Battery Park City: An American Dream of Urbanism

Abstract

The process of creating design guidelines brings into play important existential questions about how we view ourselves as a culture through our architecture and urban form. In some cases, design guidelines are the perpetuation of existing misunderstood value systems or, worse yet, the unwitting perfection of ideologies that are reluctantly understood to be disdainful. The results are comfortable and supportive of the existing socioeconomic conditions, but contain an underlying crisis of meaning, experience, and culture. With this perspective we will examine Battery Park City in Manhattan, which was formulated according to a comprehensive set of design guidelines governing both its urban morphology and architectural expression. Of particular concern is the resultant urban morphology and architectural iconography as it reflects the underlying ideology of the design guidelines themselves. Battery Park City is relevant because of its comprehensive planned structure within one of the world’s most well-defined cities, as well as its manifest ideology, created during this “moment of late consumer or multi-nation capitalism,” as Frederick Jameson labels the end of the twentieth century (Jameson, 1983, 125).