As part of his recently released plan for New York by the year 2030, entitled PLANYC: A Greener, Greater New York, Mayor Michael Blooomberg is actively promoting a scheme for congestion pricing in the busiest parts of Manhattan. Modeled on programs in Singapore, London, and Stockholm, the system is intended to curb vehicular traffic (and raise money for public transportation) by imposing charges ($8 for cars and $21 for trucks) to enter the borough below 96th Street. The proposal has the support of virtually every bien-pensant urbanist in town, although it has met some resistance, particularly from the outer boroughs
Spaces of free access The contraction of the public realm, however, extends beyond these Orwellian developments. Public space is produced from the private: In democracy, the commons is always a compact about what is to be shared, what reserved; about where we choose to interact with the other. There’s been a lot of criticism from certain academic quarters about traditional notions of public space, about overidentifying the idea with streets, squares, parks, and other historic settings for face-to-face interactions. This critique is predicated both on the idea that these spaces fail to acknowledge the existence of multiple publics and that
L. William Zahner is the president of A. Zahner Company in Kansas City, Missouri. His firm has designed and fabricated stunning metal façades for high-profile projects by Frank Gehry, Morphosis, Kieran Timberlake Associates and other notable architects and firms. RECORD’s November 2005 cover featured Zahner’s exterior envelope for San Francisco’s de Young Museum, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Zahner has authored two books on architectural metals, and his family-run company has won dozens of awards. On Oct. 10, Zahner will speak at the 2007 Innovation Conference in NYC. The title of his presentation: “Torqued, Punched, and Folded: Making Metal
A shift in the architecture profession, already entrenched with issues of control and authorship, affords the engineer an expanded role during initial project design discussions, not just as consultants after the fact.
Enabling collaborations Today, shared Building Information Models (BIM), rather than just physical models, as with Otto’s early projects, allow for feedback and integration between all the building professions, including that of the construction team. Adams Kara Taylor (AKT), a London-based structural and civil engineering firm of 40 people, will engage an architect’s ideas for a project design, but, as engineer Hanif Kara says, they “do not pretend to be the architect.” Key to the firm is teamwork and a constant dialogue with the architect. An in-house mathematics think tank with computational specialists assists teams, and it is common to see
Arrive in KL for the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture, a triennial event, after 20-hour flight via Stockholm. Bleary-eyed, check into the business-chic Traveler’s Hotel, so new the furnishings still have scraps of wrapping tacked on.
The skyscraper has had more comebacks than Cher. From its humble, naive beginnings in Chicago after the fire of 1871; its idealistic representation in early European Modernism; its apex as the glam symbol of American corporate eminence; its bimbo phase in Postmodernism; its more recent dalliance with high-tech engineering; and culminating with its supposed demise on September 11, 2001, the skyscraper is one helluva contender.