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The Bilbao Anomaly

A watershed event in the history of American city planning occurred in 1956 when the University of Pennsylvania inaugurated a joint degree program in city planning and architecture. The goal was to educate professionals who could bridge the gap that had grown up between city planners, who were increasingly concerned with large-scale urban policy, and architects, who tended to focus on individual buildings. Henry Wright, the former partner of Clarence Stein and the codesigner of Radburn, helped draft the proposal: “The need, the urgent need, now exists for a designer with a broad vision, with understanding of the life of the city and these times, and above all with unusual skill in composing buildings in relation to each other and to their natural setting and to the activities of the city.” 1 The new discipline came to be known as urban design.^* Urban designers deal with collections of buildings, such as downtown business districts, residential neighborhoods, planned communities, town centers, and college campuses. While they are often architects, urban designers don’t design individual buildings. Instead, they plan the public spaces between buildings—avenues, streets, squares, promenades, and parks—and establish general guidelines, such as setbacks, heights, and other rules that govern how buildings relate to one another. Reacting to the failures of the megaprojects of the 1950s—and to Jane Jacobs’s critique—urban designers recognize that building a city is different from constructing a building; in this gradual process, many actors participate over long periods of time.2 Thus, the goal of an urban-design plan is to create a loose framework that will accommodate this process, acknowledging that the future is usually impossible to predict. On the whole, this approach has proved workable and useful, as Harborplace and Reston Town Center demonstrate.

A different sort of watershed occurred on July 20, 2002, during a town-hall meeting held at the Javits Convention Center in New York City. The meeting was organized by the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York, a coalition of community groups; the subject was the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks the previous year. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is responsible for the rebuilding, presented a number of urban-design schemes showing how 11 million square feet of offices, retail space, a hotel, and a memorial to the victims could be arranged on the sixteen-acre site. The drawings and models were the work of Beyer Blinder Belle, a New York architecture and planning firm that designed the South Street Seaport Museum and recently turned Stone Street in Lower Manhattan into a successful outdoor restaurant row. However, only two of the schemes presented at the Javits Center were designed by Beyer Blinder Belle; two were the work of Peterson Littenberg, an architecture and planning firm that espoused New Urbanism; one was based on a plan that the powerhouse architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill had prepared for Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder of the destroyed Twin Towers; and the sixth was based on a master plan designed by Alexander Cooper, one of the designers of Battery Park City.

The authors of the six alternatives were not given an opportunity to speak at the town-hall meeting. Instead, the projects were presented to the public in the form of what urban designers call massing models, which represent generic building volumes and lack specific architectural details. The forty-five hundred people who attended the meeting broke up into small discussion groups that were electronically connected to a central database, allowing instant polling of the attendees. It quickly became apparent from the tabulated reactions that the audience didn’t like any of the proposals. The common complaints were that the architecture was unimaginative, that there were too many office buildings, and that the memorial areas were not inspiring. In sum, the Development Corporation was seen as having fallen down on the job. When Robert Yaro, one of the Civic Alliance’s founders, offered conciliatory remarks, he was shouted down by the assembly. The vociferous reactions to the plans echoed a New York Times lead editorial of three days earlier titled “The Downtown We Don’t Want,” which described the six schemes as “dreary, leaden proposals that fall far short of what New York City—and the world—expect to see rise at ground zero.”3 Portentous prose, but an accurate reflection of the public mood.

Obviously, there was a disconnect between the urban designers and the public. The former saw rebuilding the World Trade Center site as a technical problem—which streets to close and which to open, where to build, how to accommodate complicated underground infrastructure, and how to deal with transportation (streets, subways, and a PATH line). The urban designers intentionally avoided superblock solutions and diffidently aimed at reintegrating the World Trade Center site with the rest of the city. As Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic of the New Yorker, put it at the time, “Boldness has been pretty much out of fashion in city-planning circles for a while, especially in lower Manhattan, where it is associated not only with projects like the World Trade Center but with unrealized schemes like the expressway Robert Moses wanted to run across downtown, which would have destroyed SoHo.”4 But boldness was what the public wanted. It saw the reconstruction of Ground Zero not as a chance to repair the city but as an opportunity to create new, exciting architectural forms that would, in some as yet undefined way, both symbolize and commemorate the events of 9/11.

