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Martin Filler on Architecture
WHAT IS ALL the cheering about? To judge from the rapturous reception of the latest proposal for Columbus Centre, a mixed-use, pretentiously spelled, high-rise development on New York's Columbus Circle, one would think that a major victory for urban design in America has been won. After fifteen years of successive schemes for the site, which differed one to the next only in their degrees of awfulness, we now have the ultimate version by David Childs, chairman since 1990 of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. There is no cause for celebration.
The most recent occupant of the coveted property on the west side of the traffic roundabout between Manhattan's West 58th and 60th Streets-at the chaotic confluence of Broadway, Eighth Avenue, Central Park West, and Central Park South-was the demolition-worthy New York Coliseum. Completed in 1956 according to the designs of Leon and Lionel Levy, and under the patronage of Robert Moses, this banal late-modernist ensemble-a seven-story-high, white-- brick-clad exhibition structure joined to a twenty-five story office slab-proved that the legendary master builder had lost his touch by then. As Norval White and the late Elliot Willensky wrote in their indispensable AIA Guide to New York City, "Long before [the Coliseum] was outclassed by the Javits Convention Center, it had been relegated to the has-been stage: obsolete the minute it opened."
Yet the land beneath that white elephant is a very tasty morsel indeed, ready for years to be devoured by every commercial real-estate developer within pouncing (and financing) distance. It is poised between the northern limits of midtown and just south of the bustling Lincoln Center area-the latter the scene of the most concentrated and expensive residential construction in Manhattan over the past decade. Thus a revitalized Columbus Circle has the potential for transforming an entire district of the city, especially the stubbornly seedy blocks that lie just to its west.
Created amid the ungainly collision of Manhattan's relentless grid plan and the old diagonal Indian path that became Broadway, Columbus Circle was given its name and its focal feature in 1892, when Gaetano Russo's statue of the explorer was perched atop a column to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of his cruise to the Bahamas. Ever since, this pizza-shaped piazza...