New York’s Public Architecture Gets a Facelift - NYTimes.com
The Children's Library Discovery Center is a new addition to the Queens Central Library.
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: October 10, 2011
It was business as usual when I stopped into the Queens Central Library in downtown Jamaica the other morning. Visitors were nosing through racks of dog-eared best sellers, schmoozing near the circulation desk and peering into banks of computers on long tables in the lobby.
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Across the room, beneath “Discover!” in red lettering, light poured through a large candy-colored doorway opening onto a new addition, a children’s science center. Immaculate and all white, the place gave off the cheery, vaguely techno vibe of a Swatch shop on the Ginza.
Designed by 1100 Architect with an interior by Lee H. Skolnick Architecture + Design Partnership, the Children’s Library Discovery Center, as it’s called, is part of a quiet revolution reshaping the city’s public architecture. Piecemeal across the five boroughs, New York is gradually being remade.
These changes come in large part thanks to David J. Burney, a polite Englishman who has lived here for 30-odd years and, since 2004, has been Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s commissioner for the Department of Design and Construction. Under him, and mostly under the radar, dozens of new and refurbished libraries, firehouses, emergency medical stations, police precincts, homeless processing centers and museums have been designed by gifted and occasionally famous architects. Taken together they have brought fresh architectural standards to the city’s infrastructure and, often, to poor, middle- and working-class neighborhoods that have long been overlooked.
It’s a big change from decades ago, when city bureaucrats considered good design a costly frill. The quality of construction was allowed to suffer to serve the bottom line. This message of official indifference contributed to a climate of public skepticism about government and the city that, in turn, dimmed expectations for urban improvements, large or small.
And it’s the small things, after all — some greenery, good lighting, well-maintained sidewalks and well-made buildings — that shape our perceptions of where we live, whether we’re always conscious of them or not. “The little interventions add up,” is how Mr. Burney put it to me recently. The projects his department has been overseeing aspire to improve the general quality of street life, and in a few cases tip the balance in neglected corners of the city. For instance, an EMS station on Bond Street in Brooklyn, by Beyhan Karahan Architects, has added eyes on the street to what had been a fairly deserted and derelict stretch near the Gowanus Canal. The area has become safer since.
A century ago Gilded Age patrons, inspired by progressive ideas, enlisted lions of Beaux-Arts architecture to devise landmark schools, firehouses and police stations throughout the city. Andrew Carnegie distributed branch libraries — raised like temples or courthouses a few steps above the street, with stony facades and lofty reading rooms — to serve the masses as silent palaces for public improvement.
Today, libraries double as senior centers and toddler playrooms. They’re safe after-school havens for teenagers of working parents, with rooms set aside that are stocked with computers and, at a few branches, as in the Rockaways, even with recording studios. Libraries have also learned from retailers like Starbucks and Barnes & Noble about what people expect when they leave their homes to go someplace public to sit and read. Libraries have become modern town squares and gathering places; they offer millions of New Yorkers employment counseling, English language classes and, crucially, Internet access. Quiet rooms, like the ones Carnegie built, tend to be smaller and set aside these days, almost like smoking sections in airports.
Is that a bad thing? Times change. Research libraries still survive. To imagine that libraries could remain as they were half a century ago would entail wishing away the Web and the demands of old people, immigrants, the unemployed, schoolchildren and parents who want constructive places to keep their young children occupied at a time when public resources and political good will are in increasingly short supply. “We need to be less introverted,” is how Thomas W. Galante, the chief executive officer of the Queens Library, summed up the challenge for libraries today.
