January 2004 Archives
Who designed the WTC memorial?
One of the more intelligent comments about the World Trade Center memorial competition – I can't seem to find who said it, right now – was that with some 5,200 entrants, the winning design would not be one individual's uncompromising vision, pace Maya Lin. Rather, it would essentially be exactly what the jury wanted it to be: whatever it was that the jury collectively wanted, they could surely find it among the thousands of different plans with which they were presented.
This idea gained currency when Reflecting Absence was chosen, for two main reasons. Firstly, it bore a startling resemblance to a plan that Maya Lin – a jury member – had previously sketched out for the site. But more importantly, it suddenly carried the name of Peter Walker, a celebrated landscape architect, alongside that of the original designer, Michael Arad. The clear implication was that the jury was essentially forcing Arad into a direction in which it (the jury) wanted to go. Arad is a mild-mannered mid-level architect for the Housing Authority in New York, who, frankly, seems perfectly amenable to being pushed around.
Today, the New York Times runs a long article about the selection process, which only reinforces the original thesis. Here's the key bit:
What swayed the jury was that the "Reflecting Absence" team was joined by Peter Walker, a well-known landscape architect in Berkeley, Calif., who had also submitted a plan to the competition.
"Without Walker, there would not be Arad," Dr. Gregorian said.
"Garden of Lights" had a lot of support, a juror said, but the support evaporated after a "very unfortunate last presentation" in which the design team failed to satisfy requests for refinements. Jurors who favored the "Garden" plan moved to "Reflecting Absence."
The Times has already reported that the jury essentially forced a landscape architect on Arad, giving him a shortlist of people to choose from and basically telling him that if he didn't pretty things up substantially, he had no chance of winning.
But the bit about "Garden of Lights" is even more germane, really. The jury wants changes, the designers stay true to their vision, and – bang – they're out.
What's more, the jurors seem to think that their job is not yet done. Here's further evidence that the memorial has essentially been comandeered by the jury, rather than the jury simply picking a designer and letting them run with it:
In a sense, it is just the beginning of a process that could further transform the memorial. Some jurors vowed that the voice of the jury would continue to be heard. "We intend," Ms. Berry said, "to see it to the end."
Now I'm not convinced that having a memorial designed by this particular jury is necessarily such a bad thing. It's a very distinguished and intelligent group of people, who have clearly thought long and hard about the whats and the whys of building a memorial. They're working and deliberating at a very high level, and clearly were not swayed by political or public pressure.
Ironically, they might even have done the very thing that a couple of them were adamant that they would not do. Here's the Times article again:
Jurors read an article in The Times on Dec. 7 titled, "Ground Zero's Only Hope: Elitism," by Michael Kimmelman, the newspaper's chief art critic. He contrasted populism with democracy and suggested that the competition be started over and limited "to participants of the jury's expert choosing."
Jurors, including Mr. Puryear, were incensed. "Elitism was something I was absolutely opposed to," he recalled. "It smacks of smug cultural superiority, the opposite of the inclusive process we signed onto."
Certainly the jurors spent a lot of time and effort going through the thousands of submissions. But smug cultural superiority seems to be exactly what the jury ended up going with: deciding that they knew best, that they could and should make sweeping changes to the Arad plan, and that if they couldn't make similar changes to a rival plan then it would be out of the running.
In fact, the voting process is very interesting in that, it would seem, no one on the jury ever really voted for anything, at least not until the very end. The jury set a 100% quorum for making decisions, and every single juror needed to sign off on every single entry that was eliminated. In other words, simply by withholding his elimination signature, any one of the jurors could basically ensure that their favoured plan made to the final nine, and even maybe the final three.
But at the end, it would seem that the jurors were quite disappointed in the teams that they had picked. They gave the final nine each $130,000 to turn their original presentations into professional renderings, models and computer animations – and discovered that the promise they had seen was not, in many cases, delivered upon. "A lot of these schemes didn't deliver the promise of what was on the stage-one boards," said Michael R Van Valkenburgh, a juror who is a landscape architect. "It was a very heartbreaking time for the process.""
