Sidney P. Gilbert, FAIA   continued from page 1
 

Sidney Philip Gilbert, FAIA		 Sidney’s son, Jay, gave a moving eulogy for his dad and we reprint a portion of it below:
Like the Twin Towers, my dad was tall. Like the Twin Towers, my dad was imposing. And like the Twin Towers, my dad defined the space he was in and, simply through his presence, forced us to check our bearings, to orient ourselves in relation to him. In 1982, my dad wrote a letter of conscience to his profession, expressing his concern for his family’s, his country’s and his planet’s survival. The response was instant and overwhelming and, within months, architects across the country, including some of the movers and shakers, organized themselves into ASR, Architects for Social Responsibility. During the next few years, my dad put his money where is mouth was, often providing gap funding for ASR with money from his private practice. ASR, and then ADPSR, marched, advocated, and educated. They reached out across the Iron Curtain and engaged their professional counterparts as human beings with shared values and a common purpose in preserving life on this planet for their children.
Sidney Gilbert is survived by his wife, Cheryl; son, Jay Coen Gilbert; daughter, Allison Gilbert Weintraub; and two grandchildren, Jake and Dexter. The Board of ADPSR/New York extends its sympathy to Sidney’s family. We will miss his spirit, his enthusiasm and, above all, his style.
Reflections on the Consequences of September 11
by Peter Marcuse
 
Urban Life Will Change
We are all of course trying to come to grips with what the events of September 11 mean, and will mean. It has been a terrible disaster, and the immediate loss of life is incredible. But I think it will also have a major long-term impact on life here, morally, economically, politically — much for the worse.

    There will be major impacts on New York City in particular, and perhaps high-density big cities generally, in the direction of decentralization and further divisions and walls. I would guess a reduction in personal travel and more emphasis on electronic com-munication. Employment patterns will change; hyper-concentra-tions of jobs in service-center-oriented office buildings (and both the high and the low-paying jobs associated with them) will shrink. The benefits of the agglomeration economies that have accounted for the strength of select financial centers will be counter-balanced by new political considerations, in which over-agglomeration is equated with danger. I suspect the global status of at least the cen-tral business district(s) of New York City but perhaps of other glob-al cities will change, as multinational businesses change their spa-tial strategies in the search for security in more outlying areas. The focus will initially be within the same metropolitan regions (e.g. American Express, Lehman Brothers, others, renting — on long term leases — spaces in Jersey City, Stamford, etc.). Many major firms already had large satellite offices in fringe locations, to which they quickly moved on September 11; in some cases deci-sions to move more operations out of New York City to those loca-tions may simply have been accelerated by the attack. The Bank of New York is ". just too concentrated in Manhattan."

    Over time the effects may lead to an even wider dispersal to other regions or urban enclaves. Larger cities will benefit, .smaller will suffer: air connections, for instance, will be comparatively 		strengthened, and protected, among major centers, curtailed among others. The construction of glamorous ever-higher trophy skyscrap-ers will stop. The towers in Kuala Lumpur and Frankfurt have already felt the threat, closing and evacuating the day after the World Trade Center collapse; workers in the Empire State building in New York and the Sears Tower in Chicago are already reported afraid to go up to their offices, At the Sears tower taxis are not allowed to idle at the entrance and lunch deliveries may not be made to offices.

     Urban life will suffer, and suburban life gain. As Paul Krugman, living in the Jersey suburbs, wrote: I "felt perfectly safe on September 11; there are millions of people living and working nearby, but no obvious targets, because there’s no there here." The "there" that isn’t there is an urban center, a city, and fewer will want that, given the trade-offs, than even before. Public spaces in cities will become less public; some, like the plaza before City Hall in New York City or the park at the Federal Courthouse in Boston, will simply be barred for open use, others will be subject to pervasive surveillance, the attractiveness of guarded malls will increase, public buildings will be less freely accessible.

    The social consequence will include the tendency to exacerbate polarization, with those able to move where they live or work out of town doing so, those unable to do so remaining behind. The difference between the two groups will be both income and race related. The polarization will be both between city and suburb and within the city, with the focus of upper-income disproportionately white households concentrating in more tightly controlled citadels and others more and more excluded and segregated, with sharper dividing lines between and among groups. Lay-offs will dispropor-tionately affect those (both high and low end) involved in global-related businesses; those without accumulated resources will be particularly hard hit.

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