| |
|
|
NEW YORK, NY Working on a Building
Daniel Libeskind, the son of Holocaust survivors whose first memorable sighting of the United States was the Statue of Liberty, has been chosen to be the lead architect for rebuilding on the World Trade Center site. Libeskind's proposal featured a tower 1,776 feet tall, for the year of American independence, that would demonstrate "the durability of democracy." The top levels would hold indoor gardens that would be a "confirmation of life." The choice of Libeskind marks a turning point in this most public of architectural competitions. The LMDC has considered tens of thousands of comments received via e-mail and at an exhibition of the design models, and held more than 50 public hearings. A massive town meeting last July rejected six original site proposals, and prompted the new competition that led to Libeskind. --CNN, February 27, 2003 Neil deMause: So what's remarkable to me that we've been through this tremendous process, and have finally arrived at a plan that everyone pretty much agrees sucks. David Gratt: That's not actually true. A lot of architects seem to think that it was the best plan of the ones that were presented - which wasn't really saying much - and that Libeskind is a visionary. Ted Byfield: Architects can describe him or his work as visionary, but what he plans and what gets built will have very little to do with each other. For example, Carl Weisbrod of the Downtown Alliance and Community Board 1's Madelyn Wils are vehemently opposed to retaining this depressed area, or "pit," which was one of the main components of why it was visionary. I don't know that I would say that Libeskind is a visionary, but people really were impressed that the process was able to arrive at a solution that actually looked like something. DG: It was several components. There was the ridiculous "freedom tower" with the greenhouse segment, which is probably impractical and expensive. There's the pit, which he thought was very important so that people see the wall of the "bathtub." There was the circular walkway above street level, to represent people coming from all directions to see the site. And the language that's being used is just shameless. Or shameful. The fact that the tower's going to be 1776 feet tall! TB: It's just abject. This whole heroic discourse is so tiresome. Something that really struck me after September 11 was how cool New Yorkers were. There was something very heroic about their low-key response - it wasn't finger-pointing, it wasn't angry, it wasn't vengeful. That stuff was piled on by people who weren't here, and weren't able to participate in it except by some sort of flag-waving gesture. And so the question for me is: How could you take that actual response of New Yorkers to the events and try to translate that? This is one of the difficulties of the development process. Okay, you had this building that no one really liked, except when they were coming in from Newark Airport and they espied it from afar. And then one day history erupts in the middle of Manhattan - they're gone. And we're posed with this very holistic question: what did we want, anyway? Despite the hype that New York seems to specialize in generating, I don't see any clear or coherent ideas coming out of the city about the shape of the future, or quality of life. On the contrary, this city is really remarkable for its ability to take so many smart people and turn them into a collective numbskull.
The board of directors of the decimated Port Authority met in borrowed offices yesterday, honoring its missing and dead while making plans to recover from the attack on the World Trade Center. A decision on whether to rebuild the complex is not expected for at least a week, officials said, although the leader of a group holding a lease on the property said yesterday he wants to build four 50-story towers on the property. Larry Silverstein, who heads Silverstein Properties, told the Daily News he intends to build four 2.5-million-square-foot buildings on the site, along with a memorial. He said he is still obligated to make lease payments on the land and that his 99-year, $3.2 billion lease gives him the right to redevelop the site. "The people who have inflicted this upon us are clearly out to destroy our way of life," Silverstein said. "It would be a tragedy to allow them their victory." --Daily News, September 21, 2001 TB: One thing that's so strange about this is that two 110-story buildings can be decimated, but somehow the ghosts of the buildings remain - all the financial, legal, imaginary apparatus that supported them. Everything changed on 9/11 - except for Larry Silverstein's lease, except for Westfield's lease, except for Marriott's lease. People were surprised when they finally rolled out those first plans in July 2002, because it said "11.6 million square feet of office space, and 500,000 square feet of hotel, and so many square feet of retail." Which, by the way, was the expansion of Westfield's initial space. They had maybe 250,000 square feet, but they had the option to expand it, and on September 10th, 2001, they had announced the plan - no joke - to roof over the World Trade Center plaza. DG: I missed that. TB: Yeah, a lot of people missed that. They certainly didn't run around advertising it after the fact. Anyway, we've heard all this vaporizing about big ideas, but when you look at the basic program elements that defined those plans, it was all stipulated by the Port Authority's deals with Silverstein and Westfield. The state and the city could have gotten together with the insurance companies and Silverstein, and done what governments often do to individuals, which is grab them by the collar and say, "You will do this. Now." And sat down in a room and said: We have a problem. Something needs to be built. We need to come up with an equitable deal for all, but this process is going to need to be open, because Silverstein is not the captain of the 21st century. But no.
