Felix Salmon

Arts bloggers love to get all techno-utopian about the way in which advances

in technology, especially the internet, are wonderful for the arts. I’m far

from convinced: I think technology can cut both ways.

Take recorded music, for example. The advance from LPs to CDs was

an advance: you could put more music on a disc, you could store it a lot more

easily, you didn’t have to worry about warps and pops and scratches, etc etc.

What’s more, for the vast majority of the population, there was a large increase

in sound quality as well.

Then, however, we moved from CDs to MP3s. An entire generation is growing up

which listens to its music downloaded from the internet, in formats which are

generally much worse than CD-quality. What’s more, because it’s stored on a

computer it’s normally played on a computer as well, through nasty computer

speakers rather than through a reasonably good stereo system.

Even people who still buy CDs on a regular basis, like me, often simply rip

them onto their computers and then play them, either on their computer or through

their stereo, from iTunes or the like. It’s a lot more convenient, but there’s

no doubt you lose sound quality. And if you’re working on the computer at the

same time as playing music, you’ll end up with your stereo making weird pinging

and clicking noises occasionally, which is definitely suboptimal.

Standards, then, when it comes to music at least, are certainly on the decline.

For every audiophile upgrading from CD to SACD,

there are thousands of regular people who are downgrading just as far by moving

from CD to MP3. Just look at the enormous success of the iPod, which comes with

rather nasty little white earbuds as standard. The vast majority of consumers

don’t seem to mind in the slightest.

What goes for music, it would seem, goes for art, too. Check out the article

today by gadget reviewer David Pogue in the New York Times, on something called

the Roku HD1000. This is a box, basically, which will "play" your

digital photographs on your high-definition TV set. Pogue raves that "photos

look spectacular, crisp and clear on a high-def set," and then moves on

to the Classics Art Pack, which "cycles through 50 famous paintings by

Monet, Manet and about 30 other dead guys whose copyrights have expired."

Soon, Pogue has been transported to seemingly another planet entirely:

Hate to say it, but the vivid, glowing pixels of a TV do better justice to

the color and texture of these masterpieces than dried paint.

Even better than the real thing, as Bono might say.

Suddenly, I have visions of technology billionaires founding a national franchise

of art museums to be built in towns and small cities – hell, even big

cities, for all I know – around the world. Kitted out with HD plasma screens,

they’ll be able to show whatever masterpieces they want: a Rembrandt retrospective

one week, Van Gogh the next. The largest permanent collection in the world –

all easily accessible to people thousands of miles from Vienna or Paris or New

York.

The David Pogues of this world would love it: no inconvenient travel! No annoying

crowds! And, to top it all off, pictures which glow!!!

It’s easy to get sarcastic about this sort of thing, but we’re talking a high-profile

New York Times journalist here, judging paintings by how vivid their, um, pixels

are. There are surely lots of Thomas Kinkade lovers out there who might share

Pogue’s enthusiasms, but they don’t normally get staff jobs on 43rd Street,

and if they do, they generally know better than to start parading their lowbrow

prejudices in front of the entire planet.

In the case of technology, however, there seems to be a general idea that technology

is, ever and always, good. You know those dioramas you see in Chinese takeaways,

where a rotating light is placed behind the river so it looks like it’s flowing?

Well, you can get that in high-tech form now, and rather than laughing at it,

Pogue embraces it wholeheartedly.

In the Nature pack, some of the photos have somehow been animated: brooks

flow, flowers blow, clouds drift across the sunset sky. Only a handful of

photos in each set are alive like this, but leaving even one of them "playing"

on your wall all day is so majestic, powerful and calming, it will probably

add two years to your life.

Trust me, that isn’t sarcasm: Pogue’s really into this kind of thing, and the

Times seems more than happy for him to wax rhapsodic about it. Here’s my theory:

when art and technology intersect, all joined-up thinking generally goes straight

out the window. Look at the way Terry Teachout extols the virtues of satellite

radio, blind to the virtues

of its old-school cousin. Look at the "internet biennial" at the Whitney

Museum in 2000, where curators desperately competed with each other to get excited

about Websites As Art.

As technology progresses, there’s always a strong temptation not to appear

Luddite, and therefore to give every new technology the benefit of the doubt.

But it’s equally important, I think, for art lovers to occasionally stand up

and say the emperor has no clothes. In this case, that’s easy: I doubt many

museum professionals want glowing pictures on their wall instead of paintings.

But when it’s someone more important than David Pogue, it’s harder. Remember

when fax machines were new and special, and David Hockney started faxing

his work to art galleries around the world? As I recall, the critics were pretty

soft on him.

