Читать книгу All Over the Map - Michael Sorkin - Страница 31

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And Then There Were Two

The charade of a design competition for Ground Zero has now arrived at two “finalists,” Daniel Libeskind and the “Think” group. Whatever one feels about the formal merits of the two schemes, they are deeply constrained by the circumstances of their production. Survivors of a group selected by the LMDC from a list that included virtually every architect on the planet, the two finalists were premiated in camera according to unrevealed standards. As many have objected, this lack of any formal accountability to the public robs the schemes of political authority beyond logrolling, all’s-well-that-end’s-well scenarios.

The “competition” that has yielded these two schemes arose as a cover for the disaster of the summer, in which another hand-picked group of architects produced a set of schemes of such banality that the LMDC was forced into a more design-friendly strategy to cover its beleaguered ass. The premise behind this new competition among “star” architects was simple: architecture would be a sufficient source of difference, of alternatives, for the site. Displaced would be any discussion about the larger questions of program and propriety, and in their stead would stand more ineffable aesthetic categories. The LMDC, as both the programmer and adjudicator of the process, has worked mightily to preserve the core of its brief: to make sure that the site reacquires its status as a hub of corporate office space. The program, to which both finalist teams have wordlessly acquiesced, demands 10 million square feet of commercial use—including offices, hotel, and retail—as well as cultural space, widely felt to be vital to downtown Manhattan’s renewal. And, of course, somewhere in the mix is a memorial to the events of September 11. Indeed, the few arguments publicly proffered by the LMDC for picking these two finalists from the rest of the litter spring from their putative success in establishing an apt image for memorial.

This result, however, serves effectively to pull the rug out from under the actual memorial competition that the LMDC has long claimed to be organizing. So strong is the memorializing aspect of each of the schemes that a competition for further memorialization will be desperately constrained. In the case of the Think proposal, the footprints—of interest to anyone contemplating a memorial site—are to be enclosed in the 111-story cages of their twin “cultural” Eiffel Towers. In the Libeskind design, the terrain of memorial is below ground, and any fresh intervention must figure itself against the huge slurry/wailing wall left exposed—the sole architectural survivor of the attack.

The gambit of foregrounding big architecture (both of the competitors offer structures taller than the World Trade Center towers) seems to have had the desired effect, the happy sign that big buildings are to be the outcome. Although a number of individuals and civic organizations (including the Regional Plan Association) have spurned the closed-door, non-public process favored by the LMDC, others have risen to the bait. Of particular interest has been the coverage in the New York Times, which has accepted the premise of the so-called competition without a word. Instead, our national newspaper of record has remained unconcerned, focusing simply on the relative merits of the two pre-chosen schemes.

On January 21, before the final two names were announced, the Times editorialized in favor of the Libeskind project, urging that “one of the two design finalists should certainly be Daniel Libeskind’s soaring garden tower and ground-level memorial that uses the slurry wall holding back the Hudson River as a backdrop. Neither should hark to the past to recreate the twin office towers.” The editorial did not suggest which other scheme might be included in the final two, but as none of the plans proposed recreating the twin office towers, one might assume that any plan which proposed twin towers—Foster, Peterson-Littenberg, or Think—were being ruled out. The editorial concluded with a call for the architectural and infrastructural plan to be in place before the competition for the memorial begins.

On January 28, Herbert Muschamp, the paper’s architecture critic, weighed in with his choice for the winner: Think. He touted their twin latticework towers as “a work of genius, a towering affirmation of humanism in modern times.” Although the humanism of placing windowless cultural facilities seventy stories up escapes me, Muschamp’s choice was unsurprising since members of the team had already been central to his own attempt to design the site last summer. He had also already applauded the brilliant idea to place new construction—per the suggestion of one of the Thinkers—above a buried West Street, leaving Ground Zero free for future deliberation. The Think solution, however, has abandoned this entirely in favor of a site plan not unlike one of those so massively derided over the summer. (Although in their signature renderings, the 8 million square feet of office space they propose seems to have been coated in stealth materials, imperceptible to the eye.)

On February 4, the two finalists were revealed and—mirabile dictu—they were the Times’s two favorites, never mind that the paper had earlier published a news story claiming that the public strongly preferred three schemes, only one of which (Libeskind) made it into the finals. Things rapidly became more interesting on 43rd Street. On February 6, Muschamp derided the Libeskind project as a “war memorial to a conflict that has scarcely begun,” contrasting it with the Think project, described as “a soaring affirmation of American values.” Libeskind, in contrast, is burdened with the worst descriptors in the lexicon, “retro,” “nostalgic,” “pre-Enlightenment,” “premodern,” “medieval” . . . “religious.” While Libeskind is certainly no slouch in the automatic piety department (indeed, he’s a virtual self-igniting Yahrzeit candle, to paraphrase Martin Filler), this criticism is totally over the top.

Muschamp attempts to argue that memorial architecture has come to stand in the place evacuated by religion. In his formulation of the separation of civil and religious spheres, he argues that under the medieval system religion was exploited for political gain, whereas in our day political actions are accountable to reason. Left out of this account, of course, is the idea that political actions in democratic culture are also accountable to the desires of citizens. Muschamp and the LMDC see eye to eye in their preference for philosopher kings (“poets are the legislators of the world,” as he noted in an earlier column) and both see the problem of Ground Zero as primarily representational, as if the content of the project were purely wrapped up in issues of imagery, an amazingly medieval conceit. The competition is reduced to a matter of iconography—how is a giant World Trade Center–shaped lattice more intrinsically modern, progressive, and meaningful than a hole in the ground. Clearly, these are tangled, difficult choices only to be unraveled by clerics like Muschamp.

