Claire Weisz is a found­ing part­ner of WXY Archi­tec­ture + Urban Design, an award-winning, multi-disciplinary prac­tice known for the inno­v­a­tive design of build­ings, civic infra­struc­ture, and pub­lic open space around New York City.  

We first inter­viewed her weeks before Hur­ri­cane Sandy struck New York, but we begin with a follow-up con­ver­sa­tion not long after the storm passed.

Your recent work for New York includes many projects that fell in the direct path of Hur­ri­cane Sandy: newly built Trans­mit­ter Park in Green­point, pub­lic build­ings for the beach at Far Rock­away, pub­lic archi­tec­ture in Bat­tery Park that flooded at the tip of Man­hat­tan, and on top of that, you’re now work­ing on the East River Blue­way, again at the water’s edge. Tell us about Sandy’s effect on your work.

The parks per­formed well, and they helped the water­front absorb the impact from the storm surge. The parks have sur­vived in great mea­sure the salt water in the Bat­tery and Green­point and the sand in Far Rock­away. This is tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion that they came back within three weeks of the storm with the help of many vol­un­teers and staff, who devoted hours to clean up those areas.

It is the elec­tri­cal and mechan­i­cal infra­struc­ture that didn’t sur­vive the storm surge, and now the city and state are hav­ing to do a great deal to repair and re-install dam­aged equip­ment. Hard hit were the offices of many of our pub­lic and not-for-profit clients – the Bat­tery whose office and archives were dev­as­tated, Jill Weber and her team in the Rock­aways whose offices were severely dam­aged. Many agen­cies have staff who also have dam­aged homes.

Did the storm change the way you think about the city’s water­front? Or might design for the water­front, going forward?

Yes. It gave us a direct under­stand­ing of 100-year, and 500-year, flood lines. This was a real­ity check in time, space, and effect. Now I will never push to have util­ity infra­struc­ture within reach of even a 500 year line. But like other cat­a­strophic events it is impor­tant to not for­get, but to absorb and make a part of all the design deci­sions one has going for­ward. Espe­cially when mak­ing the hard deci­sion of what to choose to do first.

As a designer of pub­lic space, if you were to boil down your reac­tions to the event, and came up with one take-away mes­sage for peo­ple to think about, what would it be? What would you like to see the city, and the coun­try, do going for­ward? Are there adap­tive meth­ods or infra­struc­ture would you like to see put into accel­er­ated use?

Pri­or­i­tize the envi­ron­ment by invest­ing in the resiliency of cities and their res­i­dents, and this includes not just New York, but all impor­tant water­front cities.

As a coun­try we have to real­ize that the best way to save the planet is to sup­port the fact that our cities all over the coun­try — from Detroit to New Orleans — present the best oppor­tu­nity for low­er­ing our car­bon foot­print and are crit­i­cal play­ers in safe­guard­ing our rural spaces and agri­cul­tural lands.

We need to make cities — and peo­ple who live and work in cities — a national pri­or­ity, and invest in inno­va­tions in social and civic infra­struc­ture like pub­lic hous­ing and trans­porta­tion and all types of pub­lic open spaces on and near the water­front. This will be the best invest­ment we can make in light of the unpre­dictabil­ity of cli­mate change. It was amaz­ing how grate­ful peo­ple were that the 2011 revival of East River ferry ser­vice was there to fill in when the sub­ways weren’t run­ning yet.

Do you think the city should build sea gates?

I hope that we will inno­vate in many areas and this might include sea gates. It is going to test the city and state’s abil­i­ties to har­ness a coor­di­nated effort to do all types of envi­ron­men­tal work that is not on the table today, because of per­mit­ting and cur­rent reg­u­la­tions. New York City in all the five bor­oughs needs to raise the level of many of the water­front lands for storm pro­tec­tion and raise crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture in our pub­lic hous­ing, hos­pi­tals, sewage treat­ment and util­ity buildings.

We need to put back and increase the dunes, invest in cogen­er­a­tion and a dis­bursed power and data net­work, and even build new sea gates, salt marshes, planted berms and other ini­tia­tives. This increases the local exper­tise with ris­ing sea lev­els; engi­neers, archi­tects and ecol­o­gists might come up with a range of mea­sures that even the Dutch haven’t tried yet. As impor­tant as sea gates might also be state-of-the-art local energy gen­er­a­tion and data hubs.

Our first inter­view with Claire Weisz took place weeks before Hur­ri­cane Sandy struck New York. That por­tion follows:

Can you tell us about some of the cur­rent projects you’re work­ing on in the city, like the Rock­away project?

The Rock­away project is the archi­tec­tural piece of a mas­ter plan for a very unusual park. It was basi­cally a lit­tle tiny park attached to a very large park­ing lot that was really part of the dunes and was used for dump­ing, from Beach 9th Street to Beach 30th Street.