It’s been two months since David Childs unveiled

the Freedom Tower in a blaze of publicity. Since then, of course, most of the

WTC attention has been focussed on the memorial, with a little left over for

Santiago Calatrava’s magnificent new PATH station. But work on the Freedom Tower

continues, and I took the opportunity last week, when Childs presented the model

for it at the Center for Architecture, to ask him how things were coming along.

Then, last week, I travelled to Washington on the train, and, purely by coincidence,

ended up sitting opposite architects in both directions. It turns out that the

WTC is proceeding apace, and that there’s quite a lot of information I haven’t

seen reported. So, to keep you up to date, here’s a bit of what I’ve learned.

¶It looks increasingly as though Daniel Libeskind has given up on his

initial dreams of controlling the design of the entire site. He fought long

and hard with David Childs over the Freedom Tower, to little effect, and has

since waged almost no battles at all over the memorial or the PATH station,

despite the fact that both of them essentially tore up his plan and started

over from scratch. In return for keeping quiet and not kicking up a fuss, there

seems to be a gentlemen’s understanding that the LMDC is going to commission

Libeskind to design the interpretive museum and cultural facilities on the site.

¶In terms of the tower, what you see when you look at the model is only

vaguely related to what’s actually going to be built. Childs told me that the

model was "a diagram of an idea of a basic concept". Specifically:

• The heights as announced in December are far from set, and the tower might

  yet end up being significantly taller than the 1,500 feet plus a 276-foot

  spire that we were told would be there. There will be some kind of significant

  architectural inflection point at 1,776 feet, but the antennae could well

  go higher. That’s certainly what the broadcasters want – and will pay

  for – while the FAA is happy with buildings as tall as 2,000 feet in

  total. So expect Libeskind’s symbolic height to go out the window, as it were.

• The spire, as seen in the model and plans, is basically just a place-holder.

  Childs and his team thought of a number of different ways of doing it, couldn’t

  agree on any of them, and just kind of plonked the thing you see now on top.

  Childs is very keen that the spire as finally designed will be (a) much more

  integrated with the rest of the the building, while (b) remaining fundamentally

  asymmetrical. He also said that he’s very much working on integrating the

  antennae into the spire.

• At the moment, the spire is on the southern edge of the tower, while and

  the peak of the sloping roof is on the northern edge – which looks horrible,

  especially when the building is viewed from the west. It probably won’t stay

  that way, partly because the spire hasn’t been designed yet, but mainly because

  even the sloping roof is far from certain.

  The only reason for having a sloping roof in the first place is the Libeskind

  plan of a spiral of skyscrapers all genuflecting down to the memorial below.

  As we have seen, however, Libeskind is losing a lot of influence here, and

  it’s increasinly unlikely that the architects for the other towers on the

  site – Silverstein has already named Normal Foster, Fumihiko Maki and

  Jean Nouvel – will sign on to the sloping-roof condition.

  Clearly, if they don’t have sloping roofs, then Childs doesn’t need to have

  one. And Childs doesn’t want one: he told me that often the streets around

  the Citicorp tower need to be closed off, because snow and ice and water can

  shear off the sloping roof and come plummeting down onto the sidewalk below.

  So if he can unslope the roof, I think he will.

• There will be a second observation deck: Silverstein has signed off on this.

  It will be right at the top of the trellis, open to the elements, and therefore

  accessible only in good weather. It will be reached by a glass elevator, which

  would pause at the heights of the old WTC towers on its way up.

¶In terms of the rest of the site, the LMDC yesterday announced

that they have finally reached an agreement with Deutsche Bank to buy up the

former Bankers Trust building for $90 million and then spend $45 million demolishing

it. This has long been crucial to the site plan, and it’s very good news. That

said, however, it’s still far from clear what exactly is going to happen in

that neck of the woods – generally, the southern boundary of the site.

With the cultural buildings now clustered north-east of the memorial, the south-west

corner generally is little more than a blank space – and south of it,

Liberty Street, at the moment, dominated by a large truck ramp, looks like it’s

going to be far from beautiful. Apparently Michael Arad, the winner of the memorial

competition, is pushing for entry to the memorial from the south-west, but that’s

just weird when the PATH station, most public transport, and nearly all the

rest of the island of Manhattan is to the north-east.

¶The PATH station, while beautiful, is basically little more than an oculus

at street level: most of the really grand stuff happens below grade. So, now

that Dey Street has been reconstituted, what is going to actually go on there?

One group, apparently, is pushing for a greenmarket, which sounds like a great

idea to me. It can happen south of the PATH station, so that it doesn’t interfere

with whatever symbolism is going on to the north.

¶It’s looking increasingly unlikely that New York City Opera is going

to make it downtown. The hope was that an opera house could be attached to the

eastern side of the Freedom Tower, maybe overlapping a little below grade. But

now, I’m told, even that wouldn’t create a large enough space for what the opera

company wants.

