WTC worries

I've long been a cheerleader for the WTC redevelopment. Even when others started griping, I was still optimistic about the prospects for the site and the likelihood that it could become a vibrant and world-beating neighborhood. In recent days, however, I've started getting a little more pessimistic, the release of a very sexy new site rendering notwithstanding.

The new picture is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the Freedom Tower pictured is almost exactly the same, as far as I can tell, as the one which was unveiled nine months ago. That Freedom Tower was a last-minute thrown-together compromise, and since then the foundation stone has been laid, and some kind of construction has begun.

There are two possibilities here. The first is that over the course of the past nine months, zero progress has been made on what the tower is going to look like, especially its upper half. The second is that David Childs and Larry Silverstein do have a good idea of what they're building, but they're keeping it secret – maybe because they fear what the public and/or Daniel Libeskind might think of the changes. Neither of these two possibilities makes me particularly hopeful about the future of construction on the WTC site.

That said, there is one obvious difference between this rendering and the one which was released in July. Look at the trelliswork at the top: the old rendering is on the left, the new one is on the right.

Doesn't it look to you that the top of the Freedom Tower has been glazed? If you magnify the image even further, it's clear that the buildings viewed through the top of the tower are much less clear than the ones viewed to the side – DBox, the renderers, clearly want it to look as though we're looking through glass. What's more, the windmills, which were never much in evidence to start with, seem to have disappeared altogether. Is the top of the Freedom Tower going to become a useless glass box? I do hope not.

My guess is that neither rendering looks much like what we're eventually going to get. I stand by what I said in February: the spire will look very different from what it's being rendered as right now, the sloping roof is likely to go, and there'll be some kind of observation deck at the very top.

And the really big picture, of course, is that the Freedom Tower is a camel. As Paul Goldberger explains in his new book, it's essentially the product of wishful thinking by George Pataki, who somehow managed to convince himself that David Childs and Daniel Libeskind – both big-time architects with a strong impression of what the new tower should look like, and an even stronger conviction that the other guy was wrong – could somehow be forced to fruitfully collaborate on the skyscraper. It was never going to happen, and the final building is quite probably worse than either man would have come up with on his own – although I daresay it's better than Childs' Bear Stearns building in midtown.

Other bits of the new rendering are also interesting. Look at the detail on the left: not only has Dey Street been restored, but Cortlandt Street is just visible as a vehicular street as well. That's good news: it shows that in at least one design shop New York City has won out over the floor plate Nazis, although of course none of this is final.

The one thing I can't work out is the jagged reflection in the office tower behind Santiago Calatrava's PATH terminal. It seems to be the reflection of some kind of building, but which building is not at all clear. This is actually the most annoying part of the rendering: I would much have preferred an idea of what we're going to see in four or five years, rather than a wishful-thinking plan including four large office towers which probably won't be built for decades and in any case won't look anything like this if and when they are built. Hidden behind the middle two, for instance, is most of the Wedge of Light and all of the Millenium Hilton: I still don't really have any idea of how the PATH station and the Wedge of Light are meant to interact and point pedestrian traffic coming from the Brooklyn Bridge, say, down towards the memorial.

What we do see quite clearly in this rendering is the memorial, and the way in which it's almost entirely at grade. Libeskind's pit of memory is long gone, and what remains of the slurry wall will be as nothing compared to the edifice which so impressed Libeskind and the people who chose his design from the shortlist. More generally, when I reread what I wrote back in 2002, I feel a sense of opportunity squandered:

It all starts down in the dirt, by the huge slurry walls which stop the Hudson River from rushing in to the site. These were and are true engineering marvels: as Liebeskind says, they "withstood the unimaginable trauma of the destuction and stand eloquent". He keeps them exposed, 70 feet below ground, and then spirals up and out, into the rest of the site and beyond.
At the bottom is the museum and the memorial; at the top is a vertical "gardens of the world", rising in a glorious spike well above the rest of the skyline. The buildings in the rest of the site are extremely strong as well, especially the ones which border on what Liebeskind rather unfortunately calls the "wedge of light". This is a triangular plaza which will have no shadows each year on September 11 between the hours of 8:46am and 10:28am. It's mirrored by the Heroes Park, one of three or four green spaces in the plan.

What's left of this vision? The slurry walls are gone, the spiral walkway is gone, the gardens of the world are gone, the spike is rapidly going, the wedge of light won't have no shadows at the crucial time, thanks to the Millenium Hilton, the Heroes Park has all but disappeared... as Goldberger says, Libeskind's plan has been "ground down" to the point at which we can reasonably ask ourselves why we needed a major architectural name to design the WTC site at all. With all the compromises which have been made, it's looking increasingly as though the high-profile competition was little more than a shiny toy which took the eyes of the public off the places where the real decisions were being made – mainly the offices of George Pataki and Larry Silverstein.

As Goldberger says, what was needed here was someone with a strong vision and the ability to make it happen – someone like Francois Mitterand, who did something similar in Paris. Pataki was not that man; I have a feeling that New York's deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff, with the wholehearted backing of Michael Bloomberg, might have been.

