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Public Contribution in
High-Rise Building Design
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@ New York City
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55 Water
Street
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| Contribution | ||||||||
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This building was the result of the
International style and the 1961 Zoning Law. The international style
made everything look "clean" and "minimal". And 1961 Zoning Law made
it contribute the enormous size of urban plaza to the public to get
their bonus for special size of the building. This building is not the
top class historic piece of the era. I was acquired to this building
by working for 1331.01 Project at KPF.
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| Because of the purpose, creating the public space to get the bonus and increase building area, is not directly the purpose to encourage urban activities or to describe in another way, not for the urban people. Therefore this space place is lack of aspects to bring the people into. Today, this enormous plaza is so empty all day long and all night long. It is so cold and sober. This plaza did not have any issues that match the needs of the people at all. | ||||||||
| There are issues that made this plaza failed; | ||||||||
| 1. The distance from the street activity - This plaza has only 2 way to access to; the stair case from the water street and another tiny step from east side highway. People hardly know from the street level that they can use those staircase to access the large public space on the upper level. There is only small signage that inform people about the public space. Actually lots of buildings in New York City use this signage to guide the people. But those building also has other aspects in design to attract the people such as storefront or retail shop. This 55 water street has no such thing like that. | ||||||||
| 2. No urban activity in itself - the enormous space on the building podium was design with out any idea about urban activity. This building is a very large building. With the amount of tenants in the building, this space can modified to be the shopping or food area. It can be many alternatives plan to make this plaza back to life. At least it should provide some space for people to sit. But there is no such thing happened. | ||||||||
| 3. Lack of View - The plaza is located at the east side of the north tower (small tower), facing east to see Brooklyn Height. The position of the plaza was an assets in terms of view for the users. But in the reality, this view was block by the large 12' height mass (Figure). Only the people who climbed up to the top of this mass can see the view. So it is too hard to reach this spot and according to the second issues, there is no activity up there for people. | ||||||||
| 4. Pollution - This plaza was located near East Side Highway which is crowed all day. The sounds and smoke from the cars made this plaza become harder to be used by the people. | ||||||||
| 5. Poor landscape design - Even it can be describe that there is no landscape design at all in this space. There are very few trees and small proportion of green scape compare to the amount of stone finishing. The atmosphere is so sober, dry and unfriendly. | ||||||||
| Once the purpose of the design is not for the people, therefore the people activities are not considered. The dead plaza like 55 water street was located at many place in New York City after Seagram Building. It is the waste of space and money for the very dense urban city to have such a failure. At present New York City Zoning Department is trying to develop and cover this mistakes by many kinds of way. However this 30-years continued problem (since 1960's - 1980's) is not easy to be quickly solved. | ||||||||
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