When you say it was used for dumping…

Peo­ple thought it was derelict land and they’d leave things there. The Rock­aways is so chal­lenged envi­ron­men­tally from threats of storms and also because it’s such a mix of high poverty areas, rel­a­tive trans­porta­tion iso­la­tion, and beau­ti­ful envi­ron­ment. It’s become an afford­able place for peo­ple to move, but it also has real eco­nomic chal­lenges and it doesn’t have all of the ser­vices and ameni­ties. So one of the tar­get parks that the Bloomberg admin­is­tra­tion focused on was to cre­ate a real amenity out there. So, every­one wanted a pool, but they got instead lots of water play, a skate­board park, more play­grounds, a big lawn for con­certs, a foot­ball field.

The idea is that you have a func­tional thing, the main­te­nance office, a com­fort sta­tion, but then you have this space and there’s kind of a dune park over here.

Attached to a com­fort sta­tion is an open air class­room or com­mu­nity meet­ing space — some­thing that can be a shade struc­ture when noth­ing is hap­pen­ing, but that also becomes the beach pavil­ion shared by everyone.

Was the intent to ser­vice mainly just that com­mu­nity? Or to allow other peo­ple from other com­mu­ni­ties to use it as well?

The intent was to actu­ally do some­thing sim­i­lar to what hap­pened in Bat­tery Park City. They cre­ated the best play­ground around and every­one from the whole city showed up there, which is not sur­pris­ing. That was a sim­i­lar goal in the Rock­aways. To open up the neigh­bor­hood. And it’s already hap­pened appar­ently. Peo­ple are show­ing up at the skate park [from all over].

Tell us about another project you’re work­ing on.

Another project — also a water­front park — is called Trans­mit­ter Park. It’s part of the Green­point mas­ter plan, and it ties together…have you seen the zip­per benches?

Down at the Staten Island ferry terminal?

Yes. We were doing the mas­ter plan for the park, and try­ing to fig­ure out the urban design and zon­ing issues of mak­ing peo­ple feel like the esplanade was going to be pub­lic. We started to explore this idea of a bench that then turned and took you somewhere.

Then we real­ized that that idea of the benches had a lot to do with some of the things we felt urban design needed to do. One is encom­pass­ing an envi­ron­men­tal idea of pub­lic — what they shared, what things, like trees, need to be pro­tected, and how to occupy space and make really good relationships.

Out of that mas­ter plan we’re doing one piece of [Trans­mit­ter Park] as a park with Dar Walkovitch of A-com, the land­scape archi­tects. And we’ve designed the pier and you’ll see all of the rail­ing, and the benches, and this pretty inter­est­ing pier. Only half of it’s being built. It’s actu­ally a branch­ing idea. So it’s an idea of sav­ing money actu­ally to do piers, where you only put the pile foun­da­tions, the piers, at what we call pods, and then you have these lit­tle bridges that con­nect the pods.

 And that’s just phase one?

Well, already, you’ll go down if you take the ferry, already pieces of it are being built,  and as each devel­oper devel­ops prop­erty parts of the esplanade will be built. And Bush­wick Inlet Park is also part of that mas­ter plan.

And what else is on the docket for the mas­ter plan? How far into the future does the plan reach?

The whole thing is ongo­ing and it’s hap­pen­ing as we speak. It’s really inter­est­ing to see that pub­lic realm being built one piece at a time. And I have to say, on Trans­mit­ter Park, I went there the other week and there’s this fan­tas­tic new lit­tle cof­fee shop in a place that was a dead end street.

It must be sat­is­fy­ing to see these spaces being occupied.

Com­pletely sat­is­fy­ing to see… peo­ple have all these ideas. What’s also fun about Trans­mit­ter Park is it’s a site for the Nuit Blanche fes­ti­val, so that’ll be out there.

The other big project that we have under con­struc­tion is the san­i­ta­tion garage and salt shed on Spring Street, and that’s also worth talk­ing about.  That’s a big indus­trial, city project to house three garage units, main­tain vehi­cles, store salt, refuel garbage trucks, house san­i­ta­tion per­son­nel. And you can see the steel going up.

So what kind of things are you think­ing of for the san­i­ta­tion garage?

Well the san­i­ta­tion garage is designed and it’s now under con­struc­tion and really that was devel­oped kind of twofold. How to do a beau­ti­ful, but yet, not aggres­sive build­ing; a build­ing that was very calm and could feel like a good neigh­bor. But the excit­ing thing about it is that all the guts of it are kind of shielded by lou­vers which are kind of com­posed to make sub­tle dif­fer­ences on the West side and on the South side.

Is that to dis­guise the build­ing from the rest of the neighborhood?

