aware that just because there was no answer to an unexpected ring at the gate didn't necessarily mean there was no one up there. And ending up in jail for trespassing probably would have ruined the day.

Drat.

Eventually I would really like to go back up to see it. The problem is that I've now already seen everything even remotely close to that house, so it seems almost silly to drive so far just for that one building (Litchfield took about three hours from the city). I have been in contact with Libeskind's studio about getting in contact with the owners, but the fact remains (as I knew) that this is a private residence. If my experience with another private home I've been wanting to profile is any indication, it may be prohibitively difficult. Cross your fingers.

Stay tuned for Part Three.

All text and images ©2011, Ryan Witte, unless noted.