On September 23, about a hundred urbanists and architects gathered on Zoom to discuss the recent gains of the ground plane in public life, and how to consolidate them.
Billie Tsien:
I have never walked so much in my entire life. We always thought that the streets were primarily for parking and for cars. Now we see they are an asset for human beings. It recalls a time in New York when artists took over the ground floor spaces—at 101 Spring Street, now a hallowed space, Donald Judd transformed a storefront that wasn’t being used. So you think, “If the streets are for people, then also maybe the ground floors are for people,” and the world becomes flatter. It reminds me of step-wells in India. In the past, we were always going up. Maybe here we are going horizontal and going down.
Tod Williams:
The intersection of Mother Earth and the sky is the most sacred spot we’ve got. That’s where life really emerges and eventually submerges. I want to focus on 20 feet above that ground plane and 20 feet below. How can we make that come to life? This spring, in isolation, Billie and I saw a spring move so slowly forward that it just astonished us. Time slowed down, and we began to look at nature in a way we had never seen before. I am absolutely convinced that the treasure of this time will be a real appreciation of the surface of the earth. If it is not, we are done. So, I don’t want to talk about towers in the sky. We can ask, “Who owns the sky plane? Who owns the ground plane?” But our lives really are most interactive when we are on the same level with one another.
Vivian Loftness:
Tod had suggested 20 feet—I would stretch it up to 70 feet of community with the earth. It’s not just the height of the building that is sacred. It’s the engagement of the population on the ground plane—the floor below and the three, four, five, six floors above. Covid has opened our eyes up to how much we lost by turning over four times the size of Central Park to cars: to driving, to parking, to handling cars. Yet we cannot just redesign ground floors, we have to re-engage the apartments above so that the occupants of each of those apartments can be part of the social fabric of our communities.
REGARDING DENSITY
Louise Harpman:
Does a flat future mean less density?
Vivian Loftness: To the contrary. The future needs to embrace the “flat” because the ground plane is the tissue of the city with the greatest amount of environmental and social connectivity. Serge Salat, the Director of the Urban Morphology Institute in Paris, has identified that there is more density in Paris, with its seven-story walk-ups, than there is in modern Shanghai. Paris has 40 percent more density of occupants per square kilometer and 80 percent more passive survivability if the power goes out. In addition, there are 80 percent more parks and continuous green space. There is something precious about the design of those first six floors.
Billie Tsien: When Tod and I went to China for the first time in the late ’70s to visit my grandmother, Shanghai’s tallest building was the Peace Hotel, thirteen stories tall. It was very much a ground-based life. And because electricity was expensive, people would congregate around the streetlamps. There would be low tables, and people would be cooking, eating, and playing cards, and reading. And kids doing their homework. It was an amazing experience. Today, I think that people won’t be pushed back into their little apartments, even when it gets colder. I think we’re developing a kind of new idea of taking that public space and using that space in more human ways. At least here throughout all the boroughs of the city, people are now coming out into the streets and using them for living much more than they have in the past.
STREETS & RIVERS
Tod Williams: The streets are what our rivers used to be. A space for commerce. In the same way, we have abused our streets. Our streets are as filthy as the Hudson River was in a way. They are as unpleasant as the Hudson River once was. If we can make the Hudson River come back to life, there’s no reason our streets cannot be much more alive. A single lane for service vehicles, but there should be no private cars on the street, period. A river and ocean are democratic spaces, and so should streets be. They are not to be owned.
Vivian Loftness: One word to embrace for design is porosity. The indoor realm should flow into the outdoor realm through thicker facades that engage the street and nature. This obviously challenges a lot of questions about ownership. When I studied under Stanford Anderson and Donlyn Lyndon at MIT, we studied “Transactional Space.” We mapped the layers of ownership in Paris, where there is a richness to ownership, from fully public to semi-public to spaces through gateways, that we have pretty much forbidden in American cities because of the way in which we write our zoning rules. Porosity challenges the design community to find new rules, to change the rules so that public to private ownership becomes much more diverse.
AFTER CARS
Louise Harpman: Vishaan Chakrabarti estimates that in New York we’ve given away 33 percent of our streetscape to parked cars. How might we get that space back permanently? What should we do with it?
Vivian Loftness: You start rethinking pavement by studying the watershed. Where is the water? You look at the work of Herbert Dreiseitl and Waterscapes. We start to un- pave for shared green spaces, for biodiversity, for food, and for stormwater management not because the cars are completely gone—they are simply a more modest commitment. We then establish continuous greenways as part of a richer, thicker infrastructure, like in Cologne where you have a series of green spokes emanating from the historic core.
Tod Williams: In New York, if the streets are clean and they have green in them, and they have activity in them, people will want to live at street level. And that level just above, and maybe the level just below, which will add to the energy of the city.
PROGRAMMING
Editor’s note: Programming’s role in the success of outdoor space is often undervalued. The classic New York example is Bryant Park, which was revived not by drastic redesign, but primarily by giving it continuous, year-round programming, ranging from concerts to outdoor movies, to ice skating, weekly chess tournaments, and—of course—its 6,000 folding chairs and tables.
Audience, Ray Gastil: There is a huge challenge here. Americans now spend 90 percent of their time indoors. Thick facades and thicker services are brilliant and important, but we also need to be thinking of programming in the public realm. It would be great if it happened organically, but it will probably take a deliberate approach to remembering and relearning how to enjoy public life, where the pleasures of proximity are shared and equitable.
Billie Tsien: Already cultural institutions are creating new programming. The New York Philharmonic has something called the “Bandwagon,” where they drive to every borough in the city. To avoid drawing a crowd they don’t say where they’re going. But suddenly, quietly, these musicians will sit down in their chairs and pull out their instruments. Then this pickup truck with amplifiers pulls up. And there’s a guy standing in the back singing, and the musicians are playing.
Vivian Loftness: To spur more programming and life in the streets, I would also suggest adding layers of “living room balconies” in our thicker facade—deep enough to be like a living room where you can have six people sitting around a table, immersed in the environment and community. So even though you’re three stories up, you can hear the music in the street, and the laughter at the restaurant. In the mostly sealed, isolated, sleek buildings of today, we have lost our engagement with the ground plane. And that is one of the reasons why very little programming has happened on the street: because you don’t have an audience.
THE GARDEN CITY
Audience, Kent Johnson: Could this be a time to consider and tackle the spatial ideas of the garden city movement? Remove its racist and classist baggage and create an egalitarian understanding? Variable density, open space—or is that only the purview of the wealthy?
Vivian Loftness: Absolutely not. Open space should belong to everyone. It’s where we can celebrate diversity.
Billie Tsien: A problem the garden city creates is that it has no streetscape. An understanding of where the boundaries are, rather than a series of buildings in a green, is very important to having a lively and fair city. The demonstrations for Black Lives Matter took over the streets, and nobody really asked permission. So people now have a different understanding of what you can do in a street if you choose to, and you have enough people to support you.
CONCLUSION
Louise Harpman: Can each of you share one hope for the future flatscape?
Vivian Loftness: The filling in and the opening up of our buildings in the first four or five, six stories, including one floor below to increase humanity’s sustainability, resiliency, and connection with nature, and community.
Tod Williams: That we’re not divided. I cannot stand another moment of this division.
Billie Tsien: That there would be many, many places where you could lie down outside. Because when you lie down, you can look at the sky, and it also means that you feel safe enough to lie down. I would like to think that there are many places in this flat world that we can make where you can lie down.