The reach of the Megachurch expands to include the development of shopping malls, residential development, and sport facilities.
Nicolai is spot on with his take on the five West Side Railyard proposals:
...the proposals embody the kind of tired, generic planning formulas that appear wherever big development money is at stake. When thoughtful architecture surfaces at all, it is mostly a superficial gloss of culture, rather than a sincere effort to come to terms with the complex social and economic changes the city has been undergoing for the last decade or so.If anything was to be learned from the debacle at Ground Zero, its that these large scale developments have the potential to really suck if not handled carefully. Nicolai reserves some praise for the Extell / Holl scheme, which begins to display some smarts and innovative problem solving specific to this site in particular, and the architectural treatment of these projects in general, but at the end of the day you are still left with a secluded plot of open space surrounded by glass towers all of which are cut off from the surrounding context. Which is all we can expect from this type of development, especially with the constraints imposed by the working rail yards. Jane Jacobs version / vision of New York doesn't apply here, but there is an untapped potential of how these mega-projects impact the city. Currently there is too much focus on the architecture - as Ground Zero clearly showed, the smarts of a master plan shouldn't rely so much on the design of the towers framing the plan, as it's likely David Childs will end up being responsible for the architecture at the end of the day. Unless the towers are going to push the limits of skyscaper design that will have a more operational impact on the use of the site (OMA's CCTV, or some of the original Ground Zero proposals) then what the towers look like can be limited to simple massing that express FAR ratios and square footage calculations.
In Plans for Railyards, a Mix of Towers and Parks [NY Times]
In what otherwise appears to be a well thought through master plan for Hudson Yards (pdf here), a series of cold and gloomy renderings manage to set the tone for the early public reaction to Extell's proposal.
