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9

Thinking Inside the Box

Admittedly, I went to the July 20 “Listening to the City” meeting at the Javits Center with visions of myself as that woman in the legendary Macintosh commercial, running through an auditorium of passive plebs to hurl her hammer at the monster screen on which Big Brother was proclaiming what a fine and orderly place the Orwellian world was. The setup seemed to confirm my worst fears for the event: 5,000 people arbitrarily assigned to 500 tables, watching speakers and images on giant video screens, each participant equipped with a remote-control keypad for “voting,” each table with a volunteer “facilitator” (ours a German from Toronto) and a laptop on which to communicate with a team of compilers who would determine opinion trends in the room.

No more reassuring was the parade of the usual white men—from the Port Authority, the LMDC, the city government, and the Regional Plan Association—who extolled the importance of the process and presented the famous six schemes compiled by the LMDC and its consultants. The working portion of the event was conducted by Carolyn Lukensmeyer, a professional facilitator—who, for me, combined the more annoying aspects of Oprah and Kim Il Sung. Indeed, as the meeting wore on, I felt increasingly like a delegate to a 1950s Soviet Party Congress: the Central Committee has carefully selected this list of identical candidates for your consideration, you may now vote. (In this case, though, it was for the six schemes for street grid, office, shopping, hotel, memorial, and transit complexes all of precisely the same area). My own strained ability to participate in well-behaved Nielson-family fashion finally evaporated when Lukensmeyer (“give yourselves a nice round of applause”) embellished her script with a pep talk on how the meeting was democratic as all get-out because, “in democracy, the people have a chance to speak!” Seizing upon this right, I rose to my feet to shout, “Buuuulllllshiiiit! Democracy means the people have the power to choose!”

This tiny act of insurrection went almost completely unnoticed. Inaudible over the amplified pronouncements being broadcast from the central stage, invisible in the vast hall and crowd, my outburst attracted a smattering of applause from nearby tables and not the slightest notice from anyone else. Not the first time for me, but telling nonetheless. The charade of “electronic democracy” was burst by the asymmetries of power in that room, the careful control of both agenda and process from above. With most planning, decision-making belongs to the powerful, reacting belongs to the people. At the Javits Center, original ideas were excluded because they—naturally—lacked a constituency: all the opinions that we wrote on our computers were vetted to see if enough people shared them to have them played back to the audience. Creativity was thus foreclosed by stifling the new or the unusual and by total control of what could be discussed. There was not a single mention among the alleged “choices,” for example, of a scheme that would preserve the entire site as a memorial. Nevertheless, something constructive did happen at the meeting and in its aftermath. This had nothing to do with changing the underlying institutional structures—the virtually unaccountable quasi-governmental agencies that are running the process—but rather in the clarity of the audience response to the uninspiring and profoundly mediocre goods on offer. Emerging from the self-congratulatory and coercive process was a genuine act of protest: the audience consistently exercised the one planning power left in the hands of citizens: the power to say no. Given the opportunity to vote scheme-by-scheme, the crowd offered a pox on all houses.

Power had certainly anticipated this. In the week preceding the meeting, the six “alternative” schemes were released to the media by architects Beyer Blinder Belle (BBB) and were met with a fusillade of opprobrium that rained on them from every direction. Even John Whitehead, chairman and patriarch of the LMDC, mumbled with embarrassment at the press conference about this being “only a beginning.” Likewise, the mayor (who has recently called for the inclusion of housing on the site), the media (including Paul Goldberger, Ada Louise Huxtable, and Herbert Muschamp), and the person in the street all responded with a raucous ho-hum. Even the governor (up for re-election in November and the man with the most power to influence events) wants to preserve the towers’ footprints, arguing for a design that looks beyond the limits of the site. In the post-Enron environment, there is a growing sense that the leaders of the development community may not be the most dedicated keepers of the commonweal and that their plan simply to restore the status quo ante intolerably ignores both ethical and civic values.

