One reason I decided to study architecture has been living in one of the most successful architectural experiments of the Twentieth Century.  Roosevelt Island is not just a unique part of New York City; it is also a laboratory for architectural ideas ranging from public space to the cross-ventilation of apartments.

In Northtown designs, courtyards are clearly defined as public or private, and they connect appropriately to the surrounding spaces.

Not only as a resident, but also as an architect, I take our Island very seriously precisely because it is a symbol of a "can-do" attitude: the notion that, given the power to make decisions, architects can make places that are not just groups of buildings, but are communities that are great to live and spend time in.  Roosevelt Island is as much a symbol of sound planning the world over as it is a symbol of progressive development in market-driven New York.

It is because of this that I am very distressed by the two plans unveiled in recent weeks by The WIRE.  Both are essentially "towers in a park."  Architects created this concept in order to solve the problems of the cities of the early century that were dark, dank, and severely overcrowded.  Making buildings go vertical with lots of open park space around them seemed a way to alleviate these problems.  The idea of placing buildings in beautifully-landscaped settings seems like a good one. But, while the end is admirable, the idea had many flaws.  To this day, the problems of poor design plague housing complexes all over the world.  Despite the fact that some people might even think that Roosevelt Island actually is a group of towers in a park, Roosevelt Island is amazing because it finds ways of making this concept work, even when in most other cases it has failed. It is a good idea to identify the problems of the "tower in a park" scheme that are evident in the two proposals for Southtown.

Vast open spaces, with no specific uses, become unusable and wasted.

Once we remove the grid of city streets full of continuous buildings, the spaces that are supposed to become great parks become isolated, cold, and impersonal areas that are so vast that they are useless.  Even though we sometimes hate to admit it, people actually like streets.  We like other people around us.  We are uncomfortable if we wander alone in miles of trees.  Even our suburban friends, who seem to like doing just that, spend a lot of time at places like the mall, which is a sort of city in a bottle that is more crowded than most cities ever are.

The buildings do not relate well to human scale...  The proposals do not maintain the existing qualities of Main Street.

Like Central Park, parks need to be defined by an urban mass around them. They cannot define an urban mass themselves.  Covered by trees, without specific uses like boating lakes, soccer fields, or barbecues, these parks become places that people are afraid to use unless they seek to do things that need to be hidden from observation.

What happens to these vast open spaces is apparent when one takes a look at the public housing developments all over the city such as the Queensbridge Houses and even privately-developed "communities" such as stark Lefrak City in Queens.  The open spaces are too big to be maintained well and these quickly fall apart. The towers become disjointed from these parks.  The only heavily-used path is the one that leads most directly from the building's lobby to the main streets that line the sides of the development.

Roosevelt Island offers an elegant solution.  While the impression of vast areas of open spaces is kept up, in actuality the size and nature of these open spaces is very controlled.  This is done by combining the "tower in a park" concept with a courtyard scheme.  Alternating courtyards, either enclosed or open to the street, create a variant between public and private space.  Take a look at the courtyard in Rivercross, which is a beautiful, if underused, private space that is surrounded by the apartment building with only two small openings out to the river beyond.  Compare that to the Church Courtyard, which opens out to Main Street, becoming a very public space clearly defined by Rivercross and Island House.  North of Eastwood is a park divided so that each and every part of it has a specific use - and it is constantly used.  Even the underused courtyards of the apartment buildings like Eastwood and Island House were meant to be used by the students in their mini-schools.  In Eastwood, one courtyard even has a stage meant for summer performances.

The courtyard concept is but one crucial part of the overall scheme of Roosevelt Island that is ignored in the new plans.  The Davis Brody Bond plan makes a passing reference to it by curling some of the corners of the buildings around certain spaces, but they contain and define those spaces no more than a glass that has a big hole in its side can hold water.

The buildings do not relate well to the human scale.  They are too massive, too boring, and too overbearing.

Both proposals talk about the "human scale." Passing references to low-rise buildings are supposed to suffice in addressing concerns that the monolithic towers being proposed will be too oppressive.  Tall buildings, such as those on Roosevelt Island, can quickly become too large and too overbearing.  But token pieces of buildings stuck out in front of large slabs do not moderate the size of the masses behind them - instead they tend to look as absurd as a sixth toe.

Eastwood's varied facade makes it gentler on the eye.  Its covered sidewalk makes its scale more human and seems to lift the building.

It is tempting to think that adding low-rises to the towers will help make the scale more human. The Davis Brody Bond plan "hides" the masses of the towers by shifting them behind walls of low-rise structures. The buildings of the Manhattan side are an amalgam of different height pieces.  Unless this mixture is done well, however, the result can look very awkward.  The Thoreson and Linard plan tries to make the towers shorter and so small in plan that they seem almost insignificant.  But it is not the height that is a problem.  It is the shape and distribution of the building masses that is.