New York City, which has had very, very little say in the development of the WTC site, had a wonderful plan for Lower Manhattan as a whole, much of which – especially housing – has been jettisoned by the Port Authority and the LMDC. The cooks in charge of this particular broth were the wrong ones, I fear: some deal surely could have been done whereby New York City received the land under the World Trade Center from the Port Authority, in return for the land under JFK and LaGuardia airports. Doctoroff would then have had much more power, Pataki would have had much less, and there might well have been many fewer compromises along the way.

Just look at the results of the competition for the cultural buildings: the Joyce Theater and the Drawing Center are going to be the anchor tenants at the new site, because their competition, mainly the New York City Opera, was considered to be too big to fit into the small gaps remaining between office buildings. I'm all for facing up to realities, but there comes a point where you simply can't give office buildings which might never be built priority over an institution like the New York City Opera, which isn't all that big to start with. If Ground Zero is too small to accommodate one medium-to-large cultural institution, then there has to be a strong case for revisiting the whole question of why so much space has to be set aside for offices.

I might look as though I'm contradicting myself here: Last September, I wrote that

In theory, Silverstein could be bought off with a cash settlement rather than office space. But he doesn't seem to understand the cashflow situation here: far from the taxpayer giving money to Silverstein to go away, Silverstein is actually the central, necessary source of funds for rebuilding the WTC site in the first place. It is Silverstein who held the insurance contracts on the World Trade Center, you see, and without those insurance proceeds, nothing is going to get built on the site at all.

But the situation has changed. Silverstein's insurance payout is barely going to be able to cover the cost of the Freedom Tower, after his legal expenses and his rent to the Port Authority have been paid. Yes, Silverstein does have a contractual right to rebuild 10 million square feet of office space – but surely there's a case to be made for crossing that bridge when we come to it. No one expects Silverstein to exercise that clause in his contract any time soon, and in the meantime there's a whole new neighborhood to be built.

I went to a press conference with Daniel Libeskind this week, and if I've learned anything from being a journalist for the past ten years, it's that the fewer questions someone answers, the more worried they are. Libeskind, on Wednesday, answered very few questions, and fell back time and time again on the stock answers that he's been wheeling out for the past two years. The only news we got was regarding new projects of his, nothing pertaining to Ground Zero, where I get the feeling he's been doing very little work this year.

I would like to think that Libeskind will get the commission to design at least one of the new cultural buildings, and that being able to get involved with the minutiae of a real building on the site will bring his enthusiasm and involvement levels back up. But the bigger battle has been lost, I think: at every turn since the initial choice of Libeskind as master planner, political realities have trumped the larger vision. While I'm still optimistic for the neighborhood in the long run, I don't think it's going to be the greatest piece of urban planning that the world has ever seen. And it should have been.

Posted by Felix at 16:23 EST

Comments

I hate to say it, but "welcome to the club, Felix." This whole thing has been played and played hard, with Libeskind as the entertaining Freedom Jester in Pataki's court.

And all with the relentlessly sacred perception of Progress Being Made, to boot.

Posted by: greg.org at 22:55 EST, September 13, 2004

You are certainly right that the current rebuilding process and proposed plan will never lead to the architectural and urban design for Ground Zero that 9/11 deserves. But "political realities [had] trumped the larger vision" well before Libeskind took his first bow at the Winter Garden in December 2002.

Silverstein told Newsday on 20 September 2001 -- just nine days after 9/11 -- that he was going to build four office towers. On 13 December 2001, Newsday quoted Silverstein to the effect that "it will probably be more than four" and that "50-55-60-65 stories is probably a mix that would work on that site." Newsday reported that day that Silverstein "said he [was] working to re-impose the grid of streets that crossed the site before the Trade Center was built."

Trust your instincts. The "competition" was a sideshow, and Ground Zero has been a very brave new world since day one.

That it has taken the public this long to start smelling the fish is a stinging indictment of the media (including Goldberger), who for three years have played architectural patty-cake with rebuilding officials, refusing at every turn to ask the hard questions that still must be asked if we are to remember 9/11 at Ground Zero by achieving something truly great there.

As it is, most of the public has no idea that an illegal, irresponsible, unsafe, inferior, and wasteful design is being advanced in their name to serve base financial and political interests. To allow this plan to go forward would be an indictment of our culture and a visible stain on our history.

Posted by: John Lumea at 15:08 EST, September 14, 2004

Since the last building was destroyed by an airplane...dont you think that it would be "smart" to make this one out of a little more than just glass? Oh well I guess the architect will find out sooner or later...

Posted by: Bee Bop at 10:12 EST, July 07, 2006

To me Freedom tower looks horrible....i would much rather see the twin towers back

Posted by: Graham Gallagher at 10:19 EST, April 16, 2007

Can you tell me where the image came from?

Posted by: Matt at 14:43 EST, September 04, 2007