Even before the town-hall meeting was over, the cowed officials of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation announced that they would extend the deadline for completing a final master plan in order to consider fresh options.⁵ The six urban-design proposals were shelved, and a month later an international competition for “conceptual ideas” was announced. Four hundred and six teams responded, and seven were selected. Some of the team members had planning experience, but most were high-profile architects, among them two Pritzker Prize winners—Richard Meier and Norman Foster—such well-known designers as Charles Gwathmey, Rafael Viñoly, Peter Eisenman, and Steven Holl, and younger international architects such as Daniel Libeskind, lately of Berlin, Foreign Office Architects of London, and UNStudio of Amsterdam.

The earlier urban-design proposals had taken into account such mundane factors as subway stations, transit lines, existing river tunnels, and underground infrastructure, as well as connections to Battery Park City on the west and Tribeca on the north. The new projects generally downplayed these constraints and concentrated on architectural form: Foster designed an unusual pair of connected skyscrapers; the team of Meier, Eisenman, Holl, and Gwathmey produced a striking composition of five identical towers; Libeskind placed his buildings around a huge memorial excavation; and the team that included Foreign Office Architects and UNStudio proposed a colossal megastructure of a type that had never been built before—and was, perhaps, unbuildable. Although architecture critics generally praised the results, not everyone was pleased. “It is like putting lipstick on a hog,” complained Yaro. “Nothing has changed except you have a lot of fancy architects on this go-round. They are still designing the same thing, just prettier.”6 He meant that the program had not changed and still consisted primarily of office buildings.^* But his criticism missed the point: fancy architects and pretty models were precisely what the public—egged on by the media, especially the New York Times—wanted.

That is why the Javits Center town meeting was a milestone. Forty years earlier, Jane Jacobs had criticized city planning for “sorting out certain cultural or public functions and decontaminating their relationship with the workaday city.”7 The new discipline of urban design was a response to her critique, but the public would have none of it. In the words of architect and author Philip Nobel, “The universal negative reaction that would kill the plans was not only a knee-jerk response to unsatisfying architecture . . . it marked the death of reasoned planning at Ground Zero.”⁸

The rejection of urban design in favor of showcase architecture was influenced by a major phenomenon of the late 1990s: the public’s fascination with so-called signature or iconic buildings, that is, striking buildings designed by architectural stars. Emblematic architecture in cities is not new, of course. European urbanism in the second half of the nineteenth century, for example, included massive railroad terminals, palatial department stores, huge exhibition halls, and impressive opera houses, not to mention urban landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower. Historian Barry Bergdoll characterizes this period as embodying the “cult of the monument” and links the rise of officially sanctioned and historically inspired architecture in Europe to the rise of nationalist ideologies in new states such as Germany, Belgium, and Italy, and to the growing power of commercial interests.⁹ “Belatedly architecture joined the arsenal of the burgeoning art of advertising,” he writes, “which quickly exploited even the newest findings of the young field of visual psychology to fine-tune its message and appeal.”¹⁰ The connection between architecture and advertising was particularly evident in the entrepreneurial United States, where the first four decades of the twentieth century witnessed a veritable explosion of commercial monuments: hotels and apartment buildings in the form of aristocratic châteaus, railroad stations modeled on Roman baths, department stores resembling Florentine palazzi, and those most visible of urban monuments, commercial skyscrapers.

The public’s appetite for striking architecture, in any period, is fueled by similar forces: prosperity, civic ambition, confidence in the future, and a sense that one’s own epoch is unique and needs its own form of special expression. The first postwar building to achieve the status of an instant national icon was the Sydney Opera House, designed by the Danish architect Jørn Utzon and completed in 1973. Despite its relatively remote location—most non-Australians did not see the Opera House firsthand until the 2000 Olympic Games—the sculptural concrete roofs and the spectacular site captured the world’s imagination. Charles Jencks, the author of The Iconic Building, describes architectural icons as delicate balancing acts between what he calls explicit signs and implicit symbols, that is, between memorable forms and the images they conjure up. He emphasizes that in an increasingly heterogeneous world, multiple and sometimes even enigmatic meanings are precisely what turn buildings into popular icons. According to Jencks, the billowing white roofs of the Opera House could be read as sails, waves, or seashells.11 This has little to do with music, but it seems just right for Sydney Harbor and Australia.