Overall, the site plan is moving from grand visions to something rather more

realistic, which is inevitable and not to be mourned overmuch. While many of

us would have preferred something which cleaved much more closely to the original

Libeskind vision, that was never very likely, and I do still have faith in the

LMDC to do its best to create a vibrant new neighborhood.

Tyler Green is, I daresay, the best art blogger in the world. But today he

harshes,

quite unjustifiably, I think, on Malcom Rogers, the director of the Museum of

Fine Arts in Boston.

Rogers’ crime, in Green’s eyes, is to have loaned 21 of his Monets to the Bellagio

hotel in Las Vegas for an exhibition there. In return, the MFA will probably

receive a seven-figure sum. The Boston Globe has

the story; Green says that the link will expire tomorrow, so I’ve mirrored

it here.

The main critic of the arrangement seems to be Christopher Knight, of the LA

Times, who wrote an article on February 3 headlined "A new low in the business

of high art". It’s behind a subscriber firewall, unfortunately, but the

gist of Knight’s complaint is that the Bellagio gallery – which is run

by a subsidiary of art gallery PaceWildenstein – is a for-profit organisation.

Writes Knight:

[The] MFA could have taken its paintings across Las Vegas Boulevard, ironically,

to the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, where Boston could actually be lending

its Monet paintings to a fellow cultural institution. But it didn’t… Context

confers meaning. The Monet show’s context is purely commercial. It teaches

audiences that, for an art museum, financial worth is art’s primary value.

Knight has also been widely quoted as saying that the Monet show "is without

intellectual merit" and "is educationally corrupt". But those

quotes are usually taken a little bit out of context: Knight was not writing

a review, and has not seen the show. Rather, he was holding up the MFA’s actions

to the guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors, which say that

the primary considerations that a museum should weigh before making any loan

should be its "intellectual merit and educational benefits".

Let’s ignore Knight’s take on the intellectual and educational merits of the

Monet show, then, since he hasn’t seen it and really can’t say. His substantive

point is that if the MFA loans works to the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in the

Venetian hotel, that’s fine, whereas if it loans works to the art gallery at

the Bellagio hotel across the street, then that’s beyond the pale.

I don’t see why there’s such a clear distinction to be drawn between the two.

Both hotels use their art galleries as tourist attractions, as a way to appeal

to the slightly more highbrow gamblers in Vegas. In that sense, they’re both

for-profit, commercial concerns. One is run by a pair of museums, while the

other is run by a commercial art gallery, but I’ve seen many excellent gallery

shows and dreadful museum shows. It’s entirely possible that taking an art gallery

and moving it from non-profit to for-profit status could actually make it better.

Knight says, in as many words, that the art gallery at the Bellagio is not a

"cultural institution". Bollocks to that: of course it is!

Tyler Green, however, has actual questions for Rogers. Here they are, with

my own answers.

1. In the Globe story, you conceded that there is a small "issue here."

and not a big one?

The issue here is very similar to the issue of Charles Saatchi sponsoring the

"Sensation" exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In that case, the

value of Saatchi’s own paintings was likely to increase due to their receiving

the imprimatur of a major museum show. Similarly, PaceWildenstein is a major

dealer in impressionist paintings, and in Monets specifically. If this show

is a huge success, they could benefit not only from increased admissions revenues

(which are shared with the MFA), but also from increased prices for their stock

of paintings.

Why is this a small issue and not a big one? Because the market in Monets is

mature, and the chances of a Vegas show increasing the value of PaceWildenstein’s

Monets (assuming they have any) is very small.

Now, it is true that there is a very large chance that PaceWildenstein will

make money from the show directly. But that’s always the case with museum loans:

the only difference here is that the operator of the exhibit is a private, rather

than a public, organisation. And, of course, a public museum is benefitting

as well: the MFA itself, which is getting a tidy sum.

2. Are there groups, people or organizations to whom you would not rent

to a private corporation gallery that is based in a casino?

A museum’s works should be accessible to the public. If somebody wanted to

rent an MFA Monet so that they could hang it in their front room or otherwise

keep the public from seeing it, the MFA would rightly refuse. Now many art galleries

charge admission – mostly non-profit art galleries, it must be said. Admission

fees, while regrettable, are generally understood to be a necessary evil. If

the MFA loaned out 21 Monets to a public art gallery, there would still be admission

fees. But the fact that the admission fees go to a private rather than a public

organisation does not change the degree to which the art is accessible to the

general public.

3. In Edgers’ story, he (apparently) paraphrases you asking how people

regardless of what the resulting show is?

It is fair to criticize the concept of a museum renting out work to

a for-profit gallery in a casino. Knight wrote an opinion piece, and he’s more

than free to express his opinion that what the MFA did was wrong. Similarly,

the MFA is more than free to defend its actions. What is weird is when Knight

criticizes not the concept, but the show itself, calling it "without intellectual

merit". How could he make that judgment without seeing the show? In fact,

on the very same page of the newspaper, Suzanne Muchnic describes the show as

"beautifully installed", and nowhere gives the impression that it

is in any way sub-par.