The state's urban development corporation created a powerful agency yesterday to rebuild lower Manhattan and distribute much of the federal aid for its reconstruction. The new Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corp. will manage all aspects of revitalizing Manhattan south of Houston St. Gov. Pataki and Mayor Giuliani created the new agency, although the exact powers of the joint city-state effort have yet to be spelled out. But it will generally oversee transportation and infrastructure improvements and attempt to stop the financial hemorrhaging of businesses affected by the terrorist attacks. --Daily News, November 6, 2001 TB: In fact, the really relevant organization, the one that should have been handling this, was the Department of City Planning. DG: I can tell you, having worked in the planning department, that you would think that that would be an agency where people are really looking 20, 30, 50 years toward the future. When I was there, under the Giuliani administration, it was really discouraged. The thrust of the department was to expedite things for the developers - developers are the ones that have the money, and they made a lot of money so they must be smart. So we should be facilitating what they want to do, instead of doing silly things like saying, "We think it's a bad idea to put an office building here, this should be housing." TB: There was a lot of dishonesty of who was king of the sandpit. The LMDC was unveiled with great pomp and circumstance and outfitted with some usual suspects. But the process was absolutely driven by the Port Authority. No one from the various redevelopment authorities came out and said, "We have a logical mess: there are people who want everything built right now, but then it would also make sense to do it very slowly." A properly political statement in which you acknowledge all the different constituencies and their needs and their desires, and say, so what do we do? Instead there was this artificial partitioning. The real-estate developers were loitering in the background. Silverstein was aggressive, passive, belligerent, and peaceful, depending on what time of day it was. The Port Authority was hiding behind his skirts, and he was hiding behind theirs, and the LMDC was trying to pretend that it was in control of the process. Bloomberg had largely been shut out, because Pataki and Giuliani were convinced that Mark Green was going to win the mayoral race. One of the reasons that the LMDC is so unaccountable to the city was that those two Republicans decided they didn't want one of those messy Democrat types having any say over that money. So they cut the city out of it. So city residents ended up having to express themselves through these different self-organized groups like Civic Alliance, which was mostly the transportation and logistics geeks, run by the Regional Plan Association. And then New York New Visions, which was the sort of artsy-fartsy black-wearing, coiffed types. And then the most tragic of the three was Imagine New York, run by the Municipal Arts Society: they were genuinely populist, and genuinely polyvocal in their approach. They put together these beautiful works and said: "We're not making any recommendations at all, but here are the 50 main things that people said - people from upstate, downstate, the city - every walk of life, rich, poor, here's what they say." But there was no way to translate that - or no will to translate that - into a plan that could interface with the bureaucracy. ND: Do you know what some of the things were? TB: It was a contradictory hodgepodge. The first thing everyone was saying was they want open waterfront, and access to the waterfront. That's a really great idea - and knock over Battery Park City? They want an effortless, seamless transportation hub. And then you want a lot of green. So you want a transportation hub in a park on the water - can you spell "homeless camp"? Please. You have to acknowledge where this is, and how that kind of environment would be used. So it isn't entirely fair to say that the technocrats fucked up, because the people didn't have any idea either, other than a lot of contradictory beautiful ideas. ND: But shouldn't it be the job of the technocrats to pull together the ideas, and come up with something that at least hits a few of the main ones? TB: They were all playing this weird, delicate game of trying to trade input for entree. No one wanted to upset Alexander Garvin, because he in theory was king of the process - because he was the LMDC's urban planner! ND: It's still remarkable to me that if there's anything the public has both a legitimate, overwhelming interest in, it's what happens to the Trade Center site. Yet this thing is winding up being decided by such a small group of people that isn't even the usual unaccountable elected officials. It's people like Garvin. TB: And real dark horses like Westfield, an Australian mall operator whose claim to this site was somewhere between two years and six weeks old.
