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Debating Ground Zero: Architects, Planners, Ideas
Anthony
Vidler
The story of architecture’s role following the destruction of the World Trade
Center (WTC) in September 2001 is on the one hand long and extremely complex,
and on the other brief and simple. The long version involves numerous groups
including architects, engineers, planners, developers, public officials at the
national, state and local levels, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey,
the newly appointed Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), public
interest groups including the families of the victims, and many more. The short
version, confirmed by recent events, has held true throughout the difficult and
extended process of planning and design.The short story is that just before the
tragedy, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, under whose auspices the
World Trade Center had been built and managed, had leased the buildings to a
developer, Larry A. Silverstein, who in turn had appointed the architect David
M. Childs, a principal of the office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in New
York to study the renovation and upgrading of the buildings. As the story stands
at present, Childs is still Silverstein’s architect and adviser for planning the
site, has redesigned Building Number Seven, which is now under construction, and
has released his design for the tallest structure on the site, named at some
point during the long story ‘Freedom Tower’. This design is officially credited
as an ‘idea’ provided by architect Daniel Libeskind, ‘given form’ by David
Childs. Childs will probably remain the architect of record for this building,
which will be built if Silverstein recoups enough insurance money. Meanwhile the
Port Authority has efficiently reopened transit stations on the site, and has
pushed ahead in reconstruction below ground level. Other buildings on the site
will be designed, and possibly constructed by architects like Santiago
Calatrava, Jean Nouvel, Norman Foster and others. This is the story that many
critics had assumed would prevail from the outset.
The long story, which will
not be fully documented for some time, offers a different spin on these facts.
It runs like this. Immediately following the disaster, George E. Pataki, the
Governor of New York State, under whose jurisdiction the Port Authority lies,
together with that of Rudolph Giuliani, Mayor of New York, established the Lower
Manhattan Development Corporation to coordinate all aspects of the rebuilding
effort. The Corporation then commissioned six preliminary planning studies from
the New York architectural firm of Beyer Blinder Bell and others, including
architects Peterson/Littenberg. At the public unveiling of these plans in July
2002 there emerged an unexpected groundswell of public opposition, supported by
architects and critics disappointed by the apparently lacklustre nature of the
designs. It was at this moment that it became clear that what was needed was,
rather than a ‘dull’ plan, an image of inspiring architecture, one that would be
fitting to the momentous task of rebuilding, memorializing, and responding
heroically to the attacks – or that was certainly the tenor of the reaction.
Accordingly an ‘ideas’ competition, dubbed an ‘Innovative Design Study’, was
launched in October 2002 by the LMDC, which called for teams of architects,
engineers and planners to put forward their notions of what a reconstructed WTC
would look like. Following a call for proposals, some six teams were selected by
an independent jury out of 406 submissions. To these, the LMDC added a seventh
team, that of Peterson/Littenberg, the original consultants. The six teams
comprised single firms – Norman Foster and Partners, Daniel Libeskind Studio,
and (interestingly enough) Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) – as well as
dramatically new collaborations fabricated for the occasion with names like
THINK Design, United Architects, and the ‘Home Team’ with New York architects
Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and Steven Holl. The results of
this second stage were unveiled in December 2002 with great fanfare in the World
Financial Center Winter Garden adjacent to the site, and public debate began to
assess their merits.The projects were distinguished among themselves by their
identification with one or another modernist avant-garde architectural language,
with the exception of Perterson/Littenberg’s, which was formulated in a
‘thirties-something’ style favoured by the New Urbanists. Norman Foster proposed
twin high-tech towers leaning towards each other at the summit – the ‘kissing
towers’ as they were dubbed, as if the original WTC were engaged in a love-fest.
Meier–Eisenman–Gwathmey–Holl proposed a large-scale grid building, which was
variously described as a waffle-iron or a griddle, but which in its incompletion
also resembled the shards of the WTC façade as they had come to rest on the
ground. This was perhaps the only project seriously to consider the ground plan
of the site, through to the river, as well as refusing, in its sober
abstraction, the high-volume rhetoric of ‘aspiration’ and memorialization common
to the other schemes. The Skidmore team proposed a virtual forest of towers,
each slightly warped with respect to the other, as if a large-scale cornfield
were blowing in the wind. United Architects designed what they described as a
‘cathedral’ with four huge towers bending towards each other above Ground Zero,
to form a Gothic-style crossing in glass and steel. The THINK group proposed
several different schemes, later edited into one, the central motif of which was
an open-lattice tower with various cultural institutions inserted at different
levels. Unkind critics dubbed it the ‘skeleton’. Finally, Libeskind designed an
expressionist complex around the ‘bathtub’ or concrete foundation of the WTC
towers, with the retaining ‘slurry’ wall revealed as a memorial site. Just
before the final judging, the Skidmore Owings & Merrill team pulled out of
the competition, no doubt fearing a conflict of interest with David Childs,
Silverstein’s architect.
