The rebuilding of the World Trade Center site is well underway and now it seems there is a bit of controversy surrounding the way it should look....
The following article is from today's issue of the New York Times Newspaper.
When I was out in New York City a few falls ago, the site was still undergoing the final phases of clean up. In fact on the day I was out there, the city leaders were dedicating a plauque to the British citizens that perished that day and Prince Charles of England and his wife Camilla had just arrived for the dedication. (I even managed to get some video footage of the royal couple that day....).
I cant wait till the area is completed and though the following article discusses the merits of rebuilding the site to honor our "freedom from terrorism", my views will always be that this site should be a memorial and a celebration of all that the greatest nation on earth stands for....I will keep my thoughts to myself on that....for now.
Read on:
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February 19, 2007
Architecture
A Tower That Sends a Message of Anxiety, Not Ambition
By
NICOLAI OUROUSSOFFGround zero has gone through its own kind of war fatigue. With every step forward in the reconstruction process, New Yorkers were asked to buy into the rhetoric of renewal, only to be confronted by images that reflect a city still in a state of turmoil and delusion.
Perhaps if we close our eyes, one might wishfully imagine, it will all just go away.
But the widely anticipated announcement that Gov.
Eliot Spitzer will support the construction of the Freedom Tower may signal an end to any hope that a broad vision — or even a level of sanity — can be restored to a project tainted by personal hubris and political expediency.
The most recent debate over the tower has centered narrowly on real estate values. With the developer
Larry Silverstein set to build six million square feet of office space in three buildings just alongside the Freedom Tower, some have questioned whether it will be possible to lease enough of the $3 billion project at a high enough rate to make it profitable. The tower’s symbolism alone is likely to scare off tenants who will see it as a potential targets for terrorists. The suggestion that we simply pack the building with government offices is almost perversely Strangelove-ian.
Yet the problem is not simply whether enough bureaucrats can be coerced into working there one day; it’s also what the building expresses as a work of architecture. Governor Spitzer may recall the looming presence of the twin towers on the downtown skyline, at once proud and intimidating; the Freedom Tower will have an equally powerful effect on the daily lives of New Yorkers as well as on the city’s image throughout the world. Yet its message will be very different from the old towers.
Hurriedly redesigned more than a year ago after terrorism experts questioned its vulnerability to a bomb attack, the Freedom Tower, with its tapered bulk and chamfered corners, evokes a gargantuan glass obelisk. Its clumsy bloated form, remade by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, vaguely recalls the worst of postmodernist historicism. (It’s a marvel that its glass skin hasn’t been recast in granite.)
Recently cities like Paris, London and San Francisco have held major architectural competitions for towers that will reshape their skylines. All of them drew on an array of ambitious architectural talents; many of those designs pushed technological and structural limits while reimagining the skyscraper as part of a holistic urban vision.
Even in New York, which has lagged behind much of the world in its architectural ambitions over the last decade or so, projects like
Norman Foster’s new Hearst Tower suggest that a higher standard is demanded in the design of our urban structures.
If built, the lamentable Freedom Tower would be a constant reminder of our loss of ambition, and our inability to produce an architecture that shows a genuine faith in America’s collective future rather than a nostalgia for a nonexistent past.
Nowhere is that failure of ambition more evident than in the tower’s base. In a society where the social contract that binds us together is fraying, the most incisive architects have found ways to create a more fluid relationship between private and public realms. The lobby of Thom Mayne’s Phare Tower in Paris, for example, is conceived as an extension of the public realm, drawing in the surrounding streetscape and tunneling deep into the ground to connect to a network of underground trains.
By comparison the Freedom Tower is conceived as a barricaded fortress. Its base, a 20-story-high windowless concrete bunker that houses the lobby as well as many of the structure’s mechanical systems, is clad in laminated glass panels to give it visual allure, but the message is the same. It speaks less of resilience and tolerance than of paranoia. It’s a building armored against an outside world that we no longer trust.
There is no reason to accept this as fate. Although construction has begun on the tower’s foundations, we are still a year or so away from the point that the building will begin to rise. The foundations could even be completed while a process is set in motion to begin rethinking the design. Meanwhile construction could begin on Mr. Silverstein’s towers to the south, which should prove much easier to lease.
Governor Spitzer of course would have to summon the will to venture into one of the most emotionally and politically charged sites in the world less than two months into his tenure. To do so he must first accept that the Freedom Tower’s message is not directed solely at real estate-obsessed New Yorkers but at the world, and that the message it’s sending now is the worst of who we are.
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A good monday to all....