In 1991, when Frank Gehry entered an international competition to design a new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, his clients referred specifically to the Sydney Opera House. “It was a small competition with Arata Isozaki, Coop Himmelblau, and me and they—Thomas Krens [the director of the Guggenheim Museum] and the Basques—said they needed a hit there,” Gehry told Charles Jencks. “They needed the building to do for Bilbao what the Sydney Opera House did for Australia.” 12 Gehry delivered. Since its opening, the museum has attracted more than 4 million visitors to the city and generated millions of dollars of economic activity and new taxes for the city. It has transformed Bilbao from an aging industrial port into a prime tourist destination. While other constructions—an improved subway system, a new airport, a shopping complex—have contributed to the city’s rejuvenation, the Guggenheim Museum deserves the lion’s share of the credit.

An architectural icon as the catalyst for urban renewal.

As with the Sydney Opera House, the symbolism of the Bilbao museum is enigmatic. The titanium swirls, ballooning shapes, and colliding forms have variously been described as biomorphic sculpture and an intergalactic spaceship; locally it’s known as the silver artichoke. Whatever its meaning, Gehry’s museum has had a major impact on contemporary architecture, pushing design in an expressionistic, sculptural direction. It has also influenced the way that many architects, and their clients, think about urbanism. “A single piece of architecture can be a more effective catalyst for change than a corps of urban planners,” says New York architect Steven Holl, neatly if somewhat arrogantly summarizing what has come to be known as the Bilbao Effect—the ability of a work of architecture to single-handedly put a city on the map.13 As cities increasingly depend on national and international tourism, publicity has become important in attracting visitors. Whether it is a concert hall or a rock-and-roll hall of fame, a building that garners attention is an added reason for people to visit a city.

Although the Bilbao Effect assumes that buildings become icons overnight, history suggests otherwise. The Eiffel Tower, for example, was hardly universally popular when it was first built; and the tower housing Big Ben, which was built in 1852, achieved its iconic status during the London Blitz. When the Chrysler Building was built, it was vilified by most architecture critics as gaudy and commercialized, and during the Depression, the half-leased Empire State Building was ridiculed as the “Empty State.”¹⁴ Unpopular buildings may become popular in time, but as fashions change, the opposite can also happen. When Philadelphia decided to build a spectacular new city hall in 1871, the architect John McArthur Jr. chose the ornate Second Empire style, which was then the height of fashion. However, it took so long to build the enormous structure that by the time it was finished, thirty years later, tastes had changed. Beaux Arts classicism was all the rage, and the city hall’s mansard roofs and florid decorations struck most people as old-fashioned, if not downright dowdy. The vast stone pile became something of an embarrassment, and calls to demolish the building started as early as the 1920s and continued for decades. Probably only its size—it is the largest municipal building in the United States—saved it from the wrecker’s ball. By the 1980s, tastes had again changed. Thanks to the historic-preservation movement, old buildings in general, and Victorian architecture in particular, were seen as architectural assets. In the 2007 poll that asked Americans to rate their favorite buildings, the city hall stood in twenty-first place, just behind the Brooklyn Bridge and ahead of any other building in Philadelphia.15

Buildings of far greater architectural worth than Philadelphia’s city hall have not weathered the shoals of changing taste. Charles McKim’s epic Pennsylvania Station was demolished fifty-four years after it opened; Frank Lloyd Wright’s splendid Larkin Building was gone after forty-seven years; H. H. Richardson’s monumental Marshall Field store endured forty-three years; and Stanford White’s marvelous Madison Square Garden was taken down after only twenty-five. The hardest test for a building is between its thirtieth and fiftieth birthdays, when architectural tastes have changed and the original design no longer seems fresh. That is when calls for demolition—or drastic alterations—are most likely to be heeded. If a building weathers this midlife crisis, after several more decades, as the pendulum of fashion swings back, it may once more be appreciated. It helps if a building is functionally, as well as aesthetically, outstanding, for the argument that great architecture should be held to a different practical standard generally falls on deaf ears. It also helps if a building captures people’s affections. It is not enough that a building be popular with the general public, however; it must also be appreciated by its owner. If an owner values a building, he will put up with a certain degree of dysfunction—no building is perfect—and will take the trouble to maintain it, make repairs, upgrade obsolete technological systems, and spruce it up every thirty to forty years. If a building fails to capture its owner’s favor, however, even architectural greatness will not protect it from the wrecker’s ball.

