Public Works: Reflecting on 15 Years of Project Excellence for New York City

Reviewed by Fran Leadon

AIA Center for Architecture

“Public Works: Reflecting on 15 Years of Project Excellence for New York City,” was originally scheduled for viewing at the AIA Center for Architecture, on LaGuardia Place, until April 4, but closed early because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Too bad: The show was tiny, but showcased a big idea.

In 1996, during Rudy Giuliani’s first term as mayor, the city created the Department of Design and Construction (DDC) in order to unify construction programs that had previously been scattered between the Transportation, Environmental Protection, and General Services departments. In 2004, under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the DDC started a program called “Project Excellence” (also, confusingly, referred to as “Design and Construction Excellence.”) The AIA’s show was a survey of that innovative program.

Project Excellence works by tweaking the city’s usual procurement procedures: Instead of open bidding, every year the DDC selects a group of “Quality-Based” architecture firms, which over the years have included nARCHITECTS, WXY, Deborah Berke Partners, Rice + Lipka, Allied Works, Andrew Berman, BKSK, Smith-Miller + Hawkinson, and many others. (In late March many participating architects received a letter from the DDC ordering them to stop work because of the COVID-19 outbreak, a controversial decision that, should it stand, will prove especially injurious to small firms that rely on city contracts.)

The AIA’s exhibition offered a quick survey of the Excellence program’s impact on the city’s built environment. Libraries, firehouses, police precincts, city offices, courthouses, theaters, cultural centers, garages, sheds, athletic complexes, homeless shelters, and health clinics were listed prosaically on the wall. Twenty-two of the projects were described in one image each, with brief accompanying text. The space was so small it was difficult for more than two or three people to view the exhibition at the same time, an arrangement that, ironically, would have been ideal during this period of social distancing.

The stars of the show were the forty branch libraries (nineteen of them in Queens) that the DDC has completed in the last fifteen years. Despite well-publicized problems, those libraries have greatly impacted communities throughout the five boroughs. Steven Holl’s Hunters Point Library, for instance, is filled with natural light and provides patrons with majestic views of the East River. (Acoustically, there is room for improvement: “This is the loudest library I’ve ever been to in my life,” one Rebecca H. complained on Yelp.) Marpillero Pollak’s Elmhurst Community Library, which is the midst of a vibrantly diverse neighborhood—Pollak’s website mentions that the library’s patrons speak 57 languages—tripled the space of the 1904 branch library it replaced and employs glass cubes and bright colors to winning effect. WORKac’s Kew Gardens Hills Library, which extended and spatially clarified an existing library, has a fuzzy green roof and a welcoming façade. Those projects, and the program’s many other libraries, are obvious improvements over the grim “Lindsay boxes” of the late sixties and early seventies. (Not everyone, it should be said, dislikes those fusty old fortresses of concrete and drywall: photographer Elizabeth Felicella, for one, can’t get enough of them.)

Unfortunately, in classic Gotham style, delays and cost overruns have hog-tied many of the DDC’s most ambitious projects. The Hunters Point Library took over a decade to build; the Elmhurst Community Library took fifteen years and cost $32 million. Construction of the Kew Gardens Hills Library was a “full-fledged disaster,” New York Magazine critic Justin Davidson wrote in 2018, a fiasco in which “forms burst, walls bulged, and section after section had to be patched up or started again.” 

The tapping of good architects did not, apparently, prevent the tapping of bad contractors. And so the DDC recently launched a reboot, “Design and Construction Excellence 2.0,” which, among other things, aims to improve delivery of projects by giving contractors more incentives to wrap things up on-time and on-budget. The DDC’s Excellence program isn’t perfect, but it has always been difficult to build community-minded projects in New York. “Building for NYC is hard,” Laura Boutwell wrote in a pithy Google review. “DDC does a good job.” That about sums it up.

The AIA’s exhibition was a good introduction to an ambitious (if flawed) initiative, but was too abbreviated to adequately capture the projects, let alone to evaluate the success or failure of the Excellence program. Given the overall quality of the projects on display, one longed for a more expansive exhibition that might have included models and drawings. But the best way to see the work, of course, isn’t to stare at the AIA’s walls but to visit the buildings, especially the libraries, in person. And eventually, once the pandemic passes and the city reopens, you can.

Fran Leadon is the author of Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles, published in 2018 by W. W. Norton. He is Associate Professor at the City College of New York’s Spitzer School of Architecture.