While the dreadful proposals presented in this first round are the consequence of failed democracy, the avarice of power, and the imperative to make money, they are also the result of a design process that is conceptually flawed. Democracy, after all, cannot create great art, only sanction it. The essence of the problem lies in one of the cherished myths of modernity—that planning is essentially rational and objective. The LMDC has offered up a model of design by deduction, based on the idea that a “correct” solution can be derived by a hardheaded look at the facts and systematic analysis of possibilities and constraints. There’s a false distinction here between planning (something on which all reasonable people should be able to agree) and architecture (the fickle realm of taste). By representing the six proposals as planning (this was not architecture, we were endlessly told, despite what we could plainly see were buildings, parks, streets, and squares), the LMDC covered its ass by acting as if the most fundamental issues of form, organization, and character were simply the outgrowth of logical thinking.

The mediocrity of the results so far can be blamed on the mindset of the designers entrusted with this project. Although the LMDC’s head of planning, Alex Garvin, is knowledgeable, dedicated, and skilled, he has no track record as a friend of the imagination. Ideologically, he is squarely in the New Urbanist camp, and his vision appears hemmed by his traditionalist sensibility. Moreover, every architectural firm “officially” working on the site shares this proclivity. And they are remarkably supine: no one from any of the architectural firms or official bodies involved in the process has publicly spoken out for a change in the office-building program, for a more far-reaching planning process, or for a competition. All are hopelessly behind the curve of public opinion.

Real decisions continue to be made behind the scenes without formal accountability, despite the pretense. The same impropriety characterizes the LMDC’s design process and style of inclusion. BBB were allegedly chosen as the site designers through an “open” Request For Proposals (RFP) and stands to make a huge fee (out of a total contract of $3 million). But to call the RFP open is like saying that Trump Plaza is open to anyone who wants to live there. The LMDC’s RFP—which attracted only fifteen proposals—was carefully restricted to very large corporate offices. (Firms had to have experience of at least three $100 million projects to be eligible.) And at the same time as the RFP was proceeding, three other firms were already working away semi-officially without having gone through any public process at all. Larry Silverstein’s architect Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) was producing plans for the site. Cooper, Robertson was master planning on behalf of Brookfield Properties, owners of the World Financial Center. And Peterson/Littenberg (a very small firm that would never have qualified via the official process) was hired by the LMDC to be its “in-house” design consultants. This particular choice was presumably based on long personal association with Garvin, their shared traditionalist taste, and collegial days at the Yale architecture school.

Before designating the six schemes for public presentation, the LMDC looked at nine plans from BBB and two from Peterson/Littenberg, as well as at the plans commissioned by Brookfield and Silverstein. The board members then voted to select two of the BBB plans, two from Peterson/Littenberg, and one each from Cooper, Roberston and SOM. This choice caused a number of people to go ballistic, among them BBB’s John Beyer who—according to the New York Post—went to Joseph Seymour, head of the Port Authority, to grouse about the substitution of the two developer plans in lieu of similar schemes by his office.

Chastened, Seymour and LMDC director Lou Tomson agreed to replace the two developer plans with the BBB versions, a move which, in turn, caused a number of members of the LMDC task force to become enraged at the high-handed violation of “the process.” Arguably, though, Seymour and Tomson’s coup can be seen as restoring the process, since in theory only plans produced by BBB, the “publicly” designated architects, should have qualified.

By the end of July, the LMDC, barraged with criticism from all sides and losing its political backing from the mayor and the governor, itself came out in favor of opening out the process to smaller firms and to offices from abroad. But there’s little cause for confidence that this revised process won’t also be based on cronyism. Bromides about participation notwithstanding, it is clear that the architects with millions in public money to spend and with the sanction and public relations efforts of officialdom are working at an advantage. Other ideas simply cannot be heard.

Perhaps it is time for a little less management and a little more democracy. One possibility is to open the process to everyone with an idea. Let us immediately have not a competition, but an open call for ideas from around the world. Let us spend some money on a wonderful exhibition. Let us give the people some authentic choices instead of an elaborate scheme for pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes. Let us have the kind of real discussion that can only come from having real alternatives.

2002