-Caveat Lector- Nine Lofty Ideals But one WTC plan best meets the needs of New Yorkers
Email this story Printer friendly format Photos http://www.newsday.com/media/photo/2003-01/6119998.jpg Studio Daniel Libeskind (Newsday/Mayita Mendez) STAFF WRITER January 5, 2003 Around the perimeter of the World Financial Center's Winter Garden is the architect's equivalent of the Christmas windows on Fifth Avenue. The storefronts are filled with model cities clad in white and glamorously lit, urban fantasies for the site where the World Trade Center once rose. The city of the future has been outfitted with hanging gardens a quarter of a mile high, a vast glass cathedral, a crowd of skyscrapers that bumps hips at the 60th floor, a museum draped between two lofty latticework towers like a sock caught in the branches of a tree - and more. In one design team's exhibit, three different visions rise up in stately succession through a miniature lower Manhattan, each one descending through a trapdoor in an eerie simulation of what might happen if the new towers met the fate of the ones they are designed to replace. This is fine theater, an exciting showcase of ideas and a marvelous way to get New Yorkers to talk and think about contemporary architecture. It should not, however, be mistaken for a menu of concrete plans. The proposals look highly detailed, thanks to the sophisticated imaginations of the architects and the miracle of computer rendering, but in fact they are quite speculative. The reason for this is that New York has yet to decide what it wants. A city that until now has had little use for the world's pre-eminent architectural thinkers is now treating them like a conclave of seers. Architecture is generally a result of the collaboration between architect and client. Here, we have architects inventing institutions, proposing projects for which there are no clients, visions for which there are no funds, and solutions for which there are no problems. We are asking architects to articulate our needs and desires. They have done so, flamboyantly at times. Daniel Libeskind has produced an elegant, even moving arrangement of low-rise wedges, diagonals and rakish planes. Libeskind's is by far the most soaringly successful of the nine plans, crowned by a skyward-pointing finger enclosing something he calls "Vertical World Gardens," a series of stacked ecosystems reachable by elevator. It's an intriguing idea, but should the tallest man- made structure on the globe be a tower of botany? Maybe it should, but the idea is far too new to sink in by the Jan. 31 deadline for the LMDC to choose one of these proposals. All the designs tackle the unique problem of this site: The fact that whatever gets built at Ground Zero will have to incorporate the recollection of what was there before. The most striking acknowledgment of this is the THINK team's concept of a "World Cultural Center." It's a pair of white latticework ghosts, vaporous traces of the Twin Towers made out of struts and empty space, with a school and a performing arts center suspended in midair. Near the top, a bubble-like museum of some kind would bridge the two towers, mapping the points where the two planes struck. Despite the LMDC's injunction to leave monument-building aside, this project is a concrete representation of memory, a memorial in all but name. THINK's new twin towers would be not office buildings but the effigy of office buildings - sculpture posing as architecture. In a sense, the idea represents a cultural capitulation. Terrorists razed two structures they read as symbols of arrogant empire; we experienced the attack as the murder of thousands of ordinary, non-arrogant, not-imperial people. Why would we voluntarily choose to read it their way instead of ours, memorializing the throng we lost by erecting an empty emblem, a vast, vacant container for our fears? The answer, of course, lies in the central unresolved contradiction of the project: lots of people want to see a tall building or two where the World Trade Center stood, but nobody wants to work there. The logical resolution of that conflict would be a pair of gargantuan lighthouses. This is not some rural cliff we're talking about, but a bustling downtown neighborhood. Most of the architects attempt to suggest what life at street level might be like at the foot of their structures. But the scale of these projects is deceptive. The renderings of Norman Foster's enormous twinned towers show a pleasant glass-and-steel backdrop to a late May idyll in the park, but in real life it will probably feel like a gleaming colossus, standing astride the island's southern tip. The World Trade Center loomed, of course, in a way that sculpted the skyline and diminished the people who scurried in its shadows. There's an inherent contradiction in trying to make a building both tall and neighborly, and many of the proposals wind up belittling the citizens they are meant to serve. From the ground-floor perspective, the United Team's Vertical City, a five-legged beast of a building