Libeskind wins

It was a close-run thing, but Studio Daniel Libeskind has won the competition to design the new World Trade Center site. Today was probably the biggest day of his career, but he got there not through shameless self-puffery, as some rival architects have been sniping in the press, but rather through a tireless commitment to New York and its people. No matter what you think of the plan, there's no doubt that Libeskind's heart is in the right place: everybody from the family members of the 9/11 victims to New York state governor George Pataki has been impressed by Libeskind's dedication to genuine dialogue.

Even if the genuinely revolutionary plan was not, in the end, chosen, the process by which Libeskind's victory was achieved was exemplary, and will surely set the standard for any kind of major urban planning commission, anywhere in the world, for the foreseeable future. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the WTC site and which is notoriously opaque when it comes to development decisions, ended up being an integral part of the most genuinely consultative and democratic architectural process any major city has ever seen. Given the very high standard of many of the shortlisted plans, I think that the ultimate reason that Libeskind won was that he was most attuned to the process, and most willing to present his ideas as a work in progress, something which could and should reflect the views of all the stakeholders in the site, and not just his own ego.

As Lou Tomson, the president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, said during the announcement ceremony today, the plan was "born out of tragedy but forged in democracy". The LMDC painstakingly sifted through tens of thousands of comments from members of the public, not in lip service to the ideal of public consultation, but as a necessary part of the process for deciding what would ultimately happen on the WTC site. New Yorkers now have ownership of the winning plan, which was definitely one of the most popular.

The fact that so many people really like the Daniel Libeskind plan is surprising to me, an Englishman who well remembers the furor over his proposed addition to the Victoria & Albert museum in London. But, of course, this is different: Libeskind is not destroying anything that anybody loves, and bold new buildings have much more of a place in New York than they do in London. As mayor Michael Bloomberg noted today, the construction of Libeskind's spire will mark the tenth time in history that the tallest building in the world has been built on the island of Manhattan.

What's more, the Libeskind plan is one which repays careful attention to detail – something New Yorkers have been giving all of the proposed designs. Look at the way, for instance, in which he neither buried West Street nor allowed it to interfere with the memorial setting on which it borders: by bringing the memorial down 30 feet below grade, the cars on the highway are both out of sight and out of earshot to those in the memorial zone.

Libeskind also understood something which was lost on Norman Foster: that this was a site-use competition more than it was an architecture competition. Lord Foster spent most of his presentation in December talking about his new skyscraper – something that would probably never be built. Libeskind, on the other hand, concentrated on site use, articulating a powerful area for a memorial (to be designed by others) and placing key buildings along reconstructed Greenwich and Fulton streets.

The center of his plan – and the new epicenter of Lower Manhattan, once the plan is realised – is the crossroads of those two streets. It will be one a great public space, ranking alongside St Mark's in Venice, rather than the grey and windswept Austin Toobin Plaza that most of us remember from the World Trade Center of old. John Whitehead, the LMDC chairman, called it "one of the world's most majestic crossroads," and the Wedge of Light, to its northeast, "a 21st Century piazza for New York City and the world". Opposite the Wedge of Light, to the southwest, will be the memorial museum and the Park of Heroes: something Libeskind has glossed in his plan as green space, but something which the designers of the memorial have a lot of room to play with. To the northwest will be a gleaming new cultural center, with a 2,200-seat auditorium, abutting the great 1,776-foot spire. To the northeast will be a hotel and convention center, while to the southeast will be a grand new transit hub, which will eventually link lower Manhattan directly to airports to the east and west.

The transit hub will be a Grand Central Terminal for the 21st Century: filled with light, even well below ground. The low ground level of the memorial will help immeasurably here, as will Libeskind's ingenious idea of building the memorial's north wall out of glass. It might be stained, it might be etched, it will certainly play a central role in the memorial, but it will also act as an illumination for commuters on the other side. (To the south side of the memorial zone will be a second wall, this time opaque, which will also be part of the memorial competition. And the western wall will be the great slurry walls of the original World Trade Center, which withstood unimaginable trauma and still prevented the Hudson River from flooding Ground Zero. Part of them will be excavated to Libeskind's originally-proposed depth of 70 feet: bedrock.)

The plan is centered on the memorial square. The photo at left, looking northeast from more or less the Wall Street Journal offices in the World Financial Center, is of the new model, and shows the memorial museum cantilevered over the "memory foundations", as Libeskind calls them. A series of skyscrapers spirals up from the foundations, up the ramp which descends parallel to West Street (the big road nearest us) and around the south, east and north edges of the site to culminate in the large spire holding the "gardens of the world". On its 110th floor (the height of the original WTC) is a restaurant and observation deck, but the memorial and the museum are down at ground level, where no one needs to worry about being high up in the sky. Libeskind said he was aiming for "places with intimacy and places with grandeur," and that's what he's given us.

Most of the skyscrapers, it's worth noting, are not going to be designed by Daniel Libeskind. And since the lower floors of the signature tower are going to have some tenants, there could be a lot of changes made from how the buildings are envisaged right now. "It is now our task to make sure that the plan you see becomes a reality," said New York governor George Pataki today – but of course this plan is not exactly what will be built.

Libeskind said that within four years we should have the major public components – the memorial site and museum, the cultural center, the transit hub, and the restored skyline. Personally, I believe all of it except for the skyline: I just can't see this economy being healthy enough to support the construction of the tallest building in the world.