As if to bolster this reduction of content to a purely formal matter, a kind of fashion obbligato has been played and replayed in the ancillary sections of the Times. In a recent story, Daniel Libeskind—a lifelong nebbish with a fresh eye for fashion—was celebrated for his habit of wearing cowboy boots. Accepting his physiognomic account of the colossal benefits to his stride, the story neglected the real reason shortish people often take to stacked heels. The piece also reported admiringly Libeskind’s Alain Mikli eyeglasses, which turned out to be the harbinger of a full-blown story about the eyewear of the finalists. Here Ken Smith of Think in his Corb redux specs. Here Fred Schwartz in his horn-rims. Those Miklis on Libeskind reappear. Rafael Viñoly is seen in this signature two-pairs-at-once look. Never was vision so conflated with sight or sore eyes. Whom the Times would employ, it first makes bad. The Times has given the LMDC a virtual free pass as far as this process is concerned.

As a decision nears, the Times has pumped up the volume both in corroboration of the cynical process and in handicapping the winner. A news story the week before the decision was to be made indicated that the political powers that be were tending to the Libeskind scheme. On the Sunday preceding the decision, a guest column by art historian Marvin Trachtenberg—appearing in the architecture slot generally occupied by Muschamp—denounced the Think scheme as “mainstream modernism,” an architecture he associated with “the repression of history, memory, place and identity; the exaltation of functionalism, technology, and the machine,” and a “hatred of the city.” These scary attributes were alleged to be the spirit behind Think’s thing, its “flayed skeletons of the World Trade Center,” a description Libeskind himself used repeatedly in public to describe his competition. As if that weren’t enough, Trachtenberg identified what Muschamp had called “a soaring tribute to American values” with “a model taken from the realm of totalitarianism, the famous Monument to the Third Communist International” proposed in 1920 by the great constructivist Vladimir Tatlin.

Liebeskind’s design, on the other hand, was lauded for its putative lack of abstraction, its “deeply creative, organic relationship to the specificity of ground zero and its environment and meaning, as well as its accommodation of human needs and sensibilities . . . profoundly ‘user friendly’ on all levels.” In short, it was “a miracle of creativity, intelligence, skill, and cutting-edge architectural thought; it looks to the future of architecture, just as Think remains mired in the past . . . it reminds us what it means to be human in a city.” Say what?

Trachtenberg and Muschamp, looking at schemes alleged to be polar opposites, manage to adduce exactly the same meanings for their favorites. This pathetic argumentation does nothing to advance the contest of ideas and reveals—in its glib and unanalytical associationism (Think is fascist! Liebeskind is humanist! Think is humanist! Liebeskind is fascist!)—just how bankrupt, how feckless, criticism divorced from actual reasoning can be.

The day before the winner was to be announced, the Times took three final shots. Under the headline “Designers’ Dreams Tempered By Reality,” Muschamp described modifications in the finalists’ schemes to meet objections from the Port Authority and the LMDC. After some boilerplate about the process having interested the public in architecture, he took a wistful dig at Libeskind, claiming that because of his particular compromise (shrinking the pit), “the design’s symbolic heart no longer exists.” While later allowing that Think’s scheme had also been shrunk (by the removal of most of the program from within the lattice), he insisted that “the conceptual heart of this design remains intact.” Lub dub.

On the same page—under pictures of the finalists surrounded by microphone-wielding media types—another article, “Turning A Competition Into A Public Campaign,” appeared. This described the twin media blitzes launched by the finalists, ranging from a full court hustle of media outlets, to the hiring of two flacks (one of whom resigned over being second-guessed) by the Liebeskind camp (which had demanded air time with Larry King, Connie Chung, and 60 Minutes), to the hot pursuit of survivor support by both teams. Indeed, the Times even reported on its own reporting, citing—not unsardonically—the boots and glasses stories the paper had run.

Finally, a news story reported that the site planning committee of the LMDC had come out in favor of the Think scheme while, as reported earlier, both the mayor and governor were supporting Libeskind. The decision was held to be the result of strong lobbying for Think by Roland Betts, a local business tycoon, best buddy of George Bush, and a member of the LMDC Steering Committee, itself charged with the final decision. That committee, however, is dominated by members who owe their jobs to the governor and the mayor—Port Authority officials and members of the two administrations. If I were a betting person, I would have to say it looks like Libeskind.

Either way, though, the Times will have called it. Having supported both projects and having piously editorialized about the fairness of the process, the paper has signaled its readiness to fall into line. The more cynical among us are inclined to see the competition as so much smoke-blowing, the real plan awaiting the culmination of multiple deals involving Larry Silverstein, the philistine leaseholder; the Port Authority, the site’s owner, currently preparing its own plan in secret; the City of New York, still trying to engineer a swap of Ground Zero for the land under JFK and LaGuardia airports; and the governor, the player with the most cards. Indeed, the only dissent from all of this has come from Rudy Giuliani, who declared that none of the plans had captured the significance of the event or the place.

2003