The rebuilding of the World Trade Center area carries with it more challenge and responsibility than perhaps any urban development in history. It must provide a spiritual response to tragedy, reaffirm our political and economic freedom and meet the needs of the marketplace while aspiring to the highest architectural standards, environmental sustainability and economic justice. A series of public open spaces designed by our greatest artists and architects can honor the memories of those lost and express our hurt and our hopes. --Former Battery Park City Authority chair Richard Kahan, Daily News, November 6, 2001 DG: There's a general acknowledgment that the state of architecture in New York City is very poor, and supposedly one of the reasons is because we don't have enough high-profile architects designing in the city, because the regulatory process is so difficult to manage. TB: It doesn't have anything to do with the fact that it costs several hundred million dollars to build a building - it's all the regulators. It's the gummint! DG: That's what they say. If we just let Meyer and Gehry do what they want where they want it, we'd be in an Elysian Fields of buildings. It'd be beautiful and the seas would be made out of pink lemonade, and everybody would be an architecture expert. So I think this was the big opportunity to get the big architects involved. All the big architects obviously want to be involved, because there's a lot of money to be made. And then it's "Oh, it's Joe Dickweed! He's the one that built the new tower on the World Trade Center! What a genius!" And the thing about big-time architects is they're less about building buildings than they are about being really clever. TB: It's a profession that operates largely through a modern form of slavery. You go to school. In order to succeed in school you need to apprentice yourself to one of the big teachers there. Part of that apprenticeship will involve tacitly working in their offices or developing projects for them, which will then be commercialized. "I happen to be working on this project - maybe it would interest you, my beloved students." And then they spend the next between five and 30 years working in a big firm. DG: Doing bricking. TB: It's a very medieval profession in a lot of ways, and I don't use that in the usual respectful way that I use "medieval." It's very hard to retain your integrity in that environment, to the point where you'd actually be considered as a candidate to deal with a project of any size in New York. ND: I assume that one reason architects are always trying to outclever each other, is because they're used to working for people who want their corporate headquarters and want something that's going to stand out. DG: What happens is people like to feel that they're special, and they're being made a genius. There are two contrasting poles in New York: One is in real estate everybody wants to be first to be second - if you put up a big boxy building, everybody wants to do that because that's successful. On the other hand, if you are a big company, and you're building a name building, you want to have an architect in tow who you can be a patron to, because then that makes you a genius also. I was working in the Staten Island planning office, and somehow Peter Eisenman got involved in working on the ferry terminal. And he was kowtowing to Guy Molinari, the borough president at that time, and you could see that Guy loved it. Here was this world-famous architect who was like "Yes, Guy, we can do this. What a great idea, Guy." People love that kind of stuff. There's a huge difference between good architecture and famous architects. And people confuse the two all the time.
Thousands turned out yesterday for an up-close look at the official World Trade Center rebuilding plans and delivered a passionate message to the designers: You failed, try again - and this time, listen to us.
More than 4,000 people, representing all 50 states and six foreign countries, gathered at the Jacob Javits Convention Center to share their vision for rebuilding. The plans repeatedly were characterized as lackluster and unacceptable. And the crowd erupted in applause when giant overhead television screens displayed the No. 1 complaint: "Schemes are not ambitious enough - buildings are too short. Nothing here is truly monumental. Looks like Albany." --Daily News, 7/21/02 TB: There were a lot of discrepancies in those initial plans. In looking back at them a couple months ago, I noticed that in one set of materials, north of the site there were two 70-story buildings that don't exist. They were physically fabricated into the models. ND: How do you not notice that there isn't a 70-story building there? TB: I didn't at the time, and I don't think that anyone else noticed it. That indicated to me that people were not actually looking at these objects. They had this hazy, misty-eyed idea of what they would become, and what they would mean. DG: When the LMDC and the Regional Plan Association did Listening To The City they hired this company called America Speaks, which runs these "town halls." And basically it was this woman... TB: Carolyn Lukensmeyer. DG: ...who was reading survey questions to 4,000 people at the Javitz Center and asking them to respond. Everybody had their little clickies. So they would ask a question, and you would press your clicky, and then she would say, "Well, we have 52% women here and 48% men, and that's exactly the national average! Everyone give yourselves a big hand for that!" We were supposed to cheer demographic information. TB: It was frightening. Hard-core manufacturing consensus. DG: And after they got through the demographic stuff, they were all leading questions. TB: How much do you like this, on a scale of 9 to 10? Would you (a) strongly support, (b) support, (c) mildly support, or (d) I'm a fuckhead? I spent a lot of time checking in at different tables to try to get a sense of what was going on. Toward the end, they had these more freeform "include your comment" things, and people were being very explicit in recognizing that this was a stage-managed process. They were writing: "This is bullshit, we can tell what answers you want. This is not what we would have said." I found five or six tables in a row where this was going on. DG: And that never showed up the material that they sent out afterwards. TB: Somehow not. ND: But still, the question is, does it matter? At what point can you just say, "Okay, we have to go through the song and dance and make it look like we're having a public process." TB: It did matter. After that, the LMDC and the Port Authority made goddamn clear that they'd never put themselves in that situation again.