I don't see the federal government stepping in to help, either: the representative of the president today was a minor functionary called Alfonso Jackson, the deputy secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He gave a horribly tone-deaf speech, wherein he basically tried to claim credit for everything, as well as to imply that this plan was somehow integrally connected with both the war on Iraq and Bush's proposed tax cut. It's clear that the White House doesn't really care about New York, and that the city and state – both of whom are horribly in debt right now – are going to have to do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to reconstructing the public areas of this site. With the best will in the world, I don't think they'll quite manage the skyscraper within four years, although I hope I'm wrong.

But even without the skyscraper, I'm heartened that New York now has a vision for rebuilding which is both bold and popular. Not everyone will like it, of course: there isn't a major new building in the world that someone doesn't hate. But this site is going to be a powerful destination, and I predict that it will, finally, be responsible for turning lower Manhattan into a vibrant residential neighborhood. People are really going to want to live here!

Finally, a word about the decision. I have to admit I am a little disappointed: I wanted the Think plan to win. Where Libeskind is 1990s avant-garde, Think was genuinely futuristic, with a vision of a vertical city which had never been attempted anywhere before. But it was watered down over the past couple of weeks, with fewer buildings inside the latticework towers, and the memorial museum lowered to the 30th floor or so rather than being up in the 80s. The latticework was also made lighter and cheaper, which would have meant it would have been much more difficult to build new cultural elements as and when the funding for them became available. In short, it was not entirely clear that the Think plan would really work, and the rebuilding of a large part of the most important city in the world isn't the sort of thing which can be embarked upon with less than 100% certainty.

So I'm happy for Daniel Liebeskind, happy for New York, and happy indeed for Rafael Vinoly and the other members of the Think team, who have surely got as much of a profile boost from their unbuilt proposal as they could ever have got from a finished building anywhere else. I can't wait to see this plan become reality.

Posted by Felix at 22:04 EST

Comments

yes it is nice liebeskind won... it certainly does look an exciting project.

if only we could be assured that he doesn't talk about 'concept' and just gets the damn thing built.

felix you are almost right in saying that the liebeskind scheme comes from 90s avant garde. it actually comes from early eighties theory... it just didn't get realized until the 90s.

and this is why i don't want to hear a word about the concept, or the derivation of the forms... liebeskind has been using the same tools of formal development since the eighties (thats 20 years for those slow on the math). tools that haven't advanced, changed, incorporated outside dialogue, or in anyway developed.

all architecture at some point springs from a vacuum, and the font is either a pure hallucination of a space to be, a latching onto an extant contextual motif, an allegorical interpretation of an idea (literally like las vegas, or sublimely like ando), or a game.

liebeskind is a game player... he frequently assigns values to arbitrary physical locations, and casts a net of lines that connect elements up... lines become walls (bit of a simplification here, but not much)... and we are all supposed to feel very assured that the correct architectural answer has been derived from the very rules he set out in the first place.

the only thing worse then tautological academia, is tautological poetics.

is his plan interesting? yes. would it be different for nyc? yes. would it create powerful spaces? yes. do the people like it? (surprisingly) yes. great... now build it, and please don't tell me a word about it- because when it is finished, it like all architecture will and should only be judged as a building, not as the transmogrification of some sexy drawings and poetic newspeak.

as a side note... think was not futuristic... they were actually reinterpreting an idea for skyscrapers that was proposed somwhere much closer to the start of the 20th century. rem koolhaas has a nice picture of it in his book 'delerious new york'. the picture shows the how the 'new' skyscraper can allow everyone to have their own plot of land and house- just vertically stacked. rem elaborates the point further.

the only thing 'futuristic' about think was the pod forms... no wait that was late 90s.

ok surely the 'futurism' must have been the ability to get so far on such a poorly developed scheme... hmmm that was the dotcoms.

here comes the sarcasm!

Posted by: geoff at 10:46 EST, February 28, 2003

As ever, Geoff has some very, very astute points. At the risk of being seen as wanting the last word, I'll respond to them, with respect. Basically, I think that Geoff is responding primarily not to Libeskind's plans for the WTC, but to his pre-existing idea of Studio Daniel Libeskind as an architectural practice. Certainly Libeskind has published more than his fair share of sexy drawings and theory-laden manifestoes. But I think many people, not least in the city and state of New York, have been struck by the way in which he has avoided such mannerism in this plan. Yes, there are overriding architectural conceits, such as the lines of the converging fire companies, or the angle of the Wedge of Light. But Libeskind has been at pains to assure us that he does not have "the correct architectural answer" -- if anything, he, of all the shortlisted architects, was the most open to public consultation and what you might call archtictecture of the people. The Port Authority doesn't want a 70-foot pit? Fine, let's make it 30 feet. The victims' families want a space of their own? Here you are, there's enough space to go around for everyone.

As for the vertical city, it was futuristic at the turn of the century, and it is futuristic today. It has oft been mooted, but never realised. The reason why I place Libeskind's vernacular in the 90s rather than the 80s, and Think's in the future, is because that is where such things are located in reality.

Posted by: Felix at 20:17 EST, February 28, 2003

Where is the model of Liebeskind's design for Ground Zero being displayed? JT

Posted by: Joseph A. Teper at 11:02 EST, April 23, 2003

The model is being displayed at the Winter Garden in the World Financial Center.

Posted by: Felix at 11:16 EST, April 23, 2003

I like to get picture catalog or video presentation, I read in Time Magazine and I think the design is great in total.

Posted by: Reza Momin at 20:18 EST, June 10, 2003