The Bilbao Guggenheim is barely a decade old, so it is much too early to know how its idiosyncratic architectural style will age, aesthetically and functionally, although its current popularity is incontestable. However, the Bilbao Effect might be better named the Bilbao Anomaly, since it has proved difficult to replicate. Hot on the heels of Gehry’s spectacular success in Bilbao, for example, the Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen commissioned Gehry to design a rock-and-roll museum for Seattle. The Experience Music Project was to commemorate the rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix, a Seattle native, and put the city, whose only memorable building was the Space Needle, on the architectural map. However, the much anticipated building turned out to be a dud, a jumble of forms, materials, and colors that tried too hard to be a literal representation of rock and roll (the shapes were said to have been inspired by electric guitars). Whether it was the confusing architecture, the lackluster contents, or some flaw in iconic chemistry, the Bilbao Effect failed to work its magic. Attendance was considerably less than expected, staff was let go, and in a hapless effort to attract the public, part of the building was turned into a Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame.

Describing the fate of most post-Bilbao museums, the New York Times warns, “The good news is that for a year after the opening of a new building, a major spike in attendance can be expected. The bad news is that attendance consistently levels off after two or three years.”16 Sometimes it doesn’t even take that long. The new addition to the Denver Art Museum, designed by Studio Daniel Libeskind, was expected to attract 1 million visitors, and instead the first year it brought in 650,000; as a result, the museum has been obliged to lay off staff.¹⁷ Steven Holl’s ambitious claim for architecture’s ascendancy over city planning was made in reference to his design for a new art museum in Bellevue, outside Seattle. That museum was intended to spearhead change in the lifeless downtown. “Holl hopes viewers will see architecture as an urban amenity, one that is beautiful even as it connects people—a first step in the utopian transformation of an edge city,” breathlessly opined Architectural Record. ¹⁸ Less than three years after it opened, and following the resignations of two successive directors, the Bellevue Arts Museum closed its doors because of “failure to find an audience.”¹⁹

In 1987, Philadelphia decided to build a new downtown concert hall. Since the budget was only $60 million—low for a concert hall—Robert Venturi designed a straightforward brick box, almost an anti-icon. Asked to make the building more “interesting,” the architect cheekily added neon decorations to the façade. By then, the Bilbao Effect was much on people’s minds, the general feeling was that something more was called for, and Venturi was let go. Following an architectural competition, the job went to Rafael Viñoly, who produced an unusual design with two halls under an enormous glass roof. The coverage of the building in the national media was decidedly tepid, however, especially compared to the plaudits that greeted Gehry’s Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, which opened the same year. Shortly after Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center was completed, the management took the unusual step of suing its architect, ostensibly for cost overruns and construction delays, but according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “the underlying complaint seems to be that Viñoly failed to deliver a show-stopper.”20

The Bilbao Effect failed to work its magic at the Bellevue Arts Museum.

The demands of the public may forge the shape of cities, as Andrejs Skaburskis pointed out, but with the Bilbao Effect these demands often have negative consequences. In the past, civic monuments, since they were to last not decades but centuries, were expected to exhibit gravity and decorum. Buildings such as the New York Public Library and Washington’s Union Station were intended to impress and even dazzle, but they were not expected to astonish or entertain. Since today’s architectural icons are competing for attention not only with one another, but also with such public distractions as movies, music videos, and computer games, architects—and their clients—have waived all restraint. Aggressively pursuing novelty, architects have explored increasingly bizarre forms and unusual materials and have striven for surprising spatial and structural effects. But while fireworks are wonderful, who wants fireworks every night?

The public’s demand for novelty has distorted not only architecture but also urban design. Intensely self-centered buildings usually make poor urban neighbors, and a city of icons risks becoming the architectural equivalent of a theme park—or the Las Vegas strip.* The Bilbao Guggenheim succeeded because it is a brilliant crystal in a staid setting of sturdy nineteenth-century buildings. Successful examples of urban design, such as seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Georgian Edinburgh and London, and nineteenth-century Paris, are similarly characterized by the quality of their streets and squares—and canals—and the orderly beauty of their everyday buildings. The real challenge for cities today is not to create more icons, but rather to create more such settings. The current economic recession may aid in this, since funding for large projects has dried up and economic conditions favor modest initiatives—repairing, rehabilitating, and reusing buildings rather than tearing them down and starting over.

