And SHoP has designed these buildings with lower sections facing east, to ease the transition to the rest of the neighborhood. Tall, thin buildings look elegant in a city lower, bulkier ones, unless they are filling in a hole in a street wall, can look dull and clunky. The architects at SHoP have realized what too few community groups are willing to admit, which is that bulk, not height, is what damages the skyline. To fit everything in, the buildings are taller than they were in the Vinoly scheme-in some cases by more than 20 floors. (There will still be the same number of affordable units.) But there is also nearly twice as much public open space overall.
There is a small reduction in housing units to compensate, in part, for the added amount of commercial space. Dumbo made clear that there are more and more small, startup businesses that would be happy to be on that side of the river. There is much more public waterfront space, including an open, park-like square, and there is a substantial amount of office space, a recognition that Williamsburg might benefit from not being entirely a bedroom community. But SHoP has rethought the project in a number of critical areas. It’s a somewhat masochistic thing for Two Trees to have done, because it means the long process of approvals has to start all over again, since the prior approval applies only to the earlier plan. Instead, the company decided that plan wasn’t good enough, and that it was willing to start over.
#Cities skylines too few services free
Two Trees took over the project from the initial developer after it won all city approvals, and if it chose to do so, it would be completely free to start building the Vinoly designs tomorrow. The scheme, designed by the architect Rafael Vinoly for another developer, was strikingly ordinary as architecture but exactly the kind of thing that results from the combination of caution and desire to please community groups that so often affects planning in New York.
Some of this would be in subsidized, “affordable” housing, but most units would be full-price, luxury housing. What they’ve done on the Domino site is especially remarkable, however, because the city had already approved a plan to put 2,400 units of housing on the site, most in new buildings and some in the old sugar refinery itself. Jed Walentas, who now runs the company, and his father, David, who founded it, have always had more imagination than the average New York developer. The developer of Mercedes House was Two Trees, the same company that is developing the Domino site (and more or less invented the Dumbo neighborhood). (The building, which also calls to mind a tamer, straightened-out version of Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV tower in Beijing, would be positioned with the doughnut hole open to the east, so the rising sun would be visible through it.) Another building would consist of a slab resembling an upside down “L,” resting atop a medium-high slab that would contain an office building. The SHoP plan, a collaboration with the landscape-architecture firm Field Operations, envisions very big buildings-one tower is 598 feet tall another, the project’s centerpiece, consists of two vertical slabs sitting on top of a horizontal slab and topped by another horizontal slab, so that the whole thing looks like a gargantuan open rectangle or, if you will, a 40-story doughnut. No, this mix of residential and commercial space is not “contextual,” if you think the context is the few gentrified blocks of Williamsburg adjacent to this 11-acre site and the small-scale buildings a little farther to the east.
This is a roundabout way of saying that SHoP’s new plan for the section of the Brooklyn waterfront around the old Domino sugar refinery in Williamsburg is one of the most exciting developments New York has seen in a long time. Too much adherence to narrow rules and guidelines creates a dull city too little yields chaos. We are hesitant to accept the fact that great cities come from breaking rules as well as from following them, from architecture that surprises and excites as much as from architecture that behaves itself. Once, the notion that a new building might take its cues from its surroundings didn’t count for enough in New York. Vishaan Chakrabarti, the architect and planner who is a partner in the firm SHoP, was quoted not long ago as saying that “contextualism is an opiate for the masses.” It was not what you would call a politically correct statement in this age of hyper-sensitivity to neighborhoods, landmarks, historic districts, and small scale, when everybody wants each new building to “fit in,” whatever that means, and buildings that look different from what has been built before are an automatic no-no to many community groups.īut what Chakrabarti may have lacked in political correctness he made up in perceptiveness.
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