Word: urban
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...original World Trade Center, completed in 1973, suffered under a similar real estate climate. "The argument back then was that downtown was losing to midtown," says Susan Fainstein, professor of urban planning at Columbia University. "They thought by building this impressive complex, it would make downtown a competitor. But so much space came up at once, and there just wasn't the demand to fill it." New York State even moved some offices there to help keep the rent rolls filled. The latest plans for ground zero call for the same 10 million sq. ft. of office space...
...Have people's expectations since independence four years ago been unrealistic? The high expectations of urban people haven't been realistic. Nevertheless, the government could have done more to address the demands of the poorest people by investing quickly in infrastructure development to provide jobs. Instead, it has been too careful not to spend money without first having the legislative framework in place. But sometimes social pressures and expectations cannot wait for that. We should go ahead anyway...
Foster's tower, his first sizable project in the U.S., rises from within a six-story brown masonry base that dates from the 1920s. That's when news paper baron William Randolph Hearst commissioned the architect and stage designer Joseph Urban to produce a low-rise headquarters for Hearst's growing empire. The intention was that a taller addition would be constructed later, but the Depression intervened. For nearly eight decades, the Deco-flavored base stood alone. In the late 1990s the Hearst Corp. decided to keep the old building but to hollow it out and erect a new tower...
Keep all that in mind when you step into the tour de force just inside the Hearst Tower. Instead of a conventional lobby, Foster has produced a massive indoor piazza, a 10-story atrium bathed in sunlight from overhead skylights and surrounded by the windowed masonry walls of Urban's original base, which give the appearance of exterior walls facing inward. At a time when cities have ever less interest in parks or open space, this is an office tower with a town square inside, not a shopping mall. "A building should try to give something back to the city...
Each day, locals dial the museum’s hotline—available only to residents—and leave voice messages about daily experiences that amazed them or inspired them. At the end of the day, Kottamasu, now a graduate student of Urban Planning at MIT, puts the messages together in a program, along with his commentary...