Were the participants at the 2002 Javits Center town-hall meeting hoping for some local version of the Bilbao Effect? Daniel Libeskind’s winning scheme, which has been described as a “shrine to patriotism,” pointedly included a number of iconic elements: a 1,776-foot-high skyscraper, a Heroes Park, a September 11 Place, and a public plaza oriented to receive a shaft of sunlight each September 11—the so-called Wedge of Light.21 Many people were taken by the design. “Build Mr. Libeskind’s memorial, it will be a source and incubator of renewal,” wrote Ada Louise Huxtable in the Wall Street Journal, anticipating a Bilbao Effect.²² But we will never know. After Libeskind’s design had gone through the ringer of engineering constraints, real-estate economics, and political infighting, virtually all its symbolic elements, including the memorial slurry wall, an immense waterfall, and a shardlike museum, disappeared. If Ground Zero was to have an icon, it looked as if it might be the new PATH commuter train station being designed by Santiago Calatrava, who produced one of his characteristic avian skeletons with a vast openable roof. But that project is encountering a common problem of putative icons: high construction costs, in this case in excess of $3 billion.²³ At the time of writing—fall 2010—as redesign follows redesign (the roof no longer opens), it is not clear what form the final station will take.

Yet the World Trade Center site is being rebuilt. The new 7 World Trade Center, which includes an all-important electrical substation, is occupied. The underground infrastructure is nearing completion; a design has been chosen for the memorial; construction of 1 World Trade Center, an eighty-two-story skyscraper designed by David Childs and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, has begun; and Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, and Fumihiko Maki have been commissioned to design three adjacent office towers. The final Ground Zero plan is striking for how much it resembles one of the urban-design proposals that was so publicly rejected in 2002: the Alexander Cooper plan. Only two weeks after 9/11, Cooper, Robertson & Partners was commissioned to make a study of the area by Brookfield Properties, which owned the World Financial Center next door. The heart of Cooper’s plan was restoring Greenwich and Fulton streets, eliminated when the World Trade Center was built in 1973, and creating a connection between lower Manhattan and the World Financial Center. To reinforce this connection, Cooper proposed decking over a section of ten-lane-wide West Street, creating a new, narrower avenue, as well as a treed pedestrian promenade that extended as far south as Battery Park on the tip of the island. The most expensive part of the plan was underground: a new Long Island Rail Road terminus for a high-speed line linking lower Manhattan to Jamaica in the suburbs. Restoring the two streets cut the sixteen-acre superblock into four parcels. Cooper pointed out that the largest of the four, which circumscribed the footprints of the two destroyed towers, was roughly the same size as Madison Square or Bryant Park and could serve as a memorial park.

The Cooper master plan successfully resolved the key issues of the World Trade Center site, and according to Cooper’s partner Jaquelin T. Robertson, it acquired such an air of inevitability that it was “unofficially approved by the State, the City, and the Port Authority long before any redevelopment agency had been set up, and the various studies and fashion shows started.” Although the new railroad line and the deck over West Street were ultimately set aside as too expensive, many of the components of the plan are being realized: the restored Greenwich and Fulton streets, the office towers and a new station on the east side of Greenwich Street, and a memorial that incorporates the Twin Tower footprints. Libeskind’s scheme proposed that the memorial parcel be thirty feet below street level, but the present memorial design is a street-level park, just as the Cooper plan proposed. This is not a question of copying. Cooper’s plan, which is based on rational analysis rather than personal invention, simply anticipated the most sensible outcome. So perhaps urban design could be said to have prevailed at Ground Zero, after all.

The 2002 Cooper, Robertson study established the main urban-design parameters for the World Trade Center site.

*The 1956 planning conference at which Jane Jacobs had spoken against urban renewal led Harvard to establish a degree in urban design in 1959.

^*The Port Authority, which owns the World Trade Center site, is prohibited by law from building housing.

^*Icon overload is already visible in cities such as Dubai and Shanghai.