That probably explains why the shortlisted nine candidates were generally considered to be so uninspiring. Some of the jurors didn't even want the finalists displayed in public. At least we know now that their reaction was pretty much the same as our reaction: the jurors weren't as out of touch as we had thought.
When they saw that the public was on board with their misgivings, I wouldn't be surprised if the jury felt empowered to take more control over the final design of the memorial. None of these designs was all that great, so best that the jury start pushing the finalists in the right direction. Some designers, of course, react much better to such pushing than others, and it's clear that Arad is one of them. He won in the end, and will always have his name associated with the memorial if and when it's built. In reality, however, the WTC memorial will have been shaped at least as much by the jury as by him.
Posted by Felix at 1:18 EST | Comments (5)
Long-form reporting in the New Yorker
In his profile of Larry David in this week's New Yorker, James Kaplan finishes with an anecdote. David is sitting in his editing suite, working on a scene where he gets egged by a carful of teenagers. He can't work out whether to cut to the teenagers driving away, or to leave the camera lingering on his egged face. "I don’t know," David says. "I mean, it’s kind of fun to see them drive away. On the other hand, it’s fun to see that egg.”
That anecdote, as I just wrote it, takes 68 words to tell. In the magazine, as Kaplan writes it, it takes 439 words. We learn who's operating the Avid machine, and what he's wearing. We learn the colour and brand of the director's shoes. We learn that Avid systems involve both a keyboard and a mouse. We inwardly scream "get on with it, already!" about half a dozen times.
The New Yorker prides itself on its in-depth features, and the fact that it is able to devote a lot of space to subjects which in any other magazine would be drastically truncated. Increasingly, however, I've found the magazine devoting equal amounts of space to subjects which desperately need truncating. We learn virtually nothing about Larry David in this 6,559-word article, which probably earned Kaplan a good $20,000.
Weirdly, the piece actually feels brutally truncated in places. We follow David and Jerry Seinfeld into an NBC meeting where they pitch a sitcom, for instance. We're told that "At first, the idea was to have two comedians walking around in New York, making fun of things, and in between you’d have standup bits." The NBC people didn't like it – and next thing we know, the show's been going for three seasons.
Kaplan also doesn't seem to have a clue how much technical knowledge he expects us to have. One minute we're expected to know the difference between a one-camera sitcom and a three-camera sitcom; the next we're being told how many frames of video there are per second.
David's show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, is incredibly self-aware, doing a magnificent job at skewering the hubris of television types in Hollywood. Yet when its director launches into hyperbole – something which I'm sure was accompanied by no small measure of sarcasm in real life – Kaplan simply reprints his comments verbatim, making him look like just another LA asshole with no sense of perspective.
The show’s pivotal moment came in the third season, in 1991. Charles remembers walking with David from the “Seinfeld” offices in Studio City up to Fryman Canyon to try to break a story: the library-cop episode, in which Jerry is investigated for keeping a book out for twenty years. “We had a couple of strands, and I don’t know if it was the oxygen from the walking, but we were very exhilarated,” Charles said. “We went, ‘What if the book that was overdue was in the homeless guy’s car? And the homeless guy was the gym teacher that had done the wedgie? And what if, when they return the book, Kramer has a relationship with the librarian?’
“Suddenly it’s like—why not? It’s like, boom boom boom, an epiphany—quantum theory of sitcom! It was, like, nobody’s doing this! Usually, there’s the A story, the B story—no, let’s have five stories! And all the characters’ stories intersect in some sort of weirdly organic way, and you just see what happens. It was like—oh my God. It was like finding the cure for cancer.”
It seems clear, from reading the piece, that Kaplan never really got what the New Yorker editors had hoped for when they sent him off to spend a bunch of time with Larry David and talk to the people around him. Yet after investing all that time and effort, the magazine evidently felt that it had to publish something.
Critically, that's where the general rules of the New Yorker feature well became a large liability. This is a profile, it's appearing in the New Yorker, and New Yorker profiles run between 5,000 and 10,000 words. More, if they're Joe Klein on Bill Clinton. Even if the amount of substance in the piece would best be conveyed in a 1,500-word "Larry David's show is back on TV, here's a little story about him" piece, the New Yorker evidently feels incapable of doing that.
