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ARCHITECTURE REVIEW

ARCHITECTURE REVIEW; Greening a South Bronx Brownfield

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January 23, 1998, Section E, Page 33Buy Reprints
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The Getty Center is finished, the Guggenheim Bilbao branch is done, the competition to design the Museum of Modern Art's expansion has ended with the choice of a graceful plan. After this cluster of high-profile projects, architecture deserves a breather. Here's a breath of fresh air: Maya Lin's design for the Bronx Community Paper Company. A scale model and drawing for this thoughtful, idealistic design are now on view at the Urban Center in a crisply installed show presented by the Municipal Art Society.

Low-rise, low-down, planned for a gritty, out-of-the-way location, this project may never earn a stellar place on the international circuit of must-see contemporary architectural attractions. That's fine. Ms. Lin probably got stardom out her system by the time she was 21, when she designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, still one of the most visited places of our time. And her new project grapples with a more substantial set of issues than landmarks usually address: urban infrastructure, community rebuilding, the survival of the planet -- that sort of thing.

This project is a model exercise in cleaning up the rust belt. It is designed for a 26-acre tract of the Harlem River Rail Yards, a triangular plot of land at the southern tip of the Bronx. The Triborough Bridge slices through the site, which was abandoned in 1971. Planners use the dismal term brownfield to describe this type of site: a former industrial area, often with polluted ground.

Two agencies have collaborated to create the paper mill: the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nationwide environmental advocacy organization, and the Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association, a group that promotes economic development in the South Bronx. Trees and money. Green and green. Often, the two forces are depicted as adversaries. This project seeks to ally them.

The plant would recycle almost 300,000 tons of wastepaper annually, roughly a quarter of that generated by New York City, producing more than 200,000 tons of newsprint for the city's publishers. It would create at least 400 permanent jobs and yield about $30 million in annual tax revenue. Trees, featured prominently in the landscaping around the plant, are intended to symbolize the 3.4 million trees spared by the recycling. Plainly visible from cars passing over the bridge, the trees would also signal the sprouting of economic growth in a notoriously depressed part of town.

Sponsors of the $370 million project are negotiating with potential investors. They hope to break ground this fall and complete construction in 2000.

Ms. Lin's design is visually spare, conceptually rich. Housed in a complex of four aluminum-clad sheds, two or three stories high, the plant is split in two at the point where the bridge crosses overhead. One section contains equipment for de-inking and pulping waste paper. The other, connected by a metal bridge, houses the paper mill, along with storage for finished rolls of newsprint.

The fanciest bit of design work occurs at the plant entrance, where Ms. Lin creates a de Stijl-like composition from roof planes of different dimensions and heights. This contains the plant's offices. An outdoor stair of concrete, unsupported from beneath, leads to the entrance and, up another flight, to offices on the second floor. Facing the stair is a wall of cascading water, similar to the waterfall at the rear of Paley Park on East 53d Street in Manhattan but enclosed behind glass. A tall exhaust stack, rising beyond, is also encased by glass.

These elements are at once formal, functional and symbolic. Air heated in the glass stack powers the building's cooling system. Cool air drawn from the water wall circulates in the offices. The water itself, treated gray water from the Wards Island sewage plant, is used in the recycling. Energy is also saved by the use of skylights and louvered clerestories, which admit natural light and ventilation throughout.

Ms. Lin, who studied architecture at Yale, has worked here with a firm of project architects, HLW International. She describes herself as a designer or an artist rather than an architect. Many of her works fall into the category of public art. Her design projects, for example her interior of the Museum for African Art in SoHo, tend to fall outside stylistic genres. Deliberately or not, however, her Bronx design recalls the work of Charles and Ray Eames, designers whose work also straddled disciplines.

Asked to define the boundaries of design, Charles Eames replied, ''What are the boundaries of problems?'' In the famous Case Study House they designed for themselves in Pacific Palisades, Calif., in 1949, the Eameses faced the problem of building low-cost housing for the postwar suburb. Their solution was a classic modern machine in the garden, a steel frame, inserted with panels of glass and wood, set in towering eucalyptus. To the eye, the house offered a happy reconciliation of nature and technology, achieved at one-fifteenth the cost of a traditional masonry house.

Nearly 50 years later, Ms. Lin's clients face a different set of problems. Suburbanization has drained parts of the city of people, jobs and stability. The Machine -- industrial production -- has been exported overseas. Landfills are full. Clean water and air turn out not to be limitless. Nature can no longer be treated simply as scenery.

Solutions to these problems do not reside within the realm of visual imagination. Without her clients' experience in economic and environmentally sustainable growth, Ms. Lin would be hard put to solve them. She operates, rather, at the place where visual metaphor and material reality intersect.

Ms. Lin wants the building to send the message that the forest is now urban. It's the newspaper you are reading, and millions like it, there for the harvesting each day. The trees planted outside the mill would be reflected in its aluminum walls, and echoed by the rhythm of the steel columns inside. Naturally, a forest should have a waterfall. And if that lovely cloud happened to come from a smokestack, at least this green machine would make it easier to breathe.

Maya Lin's design for the Bronx Community Paper Company will remain on view at the Urban Center, 457 Madison Avenue, near 50th Street, through Feb. 6.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section E, Page 33 of the National edition with the headline: ARCHITECTURE REVIEW; Greening a South Bronx Brownfield. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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