4. The Guggenheim runs an accredited space at the Venetian Hotel. If this

showing the Monets at an accredited, non-profit space?

As far as the art-going public is concerned, the benefit to them is more or

less identical whether they pay $15 to see Monets at the Venetian or $15 to

see Monets at the Bellagio. So the MFA was faced, hypothetically, with two choices:

• Give the Vegas public the benefit of access to the Monets; or
• Give the Vegas public the benefit of access to the Monets, and give the

  MFA – a cash-strapped museum in need of funds – a million bucks.

Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Where is the advantage to the Vegas public in seeing the paintings at "an

accredited, non-profit space"? Does that make the paintings any better?

Where is the advantage to the MFA in lending the paintings to such a space?

The MFA certainly doesn’t get more money. It’s worth turning the question around:

why should the MFA embrace the Venetian rather than the Bellagio? What is the

non-financial value of this "accreditation" of which you speak?

In fact, since we’re dealing in hypotheticals here, here’s another one. Let’s

say the Horseshoe Casino in Vegas opened up its own gallery, accredited by the

Kalamazoo Art Club, a non-profit organisation dedicated to showing pretty pictures

to people. Would you prefer that the Monets went there, even if they weren’t

nearly as well hung, and even if the admission price was bumped to, say, $30?

What is the magical value of non-profit status?

5. In talking with Suzanne Muchnic of the LA Times, you justified your

sources for a museum?

All museums treat art as a funding source. Every time they sell a postcard,

license an image, loan a painting, or charge an admission fee to see art, they

receive money in return. Ultimately, it seems fair to say that every penny that

every art museum has ever received is in some way leveraged off the art in that

museum. So the question isn’t whether it’s appropriate to treat art as a funding

source; the question is what types of uses of art as a funding source are inappropriate.

I’ve already said that loaning a painting to an individual who would not let

the public have access to it would be inappropriate. More generally, selling

art is something which museums should think long and hard about before doing,

especially if they’re selling to a private collector as opposed to another museum.

But more importantly, preserving a cultural legacy is in no way inconsistent

with showing art to as many different people as possible. Ultimately, any cultural

legacy is going to die out if nobody sees it, and the more people who see a

body of art, the more of a cultural legacy it is likely to become. If the private

sector is better at bringing art to people than the non-profit sector is, then

all power to them, and may a hundred relationships such as the one between the

MFA and the Bellagio blossom.

I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog writing about a big new Manhattan development.

It features a landmark office building designed by David Childs, and is meant

to be one of the most important new shopping and dining destinations in the

city – augmented, of course, by cultural attractions. I refer, of course,

to the World Trade Center site, although I could just as well be talking about

the new Time Warner Center.

So, in an attempt to get a feel for what we might be in for, I ventured boldly

forth to the Upper West Side this afternoon, to check out The Shops at Columbus

Circle (for that is what this mall

urban retail center has been called). As I walked down Central Park

West towards the new building, I had my own prediction

(about the World Trade Center) in the back of my head:

A large number of national chain stores is an inevitability, if only because

– obviously – there can’t be any small local shops who have been

there for generations. Judging by the World Financial Center, there might

be a few independent restaurants, but the shops are likely to be pretty bland

and corporate.

It

turns out that my invocation of the World Financial Center was prescient. Take

a look at the photo to the left: it’s basically the WFC with catwalks. Inside

and out, the space looks and feels very WFC-esque: there’s the same pattern

of large square windows in steel and stone; the same antiseptic corridors lined

in expensive marble; the same feeling that, basically, you’re shopping in a

high-end office building, or a luxury hotel. Which, of course, you

are.

There is a reason why the best hotel restaurants in New York go to great lengths

to disassociate themselves from their hosts – they have different names,

different addresses, and their own dedicated street entrances. Large hotels

and office buildings, no matter how high-end they are, basically work from the

assumption that they have to be all things to all people. The blandness is not

the result of a lack of imagination: it comes out of the necessity of not offending

anybody.

New Yorkers, on the other hand, have very little truck with not being offended:

if we were easily offended, we would have left this city long ago. What we want

is something interesting, something with character. We’ll try anything once;

if we don’t like it, we won’t go back. But better to err on the side of the

overly

adventurous than to stick to the formulaic.

In such a town, the most successful hotel restaurants don’t look like hotel

restaurants at

all.