The buildings already on Roosevelt Island use several different approaches to solve the problem of scale.  The architects of Roosevelt Island played up the size of the buildings.  They made them broad, large, tall, and dominant so that they became identifiable.  To make them feel less bulky, the architects began to push and pull the fa‡ades of the buildings.  Called crenellating, this process allowed them to create more places for windows to pick up breezes.  This answered the need for more ventilation for the apartments.  It also makes the masses of the buildings seem more fragile and fragmented not just massive. Take a look at Eastwood, the largest and heaviest building on the Island.  It would be a very boring wall running along one side of Main Street if it were not for all those bay window projections that dot its facade.

In order to make the bases of these massive buildings seem more human-scale instead of feeling as heavy as the vast buildings above, for the bottom 15 feet of the buildngs all over the Island are bare concrete thAs a final touch, for the bottom fifteen feet of the buildings all over the Island bare concrete is used rather than the ceramic tiles or other materials that cover upper portions of the buildings.  The covered sidewalks of Eastwood and Westview are also this height.  The height of these loggias is such that instead of being pressed down, these spaces seem to lift the buildings.  Though powerful and heavy, the buildings seem to float above a very friendly and human-scale Main Street.

The proposals do not maintain the existing qualities of Main Street.

The proposals have different approaches to the extension of Main Street. In the Davis Brody Bond proposal, the current axis is unceremoniously terminated at the first apartment building.  The street divides into two parts.  The new complex is visually isolated.  In the Thoreson and Linard proposal, Main Street pulls the Queens Side too far from the water.  This leaves too much undefined space on that side.

More importantly, both proposals treat Main Street primarily as a transportation axis when in reality the street now acts as an open public space.  Boxed in by the buildings on either side and lined with stores, Main Street is really a long room.  In the proposals, the Main Street extensions lack definition and resemble a suburban parkway more than a street for pedestrians.

The original architects concentrated everything on one street that became the central spine for the entire Island, instead of using two streets.  All public spaces, from stores to parks, open to this central street.  It is not too straight.  Instead, it shifts so that we cannot see from one end of the Island to the other.  This does two things.  First, our eyes can only guess what lies beyond the turn ahead and instinctively, even if we know what is there, we tend to think it is more of the same of what we see now. The result is that the shifts allow Roosevelt Island to seem bigger and more continuous than it actually is.  Conversely, it allows the overall mass of Roosevelt Island to appear smaller because we only deal with small segments of it at any one time.

The towers themselves are uncomfortable for people to use.

Roosevelt Island is not only well designed on the outside.  The buildings themselves are more friendly and comfortable than many apartment buildings in New York. Certain fundamental things are missing from the new buildings, however.  They are more like the typical cramped New York apartment building. The hallways, completely enclosed by apartments on all sides, are narrow and claustrophobic and will be uncomfortable for people to use. Backed up against the hallways, the apartments lack cross ventilation.  In the Davis Brody Bond plan, the building fa‡ades are flattened to resemble large slabs. The apartments become cubby-holes in which people are stuck looking out at pretty views that look great from above but, because of poor planning, are virtually unusable from below.

In contrast to dark hallways in the center towers, Roosevelt Island's existing buildings have many innovations that make them more comfortable.  Most of the halls have windows. They do not seem claustrophobic but appear to be large and open.  Eastwood takes this concept one step further with its revolutionary "triple-loaded" corridor design in which apartments rise over and sink under the hallway so that they extend the width of the building and thus have full cross ventilation.  Even in buildings without cross-ventilated apartments, the crenellated fa‡ades allow windows to catch more breezes.  In front of most of the elevator banks, the architects also placed open spaces that make the wait for the elevator more open.  No provision for this sort of space is made in either of the proposed Southtown plans.  Even in buildings without cross-ventilated apartments, the crenellated fa‡ades allow windows to catch more breezes.

The two plans for Southtown propose space that is too open, too vast, and too uncontrolled.  They offer buildings that, while not too tall, are ill-conceived in relationship to the street-wall or to the sea-wall.  They lack cohesion with the current buildings, even going so far as to cut themselves off, using a barrier building South of Rivercross.  The architects appear not to have learned what the designers of Roosevelt Island have to teach us.

I believe the architects should try to take the highly effective courtyard concept a step further by activating these courtyards.  They are underused because they are uni-functional as natural recreation spaces.  To make them more usable, other activities, restaurants, stores, and community spaces need to open out to them. For example the idea of converting the old schools to dorms seems good, given that it will activate these spaces. The architects should also try to turn the Island as a whole into a more vibrant enclave by including a more diverse program: allowing some of the towers sitting on courtyard bases to have commercial functions would give the Island an active and dynamic source of population that would patronize our restaurants, park and sports facilities during lunch, and would tie us even closer to the rest of the city than we already are.

In the end, the buildings proposed seem to me to be a "cookie-cutter" solution to the problem at hand.  They are shapes dropped on a flat "baking sheet" with little apparent concern for how they relate to the open space around them, what this open space will do, or even for what they look like inside.

The Southtown development should not suffer such a fate.  At worst, it should blindly continue the precedents set by the original buildings (and followed in fairly large part by Manhattan Park), and, at best, it should build on the lessons taught and learned by the Northtown developments.