In the event two projects were selected by the LMDC for further development –
the THINK Design group’s ‘World Cultural Center’ tower and Libeskind’s dramatic
ice palace called ‘Memory Foundations’. Rumour has it that the committees of the
LMDC favoured the THINK group’s solution to the end, recommending it to the
Governor with near unanimity. The Governor, however, perhaps mindful of the
victims’ families’ need for memorialization over renewal, preferred the
insistent narrative of memory propounded by Libeskind, and proclaimed him the
winner. No doubt his adoption of a Caligari-style language, with angular and
crystalline surfaces spiralling upwards towards a new tower – the Freedom Tower
as he called it – proved especially symbolic of destruction and trauma.
The issue then arose as to what precisely the role of Libeskind’s dramatic
design was to be in the process of rebuilding. After all, the competition was
for ‘ideas’ regarding the planning of the site, not for the eventual architect
of the reconstruction. Silverstein still had his architect, and made it clear
that he intended to keep him; the Port Authority had already begun work to shore
up the foundation walls of the site below ground, work that was already negating
Libeskind’s notion of revealing them for perpetuity. After much legal wrangling
and public and private negotiation, Libeskind was appointed ‘Master Planner’ for
the site, and asked by Pataki to collaborate with David Childs on the design of
the tallest tower indicated in the Libeskind plan. The difficulties of this
‘spirited’ collaboration, as the architects themselves called it, were
enthusiastically documented in the press as the architects wrangled over the
form of the tower. Following various highly publicized battles, a solution was
brokered by Governor Pataki, and released on Friday, 19 December 2003.The
unveiled tower is markedly different from that originally envisaged by
Libeskind, and takes the form of a torqued structure, conceived in collaboration
with the engineer Guy Nordenson, topped by an open lattice containing an
energy-producing wind farm, and a spire that somehow tried to add a Libeskind
stamp to the final effect. Libeskind’s guidelines, in his role of ‘Master
Planner’, had been adhered to, but it was Child’s architecture that finally
prevailed. The final design was, indeed, remarkably similar to that suggested to
Childs immediately after the collapse by architect Richard Dattner, and later
elaborated by Nordenson for a group project sponsored by Herbert Muschamp in the
New York Times Magazine in September 2002. The only remaining question is
whether Pataki will be able to fast-track the construction process in time for
President Bush to lay the foundation stone at the Republican Convention in
August 2004.
Thus, despite all the architectural hype surrounding the process, and the
real (and passionate) involvement by the public in the discussion of
architecture over the last few months, business is as usual in New York. In this
sense, the shortest story of all would tell of the destruction of two gigantic
towers, already in 1964 the all-but extinct dinosaurs of the modern skyscraper
age, and their subsequent rebuilding forty years later, even taller than before,
a rebuilding unthinkable outside the context of the emotional and financial
response to the tragedy.
What, then, of the extraordinary publicity and apparent public interest
accorded architecture during this process? Prepared by the ‘Bilbao effect’, and
by other signature buildings used to rekindle interest in cultural institutions,
the press, followed by the public, seized on the symbolic role of architecture
as an easy way to image and respond to the difficult post-9/11 conditions. And
it is true that architecture, at least for the moment, has had an unprecedented
position on the front page. The more than 100,000 who flocked to the Winter
Garden to view the seven proposals, glittering and translucent behind their
vitrines, like so many mannequins in a department store window, were truly
interested; and certainly public expectations for the winning design to be built
were raised high. Perhaps too high if it is now perceived that the design as
conceived by Libeskind bears little relation to his chosen scheme; if all the
rhetoric that surrounded it, rhetoric of memory, memorial, freedom and light –
supposedly embedded in its forms – were seen to disappear beneath the pragmatism
of developer’s architecture.
To this point Libeskind has played (publicly at
least) his part and backed the scheme, but it is evident that if he had
harboured any hopes of emerging as the architect of record, these are now
dashed, as are any remnants of his original idea. With the ‘Wedge of Light’
having proved unfeasible, the bathtub filled by transit structures and
reinforcement, the ‘spiral’ of towers looking more and more truncated each day,
and the only remaining expression of his angled and chamfered Freedom Tower an
easily detachable ‘spire’ raised solely in order to make this (for a moment) the
‘tallest’ building in the world, he emerges actually and legally as the ‘Master
Planner’ he was appointed to be, rather than the Master Architect he aspired to
be. The loss for architecture is not so much that the final tower will be
without qualities – as a single building it will demonstrate all the elegant
efficiency characteristic of SOM – but that the coherence intimated by
Libeskind’s original design will vanish.
And therein lies the debate: should architecture continue, as in the past, to
give form to single ‘masterpiece’ objects, or is there a role for the
architecture of urban design that might, as also in the past (witness
Rockefeller Center), give shape to neighbourhoods? The conclusion of the WTC
experience would seem to reinforce the former role: the disappointment would lie
in its having, for a brief moment, offered the possibility of testing the
latter.
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