In listening to one very well attended public presentation by the designers of the five schemes, I noticed another interesting form of misdirection. We are all greatly attuned to matters green nowadays, and each of the teams pressed that component to the fore, often with the landscape architect most prominently featured in making the case. (By the way, the Bloomberg administration has, under Doctoroff’s direction, produced what is, in many ways, a very impressive plan for the city’s sustainable growth, which is clearly having at least a rhetorical impact.) The evening was filled with talk of microclimates and runoff capture, of lawns and bosks, as if the schemes were somehow primarily about parks and not about the areola of 90-story monstrosities that would surround (and in most instances, cast into darkness) the open space. The environmental ethos—the very least we should expect from all of our building—was meant to lull and to camouflage. Ironically, for all the dulcet claims of up-to-date urbanism, we were served a massive dose of towers in the park. Of course, every scheme was depicted on a glorious summer-of-love day, all blue skies and blooms.
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