Attending lots of conferences this week, so hard to feed the blog. Instead, here’s an email from urban-designer Lewis Villegas. He attended the presentation by NYC Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn, and came back with a few observations and questions:
Renaissance theorist, urbanist, architect and painter Alberti wrote something to the effect that, “the more I think about it the more I become convinced that the same numbers that are pleasing to the ear are also pleasing to the eye”.
I can’t tune a guitar, but I know that what Alberti had in mind. He was the whole-number consonances and harmonies in music, and suggesting that simple number ratios (1:1, 1:2 and 1:3) also yield proportions that are pleasing to our human sensibilities.
The remarkable thing about Times Square is that it has the proportions of the Renaissance square, albeit on steroids, or much magnified. Yet, human perception still gets it. Times Square still clicks into focus when you walk in. And when there one does get the feeling that we “walk in”. It is an ‘urban room’.
The length is about 3x the height of the buildings (which are probably 20-storey plus or 250 feet). The width is about the same as the streetwall height, maybe a little less. And, yes, when I was last there in 2004 or so, what was wanting was an elimination of the “X” traffic crossing pattern (wholly unnecessary) and continuity-on-the-ground plane à la Granville Island. One kept tripping over the curbs.
The new implementations seems to have got both right, and resolved the traffic pattern by capturing Herald and Madison Squares (something that had not occurred to me). I wonder how Sheridan Square in the Village is doing?
The Commissioner did not to mention how at night, the lighting level achieved by the commercial advertising is high enough that it approximates indoor lighting. This underscores the sense of enclosure even more. There is an audible din as one approaches Times Square that is reminiscent of that mother-of-all-squares, Piazza Navona in Roma.
That level of lighting in itself is something terrific… Sustainable? Well, no and maybe that’s why it didn’t mentioned. But, I wonder what the light level meaures in lumens.
The only time the Commissioner made reference to human sense perception was when she described why these newly pedestrianized zones in Manhattan have not turned into the Killing Fields for pedestrians [paraphrasing],
The drivers get it. They come into a space with activity all around, planters, sidewalk cafes, people. They see that and they slow down
She also mentioned that investment, even TIF, in the public realm is good business and good for the neighbourhood. That was a kind of acknowledgement that public realm matters.
The point is that thinking about bikes, and riding a bike in the city, won’t help understand human sense perception in urbanism. Even running in Venezia, Firenze and Roma, I experienced the urbanism in a different way. Things just kept coming up too fast.
The experience of the city must be had on foot. The glue that holds the human experience of place together is somewhere behind the optic nerve, and it matters at what speed the observer is travelling. Speed alters sense perception.
The fact that the walking experience of the city didn’t get a lot of attention may have something to do with on the venue (and, let’s add parenthetically that the bike revolution in Vancouver is Fab).
But cycling is only 4% of the NYC mode split. I wonder what the pedestrian percentage is, or if it is factored at all?
I bet well over 50% of all trips in NYC are by pedestrians (that would include all transit and taxi, but exclude bikes and cars). That walking number is not going away, and it is likely to be getting bigger as NYC adds another million people.
Until we see public officials intelligently articulating this fact of urbanism, that the fundamental mode of transpiration is what as school children we used to call “bus #11” (i.e. our own two legs), we’re not done doing
In “New York: The City Observed,” written at the very end of the 1970’s, Paul Goldberger could get away describing the native New Yorker’s attitude towards the public realm by quoting Galbraith’s famous statement about: “Private luxury; public squalor
The Commissioner gave us reason to hope that NYC is having a sea change on that point. But she was not able to show us quality urban design. Nothing to match the Ramblas in Barcelona, or Central Park itself yet in her photos of Times and Herald Square
She made excellent points about “pilot” tests, reminiscent of our own experiment with a bike lane on the bridge. But NYC Department of Transportation has a way to go. Great start
Driving home I found myself thinking about the question for the next and last lecture in this very enjoyable series: Learning from Toronto
Learning from Toronto? Hey, I am all FOR learning from our mistakes! It’s a ‘good’ thing. It helps us grow
I think where Toronto went wrong was in developing an aspiration to compete with the Big Apple, and almost doing it successfully
Toronto Streets, tame and clean in comparison to Manhattan, nevertheless seem to me to have fully embodied the notion of “private luxury and public squalor.”