So we end up with vast amounts of ill-constructed padding. "“Seinfeld” was scherzo, its fun stemming from the constantly shifting play among its troupe of four," we're told. "David’s new form was" – and here, of course, one expects another musical metaphor, to close the circle. It never comes: "David’s new form was simpler and starker".
I've worried, recently, about the front of the book; now I'm worried about the features. The New Yorker under David Remnick is certainly very good at timeliness, and covers foreign affairs magnificently. Newsier subjects in general are excellently done. But the kind of thing the New Yorker is famous for – long articles about people and subjects you didn't know you might ever be interested in – have been very weak for a long while. No one cares about John McPhee's fish, and, as TMFTML so eloquently put it, "enough with the fucking bags already" when it comes to picaresque tales of picking up litter.
We're told that the New Yorker has recently moved into the black, after costing Si Newhouse some exorbitant amount of money – much of which went on catering to Tina Brown's every whim. It would be a great shame, however, if financial success came at the expense of the great long-form reporting in which the magazine specialises. Weak long-form reporting is no replacement.
Posted by Felix at 12:34 EST | Comments (4)
Week One at Halley!
It seems to me that a day lasts a week down here, and a week lasts a month. But time doesn't drag, it's chock to the brim, and there's barely time to breathe. But when you do breathe, it's stunning, and you realise that really, in a place like this, that's all we should be doing: breathing, and taking it all in.
Then you get busy again and start forgetting. It's all very incongruous – the work and the environment, the office politics and the snow, the meetings and discussions and then the activity itself. But the ice itself, the place, the space, that's not incongruous, it's simple. Simple (not perfumed, not coloured, just kind!). And you wonder how a world could have ever existed that could have filled a brain with so much nonsense as advertisement slogans. Give me time and space here and I will fly with the fairies.
But what have I been doing? Why the busy-ness? What fills a day? Each day holds a story, I don't know where to start. There was the day that I jumped off a trailer, cut my bum (radio call: "Frank Frank, Katie: we need your help, Rhian's cut her bum"; radio silence; construction site laughter rebounding off the clouds) and had to have three stitches. It was the best hospital in the world and I recommend it to anyone. We had a meeting of friends, classical music, poetry recitals (me to them, while they stitched my arse), stitching classes, much laughter and then three days of happy pills. I was much more chilled out after that. And the corners that did the damage in the first place had all been filed down before the end of play that day.
And then there was the day we built a big mast (lots of digging) and today, when we put a massive mirror on the mast and bounced a light off it from 4km away... and it worked! Oh yes, and I forget, best of all was last week on Saturday when the whole base stops work at 5pm instead of 7pm (we start at 8am) and have Saturday night scrubout and I got to clean the library for two hours.
What a joy! I had to get someone to check up on me in the end because more pages were being cleaned by my eyes than shelves by my duster. What a great library! You can tell loads about the type of people who come here – I could write a chapter on the library alone! There's a whole section with great Antarctic literature and diaries, of course, and then polar exploration, exploration in general, sailing, rock climbing, skiing. I'm talking a shelf each for these topics in a room the size of your average boxroom.
Top shelf in the corner has religion and psychobabble next to history, and then, below it, military greats. The bottom shelf, of all levels, has antarctic press cuttings and records. Around the corner we have, top shelf again, poetry, travel, languages and music and then lots of humour, cartoons, sci-fi (shelves and shelves of star trek and Stephen King) and then at last, the alphabet begins. I'm not as savvy at perusing the alphabet because the shelf doesn't give you any hint of what you might be looking for, but already I've seen some classics that I want to dive in to – how do you book lovers do it? I know this room is stacked with Great Novels by Great Writers (I barely got beyond rows of Amis and Amis) but how do you know which to pick when the only way they've been organised has been alphabetically? Far too sterile. I'm looking forward to finding out though. if I ever get time to breathe.