As it goes for restaurants, so it goes for shops. One of the hottest shopping

districts right now is 14th Street between 9th and 10th, home to the likes of

Alexander McQueen and Jeffrey. It’s hard to get to, it’s convenient for almost

nothing, and it smells of rotting meat. New Yorkers don’t just not mind a bit

of inconvenience: they actively seek it out. Ever since the light-industrial

wastelands of Soho and Tribeca were first populated by loft-dwelling bohemians,

there’s been a sense that grotty beats glossy every time.

This isn’t just a downtown thing, either. New Yorkers love their quirky department

stores, like Henri Bendel, almost as much for their limitations as

despite them. When it comes to shopping, bigger is most definitely not better:

while we might have one of the largest shops in the world, I’m pretty sure that

Macy’s customers are mostly tourists.

What’s more, New Yorkers are finely attuned to what is unique and what is not.

New York’s most successful retail openings in recent memory were those of the

Prada store on Broadway and Prince, closely followed, in time, geography, and

sensibility, by the Apple store on Prince and Greene. Beautifully designed,

light-filled spaces work wonderfully in Soho, where they contrast with the older

architecture to create a lovely interplay between the industrial and the high-tech

eras.

At Columbus Circle, there’s certainly no shortage of light and space. But there

are no objects of desire fetishistically displayed within the glass and steel

enclosure: rather, all that you see upon entry is walls, escalators and store

logos. Walking around the building, it’s depressing to note that probably the

most inviting part of it is the Thomas Pink store which occupies the 60th Street

end of the arcade on ground level. Visible from the street, the shirts in the

window attract passing foot traffic. At the main entrance, however, there’s

really nothing pulling the pedestrian in to the atrium, since there’s no product

to be seen. Instead, you’re simply pointed to what is where: a bookshop upstairs,

a kitchen-equipment store at the back, a supermarket down the escalator.

A word about that supermarket is probably in order. Yes, it’s big, and yes,

it’s impressive. But it also seems to have been designed by a madman: at the

bottom of the escalator, there’s a food hall behind you, where you can’t buy

food, just sit down and eat it once you’ve bought it. There’s a supermarket

to the left of you, where you get your groceries. And there’s a food court in

front of you, where you get the food to be eaten in the food hall. Then –

and this is the genius bit – there’s a bunch of check-out counters, with

a very incoherent queueing system, to your right. Everybody, whether

they’re buying groceries or ready-prepared food in plastic washable bowls, pays

at the same place. I tried to get a chicken vindaloo, but rapidly realised that

it was going to go cold by the time I was able to sit down and eat it.

The above-ground levels have similarly bad design: one would think that it

was crucial, in a vertical mall, to have lots of stairs and other means of getting

easily up and down from one level to another. Instead, escalators are placed

at the ends of the arcades, and I didn’t even bother trying to get to the top

level.

At the ground level, things are even worse. Upstairs, at least, the shops seem

to know how to present themselves. But down at street level, the same design

plan seems to have been imposed on everybody, where you have to crane your neck

and look up just to find the store logo and work out whose merchandise you’ve

been admiring.

And nowhere is there any sense of surprise or joy. As Manhattan Users Guide

says,

New York derives a lot of its energy from fresh, absurd, or delightful juxtapositions.

But what do you get when you juxtapose J. Crew and Sephora? Crabtree &

Evelyn with Godiva? (For how to do it right, the planners should have spent

some time in Grand Central.) You could name most of the retailers without

knowing a thing about the place.

Indeed, I might add, you could name most of the retailers just by looking at

the type of shops in the World Financial Center, that epitome of Stepford-style

blandness. And MUG is absolutely right about Grand Central, which is a masterpiece

of well-edited retail and food outlets, with nary a national franchise in sight.

So what does this mean for the WTC site? I fear the prognosis is bad. The original

WTC mall, after all, was truly gruesome: the only saving grace in the entire

site was the Borders bookshop. Other than that, it was The Limited next to Sbarro

next to… well, the fact that I can barely remember anything else, despite

the fact that I used to walk through there every day, speaks volumes. It was

home to commuters with thousand-yard stares occasionally picking up a birthday

present for the kids on their way home.

The new WTC won’t be as bad as the old one, of course. For one thing, most

of the shops will be on streets, as opposed to being in a contiguous mall. But

if Time Warner starts making money off The Shops at Columbus Circle, I wouldn’t

be at all surprised to start seeing vertical malls popping up in the WTC office-tower

designs. And even without vertical malls, if the shops are just rented out to

the highest bidders, we’re going to see the same set of nationally-recognisable

franchises, and no sense of character or individuality.

Everybody involved in the WTC planning process agrees that the site should

be a vibrant new city district, with streetlife, nightlife and cultural life.

But entire districts are hard to build from scratch: any new development will

inevitably have a certain amount of sterility to it. What I hope is that someone

smart will take MUG’s advice, look at the Time Warner Center, look at Grand

Central Station, and realise that a bit of central planning can go a long way

in giving an area a personality.