Yesterday morning at the Winter Garden in Lower Manhattan, New York City received a gift of a kind it has almost never received before. At the invitation of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, some of the world's greatest architects presented plans for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site, plans of a truly visionary scale. What the city witnessed yesterday was a seminar in architectural thinking, a master class in making sense of space, function, civic commitment and public emotion. New York owes a debt of gratitude to all the architects and planners who participated, not only for their imagination but for how deeply they have taken to heart the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. --New York Times editorial, December 19, 2002 ND: I remember when they had the big public unveiling of the second round, with the more inventive models, I turned on the TV news and unanimously the public comments were "Nope, time to go back to the drawing board a third time - this doesn't work either." But well, no, this is what you're gonna be stuck with, so we're gonna pick one. DG: It's like they gave up. ND: It's this theatrical performance of a process - we're going to set up little models, and we're going to set up other little models, and eventually we'll pick one and say it's the winner. It's like a reality show. TB: It did take the form of politicians and pillars of society having these kind of shadow plays. It would have been quite possible for the business-as-usual aspects of the city to say, "We've got a problem, we'll solve it. Oh, we'll have a public comment period like we always do." But there was this perceived need to produce this spectacle of input that was never about the substantive terms, it was always about the window dressing. But, really, your basic Joe and Jane Sixpack on the street are not transportation geeks. They don't want to know about cabling, sewers, tracks, how long a platform can be. So most of the debate was about what will it look like from where you can't even see it. Are you going to spend the rest of your life in a helicopter looking down on this thing? ND: It's remarkable just in terms of spectacle, then, that they did such a bad job. They could have done focus groups and come up with what people wanted in it, and then come up with a bunch of stupid models that people would have liked - and then just changed it later, because it doesn't matter anyway. Instead they came up with first a bunch of things that everybody thought was so drab that they were completely worthless, and then a bunch of things that people thought were so stupid that they were completely worthless. I think a lot of people were astounded that anyone could come up with such bad ideas. TB: I was really impressed by the big number sign. ND: It was like a big tic-tac-toe board in the sky. TB: And also the ugly skeletons in which were suspended globs that commemorated where the planes hit the towers. This is the kind of stuff you get when you've done a few too many bong hits. That's why God invented tomorrow morning, for you to go back and review those ideas before you put several hundred thousand dollars into developing them. ND: So what would you guys like to see there? DG: To me, a lot of the problems with all the proposals that were made was that they were far, far too complicated. You don't need to put up a 100-story building with lateral elevators to move people across six or eight blocks of floor plate because you're building something that looks like it's giving terrorists the finger. The buildings were not terribly attractive to begin with, and the plaza was kind of a disaster, and the surrounding buildings weren't good. But the towers have been an icon for a long time - and now that they're gone, they're more of an icon. So I continue to be a proponent - that nobody ever talks to - of rebuilding the towers. And looking at the original site plan and seeing how it could be improved. TB: Basically say: the fabric of the city has grown up around this, there were flaws that were revealed through the 30 or so years that it existed. Work with what we know, and retain some sort of organic-- DG: This is the World Trade Center, but it's better, because the plaza is livable, and the buildings around it are livable, and you're still left with the massive towers - but now the massive towers mean a little bit more than when they were just big and ugly. Now they're big and ugly and they speak a little bit more towards, fill in the blank: resilience, patriotism, whatever. TB: And you would literally rebuild them. DG: Yeah, I think so. TB: This is interesting, because you're arguing for an approach to the problem of lower Manhattan that involves no vision. Not no vision as in the absence of vision, like "Oh gosh, I didn't think to have one," but rather a conscious choice to say, "Screw it. Screw all the puffery, screw all the symbolism." The overly conscious, overinflated prefab symbolism. DG: The parts of the Pentagon that were destroyed were rebuilt. And great cities of Europe were rebuilt after World War II. So why isn't that good enough for New York? Why do we have to