Posted by Rhian at 11:24 EST | Comments (3)
Victims' families
Wednesday's Guardian led, reasonably enough, with the suicide of Harold Shipman. The headline, though, splashed across the front page, was peculiar: "The final betrayal". Here's how the story started:
Just after 6am yesterday, Harold Shipman, described as a man addicted to murder by the judge inquiring into his 23-year killing spree, wound one end of a prison sheet round his neck and the other round the bars of his cell and took his own life on the eve of his 58th birthday.
It was the final betrayal.
The Guardian clearly took the view that on the day of Shipman's death, the defining point of view was that of the victims' families. They, after all, were the ones who were "betrayed":
Jane Gaskill, daughter of one of Shipman's victims, 68-year-old Bertha Moss, said: "He has won again. He has taken the easy way out. He has controlled us all the way through and he has controlled the last step and I hate him for it."
What a horrible man this Shipman was! Not only did he murder at least 215 people, but he also betrayed their families!
When I read something like this, I feel a screeching of ethical gears. Yes, betraying victims' families is a bad thing: we should all have compassion for these people. But compared to one of the biggest killing sprees the world has ever known? It's not really up there on the scale.
The Guardian also reported on the fact that Shipman's wife would now be receiving a pension. Once again, the victims' families are trundled out:
Some relatives of his victims were said to be upset at hearing that she would be receiving the money. Ann Alexander, the lawyer representing relatives of many of Shipman's victims, said: "The families that I have spoken to are deeply uncomfortable with this."
Anybody associated with the WTC, of course, knows what it's like to be guilt-tripped by victims' families, who seem to have more control over the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site than even Daniel Libeskind. It was the victims' families, for instance, who more or less forced the WTC footprints to be treated as "sacred", thereby essentially dictating the overall site plan. They also forced the memorial designers to go down to bedrock (that's "sacred", too), include an area with relics from the disaster, and even include a special room in the memorial just for them. They also managed to frame the terms of the debate, making it clear that the more acreage that was given over to the memorial, the happier they would be. Never mind the quality, feel the width!
Oh, yes, and they also got $5.2 billion of federal funds in compensation for their family members' having been killed. In my last posting I complained about the enormity the $1.5 billion that Bush is intending to spend on marriage: that sum is dwarfed by the amount he's already spent on WTC victims' families, and which, of course, comes on top of enormous life-insurance and charitable contributions the families also received.
It seems that when lots of people lose their lives in a headline-grabbing event, the families first receive sympathy, then are told that nothing can possibly compensate them for the loss they have suffered, and then finally everybody starts, well, trying to compensate them for the loss they have suffered – if not with money, then by making every effort to give their opinions on anything to do with the tragedy much more weight than everybody else's.
The upshot of this is that we essentially get a hereditary system of control over enormously important matters such as the rebuilding of lower Manhattan. And just as there are good kings and bad, there are useful victims' family members, and then there are ones who are, well, not so useful.
Sometimes, as in the case of Pan Am flight 103 and Jim Swire, the spokesman for UK relatives in Lockerbie, the victims' families end up playing an extremely important role in a very professional manner. At other times, we get quotes like this one, from Anthony Gardner, a member of a coalition for WTC victims' families, on the subject of the proposed memorial:
"This is minimalism, and you can't minimalize the impact and the enormity of Sept. 11," Gardner said. "You can't minimalize the deaths. You can't minimalize the response of New Yorkers."
Even so, criticizing family members is completely taboo. Everybody involved in the WTC project, for instance, insists on referring to pretty much all the victims as "heroes", even when they did nothing heroic. This pisses off the family members of the uniformed personnel, who want their family members singled out as being the real heroes of the day. A lot of them received so much money in the wake of the tragedy that they have essentially now become professional Family Members, spending vast amounts of their time lobbying for whatever it is that they want to see on the site. Far from moving on with their lives, they are stuck in September 11, 2001, reliving it over and over again.
One word that frequently comes up in such discussions is "closure": Shipman's victims' family members need him to describe what he did and why he did it before they can achieve closure, or the WTC victims' family members need a place where unidentified remains are kept before they can achieve closure.
But I'm far from convinced that closure really exists in the kind of sense that these family members seem to think it does. Even if it did, I'm pretty sure it can't be achieved through external, as opposed to internal, means. But it's taboo to say such things: the family members have become secular saints, and anything they say must be given the fullest measure of respect, just because of who is saying it. No one else in society has their words received so uncritically, and I'm not sure that it does anybody any good in the long term.