For too long, the west side of lower Manhattan has been devoid of any kind

of positive characteristics. A little slice of suburbia nestled next to the

financial district, it stands in stark contrast to the riotous streets found

east of Broadway. It desperately needs an injection of a little bit of New York

attitude.

There are two things which could happen when the Fulton Street corridor is

completed, and downtown becomes a coherent whole again. Homogenisation could

creep eastwards from the WFC and WTC towards Fulton and Nassau, especially if

lots of new retail is auctioned off as part of the subway station redesign plans.

Alternatively, the reintroduction of Fulton and Greenwich streets, finding their

rightful way back onto the map after a long and painful absence, could create

a lively new civic center: think the Beaubourg in Paris, with Santiago Calatrava’s

gorgeous new PATH station playing the role of the Pompidou Center.

In order for that to happen, the designers of the new site are going to have

to leave themselves open to uncertainty and a little bit of chaos. If everything

is planned and profit-maximised, it’ll just be like today’s Upper West Side

(complete with unimpressive David Childs monolith), only even more boring.

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.

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.

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.

There’s a lot of garbage

written about Apple, but the cover

story of the latest issue of Fast Company seems pretty fair, if unoriginal.

(Innovation on its own doesn’t make money: who’d’a thunk?) The bit which piqued

my interest was in the sidebar at the bottom of the article, on the new Apple

store in Burlingame, California:

The store is done in iPod shades of white. "We chose hand-selected Tuscan

stone for the floors–a stone that’s somewhere between sandstone and limestone,"

says Ron Johnson, Apple’s vice president of retail. "It’s the same stuff

Florence was built on." …

Apple is holding leases on some of the most expensive real estate in the country,

in places such as tony Michigan Avenue in Chicago and New York’s trendy SoHo.

And then there are those Tuscan stone floors. "Apple is creating a boutique

environment, and they’re doing it in a very expensive way," says Roger

Kay, from the technology market research firm IDC. "It doesn’t seem very

reliable as an approach for selling large quantities of goods."

I think Kay is exactly right. People tend to ooh and aah whenever they see

an Apple store: they’ll even line

up round dozens of blocks to get in. It’s far from clear, however, that

the Apple stores are particularly good at getting people to actually buy their

computers: the company’s market share seems to be stubbornly stuck at around

3% these days.

Apple’s retail strategy isn’t working,

and the reason, I think, is the signal that the expensive polished fabulousness

of the stores sends to the Great Unwashed on Wintel machines. Tourists from

Pennsylvania come to New York to window-shop, and if they walk down Prince Street

from the Prada store, they’ll find Apple just past the Mercer Hotel, and opposite

Miu Miu. All of them have austere white interiors, carefully designed to showcase

objects of unrivalled beauty and sophistication (or, in the case of the hotel,

Christina Aguilera). For all that people are welcome to browse the machines

in the store, check their email, and ask questions, you’re never quite rid of

the feeling that you’re basically in a design museum with price tags.

Virginia Postrel is making a

big splash these days with her book

about how great design is becoming ubiquitous in contemporary culture. But there’s

something interesting about, say, the huge success of Michael

Graves at Target: while the individual items are wonderfully designed, they’re

still sold alongside bog roll and Wonderbread in cavernous warehouses abutting

even larger car parks. They’re cheap, they’re accessible, and they’re not in

the least bit intimidating.

Now, New Yorkers do not get intimidated by retail spaces such as the Apple

Store Soho, and in fact it might be the perfect shop for them. But selling Apples

to downtown New Yorkers is a bit like having half a dozen shops in the Bay Area:

you’re preaching to the converted. Apple wants its stores to appeal to the 97%

of the population who use Windows, and that means going beyond the creative

metropolitan types with high disposable incomes and targeting what politicians

like to call Working Families.

For

one thing, Working Families live in places like Oklahoma and Oregon, neither

of which have an Apple store. If you look at the map on the left, the black

dots represent Apple retail outlets: they’re clustered in Boston-Washington

corridor, the two big California conurbations, and a handful of other urban

centers. Dye the Apple stores blue, and you could almost have a map of Democratic

states. (No wonder Al Gore’s on Apple’s board.)

More importantly, however, Working Families, even if they’re in Oakland or

Staten Island and have easy access to an Apple store, tend not to pride themselves

on paying extra for glitzy packaging. That’s not to say they won’t do so if

given the opportunity: if they see a sleek stainless steel dishwasher next to

an ugly beige one, they might well pay a small premium for it. But here’s a

thought experiment: take that same sleek stainless steel dishwasher, at

the same price, and put it in a super-sleek Soho kitchen-design store,

full of polished marble countertops and state-of-the-art ranges. Then, take

your average working stiff, put him or her in that shop, and ask him if he’d

like to buy the dishwasher. There might be lots of cooing over it, but ultimately

the answer will be "oh, no, that’s not for me."

