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16

Herbert’s List

In its approach to planning for Ground Zero, the LMDC has shown both a poverty of imagination and a deep desire to control the terms of the discussion. This failure has left a conceptual and artistic deficit that is being filled by individual creators and the many unofficial alliances that have sprung up in the wake of the disaster. The LMDC, however, has been deaf to their efforts, opening its inquiry only under pressure.

If there were a forum in which one might have expected to see some of the great variety of ideas and plans produced in the past year, it is the New York Times. Our newspaper of record, however, has provided crabbed coverage of possible design alternatives. Much of the responsibility for this stems from the gate-keeping role played by the newspaper’s architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp. Muschamp has been acerbic in his criticism of the LMDC’s flounderings. And his scathing commentary on the six misbegotten plans released in July was immediately echoed in an editorial headlined “The Downtown We Don’t Want,” which characterized the schemes as “dreary [and] leaden” and argued that no plan with that amount of commercial space would fly. It also suggested—following a proposal made by the LMDC and others—“how much better residential and commercial areas would cohere if West Street can be submerged and covered with a promenade or a park.”

The very next day, though, Muschamp weighed in with a short “appraisal” in which he lavished praise on quite a different vision. Plucking one of the site diagrams published in the run-up to the LMDC Six by New York New Visions in an exemplary analytical document, Muschamp trumpeted the discovery of a scheme of “remarkable elegance” and “unmatched conceptual beauty.” This turned out to be a parti in which the buried West Street was topped not with a “promenade or park” but by a series of developable blocks. Authorship of the plan was attributed to the architect Frederic Schwartz, who had been busily working officialdom on behalf of this diagram, now detached from the larger project of New York New Visions from which it had emerged.

While most of the July LMDC schemes had proposed to bury West Street, the Schwartz plan differed in suggesting that buildings be constructed atop the tunnel. The idea is not unfamiliar: Schwartz cut his architectural teeth in the Venturi, Scott Brown office working on Westway, and this scheme revisits the basic idea behind that project: the use of publicly funded infrastructure to create sites for private speculation. Muschamp presents this as a logical way to alleviate pressure on the Trade Center site by offering an alternative territory for development. Neither Muschamp nor Schwartz, however, has advanced any argument for the formal superiority of such a development to the creation of additional green and public space above the buried roadway.

Muschamp presents this plan as if it were the only solution to the question of off-site replacement space. Ignored are millions of square feet currently vacant downtown and the numerous unbuilt and underbuilt sites in the area (together more than enough to replace the World Trade Center twice over), as well as the possibility of replacing lost space elsewhere in the city. Although contemptuous of developer demands for immediate replacement of lost income streams—“The lease made me do it,” he acidly began one of his pieces—his plan accomplishes just that, predicated on the ultimate in developer reasoning: the logic of the parcel.

The parcels, however, were also the grounds for an exercise in Muschamp’s central critical operation: compiling lists of his favorite architects. Having suggested that the parceled development of West Street was the only logical way forward, Muschamp—playing Napoleon III to Schwartz’s Haussmann—selected a group to implement the plan and then published their risible efforts with great fanfare in the September 8 issue of the New York Times Magazine. While there were a few tasty images among the proposals, the schemes were largely undercooked, with no urbanistic glue to give spatial and circulatory logic to the ensemble. Muschamp’s mindless branding made Larry Silverstein look like Cosimo de Medici.

The plan, however, also suggests that the Twin Towers themselves be rebuilt—slightly southeast of the original site. But wasn’t the “remarkable elegance” of the Schwartz plan that it obviated the need to replace the towers? To be sure, the buildings shown are Trade Towers with a twist: the huge structures have been torqued to resemble “a pair of candlesticks of unidentified authorship.” In fact, they resemble fairly precisely a widely disseminated scheme by Richard Dattner, whose project is submerged in the claim that these buildings “enjoy a variety of sources.” I am reminded of the undergraduate strategy of oversupplying footnotes to conceal a source. The week following publication of Muschamp’s plan, a piece appeared in the House & Home section entitled, “At Home With Frederic Schwartz, The Man Who Dared the City to Think Again.” Here, after congratulating him for his “aspirational” scheme, the writer described Schwartz’s SoHo loft, his girlfriend, and his breakfast. The shelter section of the New York Times is, of course, obsessed with pedigree. And, given the fact that Muschamp’s list is about celebrity, the hapless Schwartz had to be made into one.

The celebrity mill received a further spin in the September 11 special issue of New York magazine, which included its own collection of schemes organized by its architecture critic, Joseph Giovannini. Complete designs were sought from six architects, with results that certainly raised many more interesting urbanistic issues than Muschamp’s (not so) exquisite corpse, while still feeding the celebrity beast. Indeed, two of Giovannini’s six designers were also on Muschamp’s list. For New York, Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid produced completely different, more fully elaborated schemes. Somebody has a good agent.

Stung by the attacks on its own six schemes, the LMDC had announced in August that it was ready for some list-mania of its own and was prepared to pony up a puny sum ($40,000 per team) to sponsor six more schemes. And whom did the LMDC choose from the 400 who applied? The same people. Frederic Schwartz (already backpedaling from the idea of burying West Street in the face of rising community opposition), David Rockwell, and Rafael Viñoly—all from Muschamp’s list—dominate one team. Another is composed of masters-of-the-universe Steven Holl, Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier, and trifecta winner Peter Eisenman—Muschamp’s list, one and all. Norman Foster makes the cut, as does Daniel Libeskind, our leading iconographer of trauma.

There is also an interesting, if jerry-built, team made up of a group of younger stars from the US and Europe. The final slot goes to Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, making this the fourth such commission they’ve received. They are already designing 7 WTC for Larry Silverstein; they’ve produced a site-wide scheme for Larry Silverstein (featuring an extremely tall tower); and they’ve devised a planning study for the east side of downtown for Carl Weisbrod (head of the Downtown Business Improvement District and member of the LMDC board). Why not just hand them the commission now?

Immediately following the LMDC selection of his list, Muschamp returned the favor, doing a full 180, writing that the LMDC—those former masters of malevolence and implacable foes of art—are now likely to “change the course of cultural life in New York.” Come again? What would really change the course of cultural (and political) life in New York would be an open process, a genuine competition, in which public bodies (not to mention architectural critics) devoted themselves to promoting the widest—and wildest—styles of inclusion, not this endless, mad favoritism. And am I wrong to think that in offering his own proposal at this stage of the game, Muschamp has stepped over the critical line, compromising his future ability to judge developments dispassionately?

2002