with the body at the 60th floor looks, quite literally, monstrous. The team led by Skidmore Owings & Merrill offered to build a dense forest of high-rises that would leave the earth beneath it permanently bleak. Another THINK proposal envisions enclosing the equivalent of a small town beneath a great glass canopy, but how would those inside not feel like so many ants in a bell jar? As a counterweight to size, most of the teams include public spaces and ground-level greenery, but the designs suggest that architects don't spend enough time playing catch or piloting strollers. It's remarkable how many of them surround their parks with walls and traffic, or else hoist them in the air, as if there might be something corrupting about making them too easy to get into. The husband-and-wife team of Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg opt for formal gardens in a large, hidden cloister joined to the street by discreet gateways. This is a recipe for a rule-bound, reverential park that might belong in Paris more than in New York, a circle of enclosed, disciplined nature that would require wrought-iron fences and guards with whistles to maintain decorum.Richard Meier's team had another suggestion that discourages boisterous activity: A pair of oblong groves of trees replicating the felled towers' shadows sticks out into the Hudson, wrapping itself awkwardly around the bulk of existing buildings. Those who like a park to be a place to play as well as contemplate might go for THINK's proposal for a Sky Park, a broad swath of elevated greensward stretching from above Ground Zero to a platform overlooking the Hudson River. But imagine if in order to get onto Central Park's Sheep Meadow, all those indolent couples, tireless toddlers, after-school klatches and tai-chi practitioners had to hunt for an escalator up to grass level. Where would you remove your roller blades? Or get a hot dog? How would you retrieve an errant Frisbee once it sailed over the low fence and into the traffic on West Street? Norman Foster doesn't envision walling his park off, but chooses instead to mar its interior with walls. Here, remembrance coexists with recreation. Foster's solution is to leave the footprints of the Twin Towers vacant and mark their perimeter with high steel walls - long, grim, blank facades that would rise massively out of the greenery, tempting graffitists and handball players, but oppressing everyone else. With one exception, what emerges from this gathering of great minds is a disappointing collection of megaliths. Richard Meier's clunky, L-shaped complex of towers joined by aerial bridges even looks like a multilevel Stonehenge. Only Libeskind has thoroughly imagined the way actual people might flow through the space he shapes, how the sensuous and symbolic could mix in their reactions, how differently the space might affect the deliberate pilgrim and the commuter on the run. The architect began his career as a musician, and the attention to rhythm and tempo shows. While the other plans start with the skyline, Libeskind's concept begins below ground, with the sturdy and eloquent foundations of the World Trade Center. That immense hole in the ground, almost certainly the site of a future memorial, is vast and deep enough to contain a great lake of emotions. The actual memorial designed will be selected by competition, but Libeskind has given the site a poetic context. The office towers ring the plaza, making it possible to build them over time, as the market demands, and to diversify their looks. At the center is a pair of public spaces, one an outdoor piazza, the other a plaza enclosed within a great glass box, pointed, gleaming and irregular like an imperfect crystal. This space acts as a portal that leads upstairs to a museum or downward to the "bathtub" and the transit station - giving visitors a choice to go back in time or away by train. Above ground, the jagged shapes accumulate unpredictably, so that the building appears from the ground to be in constant motion - rising, twisting, diving. But each Sept. 11 between 8:46 and 10:28 a.m., the morning sun would pierce the downtown weave of buildings and catch the crystal full in its beam, casting no shadows on the site. Those who know will see; those who don't won't notice. This "Wedge of Light," as Libeskind calls it, is an unostentatious symbol, one that stitches the memory of calamity together with the forgetful activities this new place should welcome: drinking coffee, rushing for a train, dropping a quarter in a street mime's case, blithely ignoring a street-corner preacher's warnings that the end is near. Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc. Jobs | Homes | Cars •How to Subscribe •How to Advertise •Career Opportunities •About Us •Contact Us By visiting this site you agree to the terms of the Newsday.com User Agreement. Read our Privacy Policy. Copyright © Newsday, Inc. Produced by Newsday Electronic Publishing. Forwarded for your information. 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