What Postrel talks about in her book is not just a reflection of the way in

which Americans are increasingly conscious of good design; it’s also a reflection

of the way in which American mass retailers are increasingly proficient at selling

that design to their customers. But Apple is not, and never has been, a mass

retailer, and its aesthetic is much closer to Helmut Lang than it is to JC Penney.

It’s entirely natural and proper for Apple to position itself as the computer

company for people who "think different". But the risk in that strategy

is that people will consider themselves more-or-less normal as far as computers

go, and therefore not the kind of people who should be getting a Mac. I have

a nasty feeling that Apple’s ultra-high-end retail stores only serve to reinforce

that notion: that Apples are for the kind of people who shop in Soho, or Michigan

Avenue, or Ginza.

What Apple needs to do, I think, is break out of the white box. The white stores,

the white-background television ads, the white computers: these all look gorgeous,

but they’re also somewhat intimidating. People need to be persuaded that the

guy next door has an Apple, not because he’s different or particularly cool,

but just because it does what he needs it to do much better than a Windows machine

could.

In a way, the evangelical fervour of the Apple faithful works against the company:

the average Windows user, looking at the wild-eyed fanatics who’ll line up round

the block to celebrate the release of an upgrade to their operating system,

simply doesn’t understand why anybody would feel so strongly about their computer.

These people, maybe they Think Different because they are different.

Most people are intimidated by computers, and Apples, by right, should be less

intimidating than PCs. Apple should, really, be able to paint PC users as the

megahertz-and-gigabytes crowd, while Mac users don’t really care what’s going

on under the hood, they just know that they find it really easy to get things

done. Apple shouldn’t be the computer equivalent of a Viking

range. Rather, it should be a George

Foreman grill: simple, accessible, and popular.

Apple probably came closest to that ideal when it released the original iMac

in a rainbow of fruit flavours, back in the olden days of OS 9. But, bizarrely,

now that it has an operating system which is orders of magnitude better, Apple

doesn’t seem to have capitalised on its newfound user-friendliness to gain any

market share at all.

When Steve Jobs gives his next major speech, at Macworld

San Francisco on January 6, everybody’s expecting him to announce new, lower-priced

iPods. What I’m hoping for are new, lower-priced computers: when the iBook went

from G3 to G4 a couple of months ago, the prices actually went up,

ferchrissakes! If the iPod can come in a low-priced, mass-market, brightly-coloured

version, then – fingers crossed – maybe the Macinosh can, too.

The design for the Freedom Tower – the big signature building which is

to rise at the northwest corner of the World Trade Center site – was unveiled

with great pomp today. Grand speeches were given by George Pataki, Michael Bloomberg,

Larry Silverstein, Daniel Libeskind, and, of course, the architect, David Childs.

But what’s the tower like? Is it a magnificent structure the like of which

the world has never seen, a skyscraper to put New York City back in its rightful

place as the home of the greatest tall buildings in the world? After all, a

central part of the WTC redesign has always – since long before Libeskind

was chosen as the master architect for the site plan – been the restoration

of the skyline. And although this building certainly puts something tall where

(more or less) the Twin Towers once stood, I’m not sure that it really has the

kind of iconic power that the most optimistic of us were hoping for.

The Freedom Tower is not an easy structure to get your head around. For one

thing, it kindasorta torques, which means that its shape can’t be easily described

or conceived. And then it’s basically comprised of three unrelated elements:

an office block at the base, with a latticework structure on top of that, and

finally a 276-foot spire perched on the very top.

It’s designed by David Childs, a competent architect with, as far as I can

make out, no real genius or inspiration whatsoever. In New York, he has built

perfectly good structures like the New York Mercantile Exchange and the Stuyvesant

School Bridge, both very close to where the Freedom Tower will be built; mediocre

buildings like the Bear Stearns headquarters; and, of course, the monstrosity

that is the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. This is not the kind of man

who will think outside the box: he more or less invented the box as we know

it today.

The base of the building has been evened out from Libeskind’s original, angular

design, and is now a perfect parallelogram, mirroring the street grid around

it: West Street on the west, Vesey Street on the north, Fulton Street on the

south, and maybe some kind of extension of Washington Street on the east.

The base is actually the best part of the building, echoing the extra-high

bases of the original World Trade Center.Weirdly, none of the publicity images

really show what’s going on down there, so you’re going to have to make do with

a blurry snapshot of the model I took with my digital camera. The view is looking

north from the Trade Center site, with Fulton Street in the foreground.

