Environment: Downtown Is Looking Up

(2 of 5)

Pinwheeling Setbacks. Every big city is getting its share of the new towers. Chicago, the birthplace of the skyscraper, has set the pace. It has tapering buildings, round ones and free forms; dozens have been completed in the '70s. Over them all broods the 110-story Sears Tower, with its pinwheeling arrangement of setbacks. In San Francisco, the 48-story Transamerica building looks like a cross between an oil derrick and the Pyramid of Cheops. The latest statement—if not the last word—is New York's: its shimmering 34-story One United Nations Plaza, designed by Architects Roche/Dinkeloo and opened last month, has taken a form as abstract as a minimal sculpture.

Down on the streets, there is another kind of new look. Central cities are now paying increasing attention to the pedestrian and his comforts. Spokane, continuing a development started for its Expo '74, is building a system of second-story walkways so that people can stroll among six city blocks without ever going outside; Minneapolis already has a similar skywalk. New York is chipping at its concrete canyons with vest-pocket parks, small oases of greenery and water amid the granite, glass and asphalt. Most U.S. cities have become aware of the humanizing influence of gardens, fountains, plazas and intimate shopping arcades—all a recovered legacy from Europe.

Vital Signs. What has caused these welcome changes? Mainly necessity. For 30 years America's downtowns have been at war with their own suburbs, fighting continuously to keep those two vital signs of life—middle-class residents and businesses. Now, for the first time, there are indications that the suburbs are on the defensive. They have attracted so many companies, so many people, that they are beginning to suffer the indignities of traffic jams, smog, escalating taxes and land costs. The crowning insult, and the most discomfiting of all developments: the suburbs now have suburbs of their own. Even so, to compete at all, the old downtowns had to shape up, and they have.

A major question is how the new buildings should define the life of the city. Traditionally, that decision is left to individual developers. In Los Angeles, for example, Occidental Petroleum decided that the financial center would move south of the old downtown, and built its headquarters in the likeliest southern line of growth. But Atlantic Richfield and three banks bet the movement would be westward and built their towers accordingly. As things turned out, the west won, which leaves Occidental in solitary splendor, at least temporarily. Not that it matters: the building boom in Los Angeles is not only around the new towers, but also miles away in Century City and West wood. The theory, urbanologists joke, is that no one ever wanted to go to downtown L.A., so downtown came to them.

Boston evolved a better approach.

It practically reinvented urban renewal in the early 1960s by developing a sound plan to help its decrepit downtown. Then the city's redevelopment agency, which had muscle and was willing to use it, saw that the plan was followed. By having veto power over design schemes, the agency made sure developers used major architects. As a result, planning became a Boston habit.