Posted on 02/04/2003 12:17:04 PM PST by montag813
2 Ground Zero design teams picked Choices narrowed to Studio Daniel Libeskind and THINK
By Jan Herman
NEW YORK, Feb. 4 — As competing factions jockeyed to decide a Ground Zero template for the future, officials Tuesday narrowed their choice of urban-design proposals to two — one by Studio Daniel Libeskind and one by the THINK team. Libeskin’s design proposes a 1,776-foot tower and would make visible “the great slurry walls” that descend into the bedrock foundations of Ground Zero. THINK envisions a tower even higher, a lattice-work scaffolding that would soar 2,100 feet. Both towers would be the world’s tallest structure.
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MSNBC
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God bless us with His liberty, the true light of the world.
Michelangelo's arm of Adam stretched out to the Creator? Want a view from a building shaped like a hand? That would be cool.
Berlin's Jewish Museum
I don't like this one of his either.
http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/diary011703.asp
I hope I’m remembering this right, but in I think Evelyn Waugh’s novel Helena there is a scene where the Emperor Constantine summons a team of architects and sculptors to build him a triumphal arch, just like the triumphal arch the Romans built at the peak of their artistic powers two and three centuries before. He wants elaborate carvings, elegant draperies, realistic renditions of his conquering soldiers and conquered enemies.
The architects and sculptors are indignant. They tell him that no up-to-date emperor would want an arch covered with all of that old-fashioned ornament. Modern arches, they say, are clean and pure, stripped of all that classical junk. “But could you do it if you wanted to?” the emperor asks. An embarrassed silence. Finally they admit: No, no we couldn’t.
I keep thinking of that story as I look at the New York Times’ very interesting slide show of proposals for the rebuilding of Ground Zero. The most striking thing about all the designs on view is that none of them seem to show the slightest understanding of how people in cities use public spaces. The design that seems to have most impressed the authorities in New York, by Daniel Liebskind, amounts to basically a giant sunken below-ground public space – ie, just the kind of space that had to be torn up in front of the GM building at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street because nobody wanted to go down there. Liebskind’s space would be even worse. It is bigger for one thing and more isolated – and because it is public property, the police will be unable to shoo away the homeless who will set up a hobo city against its walls.
Frankly, both designs are breathtakingly ugly, and as a former New Yorker, I would say out of step with the New York streetscape.
Oh, I think not. The WTC was the application of Gothic principles to modern sky-scraper design. They forced you to raise your eyes to the heavens. No one who had been inside their lobbies or stood outside them could fail to see the direct lineage. They certainly had little to do with the ugly glass and steel boxes around our cities.
Your comment speaks more about your own opinions than the reality of the WTC.
Ummmm ... no. Hitler kicked the "function before form" architects out of Germany as a bunch of degenerate modernists. That was the Bauhaus group.
The Nazi buildings which surivive show a severe but classical line, like our government buildings from the 1930's. You can see a number of them in Munich still.
As for the complaint about the museum being wedged into the towers looking like a memorial to the terorists, I don't see it that way. That's where the planes hit. That's where a lot of people died (especially in the sky lobby of the South Tower). That's where people jumped to their deaths from and that's where the people were stopped from descending before the tower collapsed. I think that the height, with a view, is a far better place for a museum than in a hole in the ground where a foundation was. It freezes the moment before the collapse, not the ruins after it and puts the height at which the tragedy took place into context. And having memorial platforms on top, where the old observation decks and Windows on the World were is also ideal, in my opinion. I don't want future generations robbed of the view I had when I visited the top of the WTC as a child.
Tall enough to make a statement. Realistic enough to recognize that people won't rent in a really tall building. Correct, in my opinion, in putting the museum up in the sky where it belongs. Also correct in providing a spectacular view from a memorial park in the sky, while giving those who prefer to memorialize the two towers as two holes in the ground get their foundation-level memorial, too. And, frankly, none of the blobs, points, or antennas that I've seen proposed, nor the hole that is currently there on the skyline feels right to me. Walk around New York. Look at all of the idealized skylines in paint, neon, and wire and see how many still contain two towers anchoring the south end of the city (you can see one on the corner of the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd Street). Nothing short of two towers will really make me happy, even if they are mostly framework, not solid buildings.
Oh really. Got proof of that? Are they abandoning the Sears Tower or the Transamerica Building?
That's one shaky premise.
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