go from something that people had a relationship with that grew fonder over the years - the World Trade Center, sure, it's the box that the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building came in, but it was a known entity. TB: I like this. First of all, to the extent that I could be personally offended by any of this, I was personally offended by this repeated claim that this process was unparalleled in all of world history. No, Dresden never had to rebuild. Rotterdam never had to be rebuilt. No part of London needed to be rebuilt, no parts of Berlin needed to be rebuilt. Come on, people. The event itself was absolutely remarkable - I don't know how many hundreds of millions of people saw it in real time. The pressure of this spectacle was unbelievable. And the specter of the cloud, and the carnage and horror, erupting in the middle of Manhattan for a few days. But then a week later, what? Even from a few blocks away you could hardly tell anything had happened. DG: Well, that's what's so interesting about this. It's not like most of a city was being obliterated, and people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps rebuilding it brick by brick. This was a very small sector of a very large city that was excised. TB: You could even use the phrase "surgical strike." DG: And you go down there now, and some of the surrounding buildings are in distress, but I think most of them are going to stand. They reopened the Millennium Hotel. The Bell Tel building on the north side of the site, that was an art deco explosion, and that's being painstakingly put back together. So soon we'll be at this point where we have this large site with nothing in it, and business as usual surrounding it. And there's nothing about it that suggests what had happened. TB: Except for this very strange, very managed eruptive social process. Immediately in the wake of this, literally before the buildings had even come down, already the architects and urban planners were-- DG: They were salivating. TB: I will grant you that. Structurally, it brought out some of their worst traits. But I have a hard time castigating people en masse. People are concerned, doing what they can. So Red Cross shows up, and then the architects and urban planners show up. Fine. That's good. This is as things should be. But through this process of self-organization, we ended up with about three blobs of these people. And then no sooner had they settled on Libeskind that everyone was like, "Right, what the fuck ever, end of discussion." DG: That's what got me - they picked this plan, and there wasn't any debate after it. There wasn't any debate about whether it was a good idea or a bad idea. Like, this is the best one of the ones that was submitted, so okay! TB: They should have filled in the hole and let it lie fallow for seven years. The magical Judeo-Christian seven years, and just had a field. DG: I'm not complaining about that either, because this whole process has moved along at a somewhat ridiculous speed. There are all kinds of examples where letting a field lie fallow has been better than jumping in. In Soho, Robert Moses wanted to blow through with an expressway, and that didn't work - and then nobody could figure out what to do in Soho. As the manufacturing left, and the artists kind of moved in, it was kind of a dead area. Now, after years of benign neglect and huge changes in local and world economies, Soho is fantastically successful - people want to live on Soho, there are places to eat in Soho, and that was really a neighborhood that nobody knew what to do with. And it was just best that nothing happened. There's definitely a sense of immediacy about what's happening at the World Trade Center, and it's really detrimental to what will ultimately happen there, because it's not giving people enough time to think and reflect. ND: So what do you think is going to happen now? DG: Shit if I know. They seem really determined to make good on the Libeskind plan. His studio's getting like $16,000 a day to finalize the plan by the end of the year. The dominoes are starting to line up. Which is not to say that the final development will look anything like this plan, but it seems to me it's starting with a very unfortunate base to go forward. TB: In my more cynical moments, I think they chose Libeskind because they realized there was going to have to be a hole in the ground anyway for several years to come, so why not call it Libeskind? It's not actually a hole - it's a hole that an architect thought of, for symbolic reasons! DG: It's important to stand in front of a backing with a slogan on it. TB: Jobs and growth. Jobs and growth. DG: Patriotism. We love the president. DG: I took classes with Bobby Wagner, who was Mayor Wagner's son, when I was in school. He was head of the planning department for a couple of years under Koch, and under his watch some terrible buildings went up. In class we were like, "What the fuck were you thinking?" And he said, "You should have seen the sell job that Philip Johnson did on us. We bought it all. Looking back on that, I never would have done that, but man, he could have sold ice to Eskimos!" 
| |
|