Certainly, its very far from edifying to see a 9/11 firefighter's widow splashed all over the front page of the New York post for taking up with another, married, firefighter. The saint is in fact a sinner! We all know that the tabloids love to raise people up only to knock them down again, but adulterous affairs happen the whole time, and this is only news because it's based on the erroneous assumption that as a Victim's Family Member, she was somehow raised up to a higher level to start with.
I think that this deification of the family members is actually a byproduct of our media-saturated society. After all, people die tragically every day, in car accidents or from rare diseases, and the deaths reverberate in their families for years. But those families don't get kowtowed to in the national press, don't get to tell the rest of the world what's sacred and what isn't, don't dictate front-page headlines in sensible papers like the Guardian. It's only when the tragedy makes news headlines that the transformation occurs.
Wouldn't it be great if news organisations pledged not to quote victims' family members unless they say something useful and/or interesting? If they realised that such people simply don't have privileged access to the truth? But that will never happen. The family members would never stand for such a policy.
Posted by Felix at 18:14 EST | Comments (1)
Maybe they can sign up Britney as a spokesperson!
We've known for a while that the Bush administration's fiscal policy can roughly be summed up as "throw money at anything that moves; reduce taxes on anything with money". But this really takes the biscuit: the White House has now managed to dream up a plan to spend $1.5 billion to promote marriage.
Most of us have daydreamed occasionally about what we'd do if we won the lottery, and had $1 million or 10 million or $100 million to spend. At some point, the amount of money just becomes ludicrous, and you have to start dreaming up increasingly outlandish notions just to make a dent in it. But $1.5 billion on marriage? What are you going to do, give 150,000 couples a $10,000 wedding each?
We're told that "under the president's proposal, federal money could be used for specific activities like advertising campaigns to publicize the value of marriage". With that kind of money, he could buy every single spot in the Super Bowl ten times over, or alternatively buy every single ad page in every single Condé Nast magazine for an entire year. If that's what marriage is worth, how much will he spend on babies next year, I wonder?
Hilariously, the Times characterises the program as being "relatively inexpensive", without bothering to say what it's inexpensive relative to. The cost of invading Iraq, perhaps?
Politically, I have to say, the move makes enormous amounts of sense, killing lots of birds with one stone.
- It's almost impossible for Democrats to oppose: anybody who speaks out against it will be "anti-family" and "anti-marriage". So Bush will continue to set the agenda, while the Dems struggle to keep up.
- It appeals directly to fast-growing evangelical churches, who believe strongly in the sanctity and desirability of marriage.
- And if you combine those two reasons, you get the real kicker: it's almost impossible for homophobic "pro-family" types to oppose. You can't oppose a pro-marriage program, especially when it's confined to heterosexuals, on the grounds that it's not an anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment.
No one ever said that Karl Rove wasn't clever: he's throwing the rabid Christian right a bone to shut them up during the general election, when the last thing he needs is a bunch of grass-roots supporters banging on about gay marriage and constitutional amendments. That kind of rhetoric might get votes in Alabama, but what Bush really needs is California and Florida, both of which are crawling with gays and gay-friendly voters.
There's nothing gay-friendly about this proposal, of course. That's the genius of it: in order to quash the unhelpful gay-marriage debate, Rove is trying to quieten down the agitators on the right, rather than the pro-gay campaigners on the left. He's even rolling out Wade Horn, the assistant secretary of health and human services for children and families, to say things like "If a gay couple had a child and they were poor, they might be eligible for food stamps." Gee, thanks, Mr Horn, I didn't realise there was a movement afoot to deny food stamps to otherwise-eligible homosexuals. (In contrast, of course, if a straight couple had a child and they were poor, the government would be falling over itself trying to use that $1.5 billion to make sure they got married and stayed that way.)
But my favourite bit of the article is this:
This year, administration officials said, Mr. Bush will probably visit programs trying to raise marriage rates in poor neighborhoods.
"The president loves to do that sort of thing in the inner city with black churches, and he's very good at it," a White House aide said.
