Cityscape

Robert Moses Lives

Like a pitchman on late-night TV, Eisenman keeps offering more. His proposal includes an extension of the No. 7 subway line -- something the city has been pushing as part of Mayor Giuliani's stadium crusade -- down Eighth Avenue, along 33rd Street, connecting to another line linking it with the Meadowlands sports complex -- "from Shea Stadium to Secaucus," the designer boasts.

And here's the twisted genius of Eisenman's plan: Embedded in it is the presumption that New York will host the 2012 Olympics. Not only is this a romantic conceit designed to appeal to boosters on both sides of the Hudson, but the Olympics, Eisenman claims, provides a loophole in environmental laws that would otherwise prevent the construction of a stadium in the Hudson River.

Well, maybe Eisenman has moved to the right of center.

He didn't come up with this all by himself. He brought in high-powered collaborators, notably Marilyn Taylor and David Childs of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the architects of the proposed new Penn Station. But this project has a monolithic, master-builder quality reminiscent of the bad old days of urban renewal. The design may be breathtakingly au courant, full of complex and irregular forms inspired and facilitated by the computer, but the plan itself is retrograde, promising to impose a unified vision on 100 acres of New York City. "Megalomaniacal," asserts a juror who says he preferred the Morphosis plan, which clearly invited the participation of many architects, as did some of the other proposals.

Eisenman's scheme is a lesson in why urban renewal was once so seductive for policy-makers. It's a security blanket, with the architect providing all the answers for a slice of Manhattan that is, at the moment, nothing but questions: Can the Javits Center expand? Does Madison Square Garden stay where it is or move yet again? And how do we get to this part of town, anyway?

Eisenman leaves nothing to chance; at least that's the impression given by his presentation. In actuality, the urban topology of his models, disorienting and thrilling, diverts attention from annoying little details like how this thing will actually work. It's hard to figure out, looking at the computer-generated renderings, just how a Madison Square Garden would fit between the rail yards below and the warped terrain of the rooftop park above. Nor is it clear how this horizontal super-duper block would appear to a street-level pedestrian standing on the corner of 34th and Ninth. Would it be a shining example of twenty-first century urbanity, a bigger, better version of San Francisco's Yerba Buena Gardens, or a nightmarish adventure in gigantism? Maybe it's unfair to ask those questions of something so raw, so new. But, as pie-in-the-sky as the project appears to be, the architect is completely in earnest. "We have a real scheme," Eisenman insists.

Like many architectural competitions, the CCA's was staged primarily as a catalyst for public discussion. The finalists' submissions will be on display in Grand Central's Vanderbilt Hall in October, and there will be a daylong symposium at the Cooper Union on October 8. But the CCA's competition also holds out the tantalizing promise that the participating architects will influence what is eventually built. Why else would Lambert have included both Rose and Empire State Development Corporation chairman Charles Gargano as jury members? And why else would she select a parcel of land over which the city, the state, and every private developer are salivating?

Gargano, incidentally, did not make it to the daylong judging of the projects. Nor was he in attendance at the dinner. While he was, according to competition organizers, very involved, his failure to show up for the actual judging adds to the perception that Manhattan's West Side, no matter what the CCA's visionary architects propose, will continue to be a battlefield for the political war between city and state governments. Regardless of what, if anything, is eventually built there, Eisenman has done something that will likely attract more powerful clients. He has given an otherwise dim-witted scheme -- Giuliani's West Side stadium plan -- a veneer of intellectual credibility and an avant-garde sheen.