Brendan Gill, Architectural and City Planning Critic

Sunday, January 2, 2005

One of the unexpected benefits of my wife-led year end purging was the unearthing of a New Yorker "The Sky Line" article, by Brendan Gill, from its August 31, 1992 issue. An interim critic succeeding the retirement of Ada Louise Huxtable and before Paul Goldberger, Gill turns out to be one of the best since Lewis Mumford. Whereas Mumford saw architecture and city planning through his "garden city" lens, Gill just looks at the scene straight on and tells it like it is without intellectual web-making. Without knowing it, he became one of the first members of CNU, because of his concern for contextual architecture and the impact of growth on New York's "infrastructure".

The article, "Hazards of Bigness", takes up the issues of bigness (Do we need it for its own sake?) and cities', in particular New York City, ability to support it, in terms of sewage treatment, rapid transit, and clean air. His context for this discussion is Mexico City with its projected population of 28 milliion in 2000. "Mexico City, for example, ...........will be...by the year 2000 the largest city in the world. By then experts predict, its heavily polluted air will have become unbreathable, it will have exhausted its water suplies, and it will have no means of disposing of its gigantic accumulations of sewage and garbage".

While this future seemed unlikely for New York City, Gill takes up the costs of bigness in connection with the proposal to build a 545 foot skscraper on Columbus Avene and 67th St. and the Trump proposal to build the tallest building in the world on a platform over the railroad tracks in a place called "Riverside South" in the west 50s and 60s streets. As to the Columbus Avenue/Lincoln Center projects, Gill point out that it will be "grossly overscaled for the 'footprint' to occupy". Gill goes on to mention potential impacts on the environment and the real impact on an already crowded subway station at 72nd Street and Broadway. But of greatest concern is the ability of the recently completed North river Sewage Treatment Plant, along the Hudson between 137th and 145th Street, which was already at capacity, pouring millions of gallons of raw sewage into the Hudson River. Gill voices the same concerns about the Riverside South project and disdains Trump's claims that his proposal is better than the other possible alternatives. Instead of adding to the city's bigness, he proposes to concentrate on the more pressing issue of renewing the city's housing stock, particularly for low and moderate income families in Harlem, and for the city to expand its vital infrastructure to support future added growth.

Architectural and city planning criticism in the prominent newspapers in the US these days is far less direct about and mostly absent any concern with environmental, transit, water supply, and sewage treatment capacity matters. Their focus seems to be on built form, the excitement of more bigness and unique architectural design, some intellectual garble about skyline contextualism, and the politics of building. Architecture and large scale building projects these days are more like media events, much in the same way the public is awed by the brilliance of computer generated special effects in today's blockbuster movies. It is not about the cities where ordinary citizens live, who question the purity of drinking water, who are jammed on subway platforms and squeezed into deteriorating cars, who breathe dirtier air, and who daily smell the acrid odors emanating from nearby sewage treatment plants and industrial smoke stacks.

Brendan Gill was way ahead of his time with his concern about the daily city. Today's critics are far behind him in dealing with the realities of city bigness and growth and the impacts on its citizens as they walk the streets, cross the streets, try to use public transit, breathe polluted and malordorous air, and dispose of waste.

Comments

[Basketball Sneakers]

I LOVE them all!!! Great lines!!!

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American Movie Classic's offering last night comes before the opening of the 2012 Republican convention. Whether that is the purpose of this coincidence, it sends a messsage to the Romney-Ryan candidacy. Larry talks about truth revealed by the hard work of introspection and knowledge. Romney-Ryan stand for the lies and mistakes of the ruling class of the American culture, a throw back of sorts to the culture of boom growth after WW I and the recklessness then of risk taking economic adventurism leading up to the 1929 economic depression. Romney-Ryan should have watched this movie, but their lock on their beliefs would not have revealed the underlying themes of the picture. And they proceed with proposing this country to live on the razor's edge.