Of course he "loves to do that sort of thing in the inner city". Fly in, get your picture taken with a passell of grinning brown children, shake hands with a priest, and fly out again. Does wonders for your reputation as an elitist oligarch who only looks out for his bazillionaire friends.
The sad thing is that in its own narrow way, the thinking behind this program might well be right. Yes, if you persuade young parents to get married and commit to bringing up their children in a stable family environment, then those children are likely to turn out healthier, richer, better educated, and less likely to be in trouble with the law.
On the other hand, if you really wanted healthier and better educated children in the inner cities, maybe you'd invest a bit more in, well, healthcare and schools. But providing healthcare for all children is "socialistic" and beyond the pale, while any attempt to redirect funds from richer to poorer school districts is "class warfare". This, on the other hand, telling everybody to marry up and settle down, this is compassionate conservatism. Do try to keep up.
Most depressing of all, thanks to Bill Clinton, who unforgivably signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, we can't even have a sensible debate about whether the benefits of this program should be extended to gay couples as well as straight ones. It might be desirable in theory, but unfortunately, thanks to DoMA, it would be illegal.
So we're left with yet more hugely expensive photo-opportunities, trying to solve deep social problems while using only techniques with an overtly religious bent. I'm sure that Joe Lieberman will be leading the applause when this is announced in the State of the Union. Separation of church and state, my arse. Remember that the first words David Frum heard when he started working at the White House were "missed you at Bible Study".
Posted by Felix at 7:03 EST | Comments (2)
On the ice at last: it's all go!
Happy New Year, Happy Christmas, and thank you to all who have left messages here or sent emails. It's lovely to receive word from home and from friends, and amazing to think that folk out there are reading this stuff!
Word on the ice is that, as the winter progresses, the volume of correspondence from the Outside World decreases such that, come mid-winter, you truly are an isolated core, desperate for news or proof that you did once have friends, somewhere in the world. Here, the solitary Antarctican thinks, "oh, so the novelty's worn off, has it, and now I'm no longer worth remembering," while at home, no doubt, life goes on so busily that you scarcely notice it's been a month and, anyway, there's not much to say these days.
It's been interesting for me to hear these stories, wondering if we, too, will experience all these apparent inevitables. In fairness to the folk who have remained throughout, they all still smile a lot and appear to be sane, so I retain faith.
We stopped bashing the ice. It hurt too much and got us nowhere. Halley base pulled out the stops, fashioned a bridge across the big crack and located safe spots to cross the smaller cracks, laid out a 7km drum line from the ship to edge of the ice-shelf and then another from these cliffs to the base, about 13km.
Relief was carried out in two camps: shipside and base-side. I was shipside. (Last year I stayed on base so check that entry if you want the full picture.) It was great. There was action at last!
Unloading boxes, discovering new levels to the Shackleton that I could never have believed, days of fuel drums, nights and days of 12 hour rotating shifts, hard physical work. Cargo is offloaded to sledge. Sledge is pulled by sno-cat across sea-ice. Sno-cat driver drives cat, driver's mate sits on sledge with radio and throw bag. If driver falls into ice, driver's mate saves him. If the sledge is too full, driver's mate follows on sno-cat.
My sometime job, driver's mate, was the best job in the world. Sitting on a sledge, watching the world go by, staring at clouds, admiring icicles and cliffs on the shelf, blue blue ice, imaging what must be inside those crevasses, away, away, away, from the mayhem of the cargo hold. Strops and straps, weight loads, cranes, crossed information, endless, endless boxes and crates, drums and drums and drums and drums. So much fuel, so much impact, can we really justify our existence?
And then the skidooing, hard work, bounce, bump, steer her back, topple over, jump up again, zoooom, up beside the driver, wave, yup, communication all intact, mine sits like a Harley, I feel like a motorbike bodyguard beside a limousine. Zooom, bounce, bounce, o my, look up, can't; wind in face, thumb hurts, wind, I'm cold, but sweating lots, this thing is heavy.