In a way. In a way it’s to not say in super graph­ics, “here’s a big garage here” towards the neigh­bor­hood, but towards the West Side High­way it’s very appar­ent. But the idea is to not make it look like an office build­ing — to actu­ally make it look like the piece of indus­trial civic archi­tec­ture that it is. [But] there won’t be any pub­lic access to it if you’re not a san­i­ta­tion worker.

We’re try­ing to really enhance the indus­trial qual­ity of it and make peo­ple want to go in, and we hope there will be tours actu­ally, of the trucks and every­thing because there’s a lot of poten­tial for that. And to be able to have kids really access and see how big these machines are, what it takes to kind of clean them. So when they see a garbage truck going down the street pick­ing up recy­cling they’ll have a whole new appre­ci­a­tion for it.

What’s your background?

I grew up in Canada, and I went to the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto for archi­tec­ture. Got my pro­fes­sional degree there. Then, the econ­omy was ter­ri­ble — so basi­cally, on a lark, I decided to go to Los Ange­les. Los Ange­les at that point was an inter­est­ing place to be as an archi­tect. Frank Gehry had just fin­ished his lit­tle house, there was all sorts of dia­logue about down­town LA, and peo­ple were look­ing at city halls as community.

I felt very lucky; I worked for archi­tect Charles Moore at the Urban Inno­va­tions Group and really got inter­ested in the idea of how design and com­mu­ni­ties and kind of new things happen.

So that’s always been a real inter­est, but very much as an archi­tect. I would say at a core I am inter­ested in form, space, light and inhab­it­abil­ity, I’ll call it. I’m inter­ested in archi­tec­ture being the kind of ‘art of people.’

I went back to school at Yale and that’s where I met Mark Yoes, who is my cur­rent part­ner. After I grad­u­ated I worked for Agrest and Gan­del­sonas, who are very inter­ested in…I’ll call it ‘acupunc­ture plan­ning.’ The idea that you kind of can read a city and do cer­tain things at cer­tain points that will change the city more. They’re very anti-master plan. I was very com­pelled by that, so I worked for them. 

What do you think New York needs more of? Just more green spaces, or some­thing com­pletely different?

I think what New York always needs more of is pas­sion­ate, vision­ary sup­port­ers, and essen­tially clients for design, like Friends of the High Line, like Robby Ham­mond, Joshua David, and Rory Price at the Bat­tery, and Betsy Bar­low Rogers.

There are younger peo­ple who get ideas in Jamaica, in Far Rock­away, and see some­thing and they want it to be bet­ter than any­thing in the neigh­bor­hood — whether it’s bet­ter food, bet­ter seat­ing, bet­ter shade, bet­ter wi-fi — on some level I think that’s what’s really fun about New York. There exists an engage­ment in expec­ta­tion, and that’s really what we need more of.

There are so many tal­ented peo­ple who have ideas about how to make things and do things. The other piece is sup­port­ing local tal­ent in the indus­try — peo­ple who make clothes and peo­ple who make rail­ings — and try­ing to find a way to cre­ate afford­able spaces so that peo­ple can make new things.

So there’s no real fixed idea in your head of what New York should be — it’s just sort of a never-ending poten­tial of what could happen?

To me it’s really about the dynamic — this dynamic of say­ing, mak­ing a liv­ing and mak­ing money and doing well — that ambi­tion to cre­ate a busi­ness that’s suc­cess­ful is fan­tas­tic. But, cou­pled with that, we want it to be the BEST inte­rior restau­rant, we want it to be the best… those two things work­ing together, not just one or the other. I think it’s that. Then you get the unexpected.

___

More recent design work from WXY includes a pop­u­lar plan for the devel­op­ment of Pier 40 on the Lower West Side of Man­hat­tan, as shown in this video:

And a plan for the rede­vel­op­ment of the blocks around Grand Cen­tral Ter­mi­nal, as part of the Munic­i­pal Art Society’s new report on the future of East Mid­town:

 

About:

Claire Weisz founded WXY Archi­tec­ture + Urban Design and has focused on cre­at­ing inno­v­a­tive approaches to pub­lic space, struc­tures and cities. She co-founded with Andrea Wood­ner The Design Trust for Pub­lic Space and was its co-executive direc­tor. Claire is cur­rently on fac­ulty at New York University’s Wag­ner School of Pub­lic Ser­vice and a vis­it­ing critic at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto, and she has also taught and lec­tured at Yale Uni­ver­sity, Par­sons’ Grad­u­ate Pro­gram in the School of Con­structed Envi­ron­ments, Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, NJIT and The Pratt Insti­tute. She has served on numer­ous design award and com­pe­ti­tion juries and was co-editor of AD magazine’s “Extreme Sites: Green­ing the Brown­field” issue. Fre­quently cited in the media and pro­fes­sional cir­cles, Claire is a reg­is­tered archi­tect in Cal­i­for­nia, New York and New Jersey.

Por­tait of Claire Weisz by Jes­sica Bruah; all other images cour­tesy: WXY