A few hebdomad ago , we asked you to name the worst airport in America . It was a seemingly crowded playing field , but in the end , there was no competition : LaGuardiawon out by a landslip . And not just agree to you — that ’s accordingto expert , thegovernor , and evenJoe Biden .
Jim Venturi , afilmmakerand the fry of the fabled designer and plannersDenise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi , wants to fix it . Now , mind you , Venturi is n’t an urban contriver . But he does have a plan — one that borrow from sources as disparate as early email protocols to Robert Moses himself . profile recently inThe New York Times , Venturi describes his idea as like in scurf to Moses ’ transformative task in the 1950s , but different in a very of the essence way : He does n’t need to make more road , like Moses did . He want to make better theodolite .
But it start with LaGuardia .
Venturi need to move Rikers , and its 11,300 - queer dweller , to prisons elsewhere in the New York area . “ The Rikers Island Correctional Facility is an embarrassment , ” he explains in his marriage proposal . “ The stipulation are reprehensively inhumane . ”
After moving inmates to modernized facilities , Venturi want to take the 413 - acre island on which Rikers pose and become it into a new LaGuardia Airport , infilling the case of water that separates it from the airport today and creating four fresh , longer rail to supersede its current two . “ The main capacity problem that the present LGA face is that its two runway are only 7,000 pes long , ” the Rethink team writes . “ By contrast , Newark has three that are : 11,000′ 10,000′ and 6,800′ in length . JFK has four : 14,572′ , 11,351′ , 10,000′ and 8,400′. ”
The 165 gates themselves would sit on Rikers , and Rikers would be connected via under - river light track to a mammoth new gear end site across the piss in Port Morris , an industrial neighborhood in the Bronx , as indicate in this draftsmanship by Venturi ’s pardner , Sigmund Lerner :
This rail place is a decisive crux of the matter of the plan : A 22 - running wonder that would include new connections to the A Train and New Jersey Transit and Amtrak , but also to Metro - North personal line of credit and the Long Island Rail Road .
How would that exercise ? Well , Venturi is also proposing a 2nd station in Sunnyside , Queens — the current land site of a blight railing railway yard — which sit directly in the south of LGA and straight off east of Penn Station . That unexampled node would associate LGA not only with Penn Station , but with Jersey across the Hudson :
And cuddle amongst these sublime plans for raw transit systems are chance for exploitation : Venturi envisions the raw Port Morris station embedded below a huge convention center to replace Javits with 2.7 million square feet of outer space .
But while Venturi ’s transit proposal feels like connective tissue paper that will take decades — if not C — to build , his plan for LaGuardia itself is the real core of the project . Governor Cuomo ’s newdesign competitionto improve the country of the terminals only goes skin deeply , he tell . What LGA needs is a basics - deep redesign , focusing on replicate the act of runways and turning the aerodrome into a hub into which about all of the Northeast corridor ’s transit lines feed .
Venturi grow up interesting in computers — despite the famous person position of his parents in the architecture macrocosm , he was more interested in engineering , assist former drudge conferences hosted by 2600 Magazine as a stripling and eventually working in IT himself . Over the past few years , though , that ’s changed . “ Now , engineering feels more mature , and urban provision seems like tomorrow ’s industry , ” he sound out . Transit networks , after all , are not that different from digital electronic web . “ For example , where do the fibre eye cable’s length go ? , ” he sound out . “ Under rail ancestry . So [ data ] packet and trains have been routed together perpetually . ”
AP Photo / Mark Lennihan
Upon close review , his ideas for New York are actually closely tie to his work in the other day of net . He describes an other line of work connecting e-mail clients , migrating bequest systems towards Microsoft Exchange , as a metaphor for connecting historically distinct caravan lines in New York . “ Those skills are what I add to this projection , ” he says . “ We ’re use up two bequest scheme and unify them . ” Also in the piece of work , he tells me , are plans for updating JFK and Newark .
Can the deeply - sown , unimaginably complex problem of the largest city in America be solved by a single somebody ? It ’s unconvincing — and Venturi is well aware that his plan flow far beyond the leaping of what a typical urban deviser might reckon plausible , which he credits to the fact that he grew up in the future - minded tech world , not the planning world . “ I wreak that to the polish of urban provision now , which tend to be more , well , let ’s call it naturalistic , ” he express mirth .
But is there some note value in talking about musical theme as full-grown as his ? Is it possible that New York has a dearth of big plans — specifically because the mistakes made by the OG big thinker , Robert Moses ? “ It ’s something that ’s been missing from New York since the late career excessiveness of Robert Moses put an end to heavy - scale planning and development , ” say one commenter on the NYT . “ It makes no sense to inhibit the brainstorming with conjecture about political feasibleness , ” said another .
The plan is expansive , and it ’s difficult to refuse its neatness if not its realism . But New York , whether it care it or not , is entering a form in which expansive design may figure prominently : After all , the Federal government is fund more than ahalf billion dollarsin storm - proof base in New York , including a monumental shoulder that will ring Manhattan to slow storm surges . Venturi sees his program as part of a push to build a more bouncy urban center , though it will cost far more than half a billion dollar sign .
Flickr / CC
“ It ’s a very button-down plan , in the sense that anything else is reckless , ” he tell , comparing the current plan to redesign LGA ’s terminals but not its runways or foundation to “ rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic . ” or else , Venturi ascertain the rise sea floor and violent storm that have absorb the aerodrome before as evidence of the need to reevaluate the airdrome on a foundational level — literally .
Of course , in the end , this is just one idea in a ocean of socio - economical and political complexities . But Venturi and his squad have already reach one major end : We ’re thinking about the city in a way that we do n’t very often . In the end , that might be this project ’s most pregnant contribution .
top image : Phillip Capper / CC . All mapping courtesy of Rethink NYC and Sigmund Lerner .
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