Penguins. The wildlife! O! the wildlife... I had no idea so much was going on down here at the coast when up there on the ice shelf it is all so barren and bare. The wildlife! I saw whales, up close, checking out the ship, amazing, and then swimming under us, under the ship, under the ice we are moored against and driving on (it is 3m thick, don't fear). And seals: leapoards and weddels, a pup sliding right close, snapping at the lines holding the ship in. Lots of emperor penguins, always nearby, and the occasional adelie, so sweet, so comical, bewildered by our activity, not knowing where to go, or how. Wilson's storm petrels, a giant petrel and the ever beautiful snow petrels. (There are lots of petrels, - the name apparently comes from Peter, biblical, the fisherman who tried to walk on water, because they fish, and when they take off, they walk on water, or something like that. Their beaks are very cool anyway, - little in-house desalination plants. You can even see the salt that has crystallised out!)
But I don't want you to get the wrong idea. It's like German irregular verbs: you spend so much time learning about them that you never really get the 'regular' bit right. Most of the time, it is still void of life here, these sitings are a song in silence. But so wonderful when they do happen. Them in just their skin while there's me in my orange dayglo gortex super everythingproof allinone tellytubby outfit, and mask, and three hats. And the patterns in the snow and the cliffs, and the ice, the ice, the ice!! There is so much to see in a landscape that is apparently empty. I now realise why Manhattan did my head in last March. You start to see detail in the plainest of things. Angel-dust in the air, arches in sastrugi, the accumulation of snow on yesterdays footprint. I love it, I love it, I love it here. And then we came to Halley, and I love it here too.
But I'm knackered.
Posted by Rhian at 18:24 EST | Comments (2)
Hey! It's a brand-new Dey!
The New York Post has a great scoop today about the new Santiago Calatrava PATH station at Ground Zero. Unfortunately, the Post spins the story as being about Libeskind's Wedge of Light: the headline is "PATH Plan May Dim Libeskind's Tribute". Of course, it won't, and as the story goes on to say, Libeskind considers the Calatrava design to fit perfectly into his master plan.
According to the Post, the Calatrava plan moves the new PATH station north a little bit from where Libeskind had it. That does two things, one minor and one major. The minor change – which the Post fixates on – is that the Wedge of Light becomes a little bit smaller. But the Wedge of Light was never about internal area: it was always about the angles of the walls abutting Fulton Street. The angles, we can safely assume, remain intact.
The real story here, the major development, is that Calatrava has resuscitated Dey Street. Under the original Libeskind site plan, Dey stopped at Church Street, right where it ends today. Post-Calatrava, however, it continues all the way on to Greenwich Street, as a pedestrian promenade. As ever, the more streets the better, so this is officially a Good Thing.
Interestingly, as the designer of the first major public building on the site, Calatrava has managed to do wonders for the commercial building next door. Now that it has a north-facing street frontage opposite the station, the tower between Dey, Church, Greenwich and Cortlandt can have shops on all four streets, including the most-trafficked side of all. Critics of the WTC redesign often play up the conflict between good public spaces and profitable commercial buildings; in this case, what benefits one also benefits the other.
Meanwhile, it looks increasingly as though Cortlandt Street, which Libeskind had as a pedestrian promenade between Church and Greenwich, is going to be upgraded to something which can accommodate cars. (Just because it can have cars doesn't mean it will, of course.) The office buildings planned for the WTC site are all going to be grade-A towers, full of lawyers, bankers and the like. Such tenants nearly always want a fleet of Town Cars at their disposal at all times, and those cars need to line up somewhere; Cortlandt Street seems as good a place as any. It's entirely possible, of course, that Cortlandt will be closed to all but fleet traffic.
The real thing to get excited about here is the prospect of genuine street life within the WTC site. Greenwich and Fulton streets were always going to be major pedestrian thoroughfares (albeit with cars as well, of course), but now the addition of side streets to the plan gives a little bit more humanity and a little bit less of a corporate theme-park feeling to the site. The more streets there are, the less likely it is that the area between Fulton, Greenwich, Church and Liberty is going to be another montrosity along the lines of the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle. Thank you, Santiago Calatrava, for making a good site plan even better.
Posted by Felix at 13:58 EST | Comments (3)
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