You can see how Childs has lit up the model by turning the solid core of the

building – where the fire stairs, elevators and whatnot are located –

into a light source. So it’s that much more difficult to tell what the building

is actually going to look like when it’s finished. What you can see, however,

is that the entrance foyer is going to be pretty spectacular, complete with

structural triangular entrance elements in place of the curved elements from

the Twin Towers.

Now

continue looking at the building from this perspective – from the south.

As it rises, the south facade becomes narrower, with the left-hand (west) wall

going straight up, and the right-hand (east) wall moving in towards it. The

north and south facades are perfectly vertical, and don’t torque at all: they

simply narrow. Meanwhile, if you’re looking straight towards them, the east

and west facades kind of fall backwards on their left-hand sides, while remaining

perfectly straight and vertical on their right-hand sides. That’s the

torquing you’re going to hear so much about.

The picture on the left is a view of the south and east facades. Because of

all the light and transparency, it’s hard to tell what’s going on. But essentially

what you have is straight, vertical walls on the left and right edges of the

picture (the southwest and northeast corners), and a torquing, falling-backwards

wall in the middle (the southeast corner). The whole thing is complicated by

the fact that the outside of the building is a diagrid – a diagonal structural

grid which helps add rigidity and redundancy to the overall building structure.

That’s why the straight-up verticals aren’t actually straight-up vertical at

all, but weave in and out a little to incorporate the movement of the grid.

You got that? Because now we’re going up, to the top of the office block, what

Childs calls the crown, where you’ll find public areas, an observation deck,

meeting rooms, and – in another nod to the original towers – Windows

on the World restaurant. The new restaurant won’t just have spectacular views

of both rivers; it will also have a glass roof, so that you can look up and

admire the latticework trellis above.

The

crown has an angled top, with the high point at the northwest corner, and the

low point at the southeast corner. The idea is to complete Libeskind’s spiral

of skyscrapers, the tops of all of which tilt inwards towards the center of

the site, as if in homage to the void there.

And in fact the experience of the crown should be fantastic. You won’t be peering

through narrow windows, like you had to in the WTC: rather, there should be

gorgeous panoramic views from New Jersey to Brooklyn and from the Statue of

Liberty up past Central Park.

The problem is that the positioning of the crown doesn’t align with the positioning

of the spire at the top of the trellis. The spire is at the southwest corner,

not the northwest corner, which gives it a tacked-on, ill-fitted feeling. The

spire should rise naturally from the building, continuing the base’s tapering

motion. Instead, while the base of the building points north, the spire drags

the eye back to the south. From the north and south, it’s not too bad, and from

the east, the view is going to be largely occluded by other towers which are

going to be built next to the Freedom Tower. But you’re not going to see many

pictures of what the tower is going to look like from the west – the famous

view across the river from New Jersey, with the World Financial Center in the

foreground – because that’s where the disconnect between the top of the

crown and the spire is most glaring. If you want, you can get some idea of what

I’m talking about by downloading this 488k

QuickTime movie of the view from the Hudson.

Above

the crown is the trellis, arranged around two broadcasting masts which emerge

from the building’s core. The trellis continues the diagrid of the main building,

but instead of being under compression, it’s made of cables which are under

tension. Childs makes a big show of talking about how this echoes the construction

of the Brooklyn Bridge, but I’m not entirely sold. I’m sure he’s right that

the trellis relieves the weight of the building, and adds redundancy to the

structure should any of the supporting columns fail. But the way in which the

cables hold the building up isn’t beautifully obvious, like it is in the Brooklyn

Bridge or any given structure by Santiago Calatrava. In fact, if it’s reminiscent

of anything, the trellis brings to mind the Eiffel Tower – something which

is made up of beams under compression, not cables under tension.

Attached to the broadcasting masts are a bunch of windmills, which will provide

a chunk of the building’s energy needs: a nice touch. And then, stuck onto the

top like an afterthought, is the spire.

Childs is unclear about exactly what sort of form the spire is going to take:

according to the LMDC press

release, "it is intended that an artist will collaborate to design

the spire with the architects and the engineers, placing a sculpture in the

sky". But as it stands, the spire is simply plunked down on top of the

trellis, with its base not even extending as far as the southeast corner, where

it could naturally continue the torqued line of the rest of the building.

Unlike much of the rest of what we think is going to appear at the World Trade

Center site, it seems pretty clear that, in this case, what we see is what we’re

going to get. Larry Silverstein has committed to laying the foundation stone

by September 11, 2004, and having the building ready for occupation in late

2008 or early 2009. He’s got his favourite architect on board, and seems to

have dodged any of the inconvenient parts of Daniel Libeskind’s vision.

Once the building is up in the sky – and Silverstein says he intends

to top out the steel by September 11, 2006 – we will indeed have a restored

skyline. That’s a good thing. But many architecture junkies, I think, will retain

a feeling that ultimately we’ll be missing out on something with a stronger

overall form: something unified, something better.