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Plans for the future of the World Trade Center site provide snapshots of architectural anxiety.
By Christopher Hawthorne
June 2002
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Carlos Brillembourg Architects's towers would house artists and writers.
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The Tribute in Light, by a team including John Bennett, Gustavo
Bonevardi, Richard Nash Gould, Julian Laverdiere, Paul Marantz, and Paul
Myoda--organized by the Municipal Art Society with artistic support by
Creative Time.
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A proposal by Asymptote's Hani Rashid.
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Samuel Mockbee's plan, conceived in the hospital in the final hours of
his life, is comprised of two towers that soar even higher than the
original pair and a 911-foot-deep pit with a reflection pool and place
for worship at the bottom.
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Hodgetts + Fung reconfigure the site into a round plaza that would house
a museum "dedicated to all the world's people".
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Images from Winka Dubbeldam's Flex-city proposal.
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Eytan Kaufman Design and Development's World Bridge between New York and
New Jersey.
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The massive edifice of Ocean North's World Center for Human Concerns has
the volume of the fallen towers faintly visible within it.
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Lot/ek's vision for a new World Trade Center in which the
site is excavated down to the scarred bedrock, which will remain
uncovered as a memorial. The downtown street grid is partially
reinstated, running between their eight proposed 60-story towers and
over bridges that span the void formerly occupied by the original
building's deep foundation.
All images courtesy the architects and Max Protetch Gallery
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Seven months after September 11, six months after New York gallery owner
Max Protetch asked many of the most prominent architects in the world to
suggest ideas for rebuilding and memorializing the World Trade Center site,
and three months after the results of that request--nearly 60 proposals
in total--went on display in Manhattan, the whole show has been packed up
and shipped down to Washington, D.C. Reassembled at the National Building
Museum (NBM), it has gained an institutional feel and looks more strongly
toward the future--to the actual complex task of reconstruction--than it
did in New York. But the show remains perhaps most compelling as a record
of how designers began to grapple with an attack that had such a horrifying
architectural dimension--and how they looked upon early calls for a built
response.
When it opened at Protetch's Chelsea gallery on January 17, the exhibition
struck many New Yorkers as simply premature. (It was also immensely popular--by
some estimates the most heavily attended private gallery show in the city's
history.) Raw nerves and open emotional wounds are not an issue in Washington
this spring to the degree they were in New York last fall, of course. But
that doesn't mean we don't continue to wonder about the soul-searching that
the various firms went through when Protetch's request for submissions
came chugging through their fax machines.
The only real oversight in this compelling and predictably uneven exhibition
is that it fails to reveal just how many firms gave Mr. Protetch a
polite answer of thanks but no thanks. Various reports put the total number
of designers he contacted at about 125, which means more turned down his
offer than accepted it. It would have been fascinating to see those notes
of regret, whatever form they took, interspersed with the actual ideas for
reconstruction.
Actually, there is one such note in the show, and to the curators' credit
it is included right at the start. (The show was curated in Washington by
the NBM's Thomas Mellins, and designed by Elizabeth Kaleida.) The New York
architects Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi submitted an image of Lower
Manhattan in charcoal and collage on paper. Above ground the Twin Towers
are missing from the skyline; but their form is visible in the lower half
of the drawing as a reflection in the water. Along the bottom--as part
title, part bit of commentary--are the words "Reflect/Remember
9/11/2001" and "Postpone Conclusions."
Like nearly all of the participating firms, Weiss and Manfredi sent
a written response to Protetch as well. Copies of these responses were provided
in bulk to critics. They make for fascinating reading not so much for their
content, but for what they say about the thought processes--and the grammar!
and the spelling!--of the various architects. Some are terse. Some take
the form of a poem, or an e-mail. Others are fully worked-out explanations
of a project. Zaha Hadid's reads like a book report: "New York's World
Trade Center was one of the largest and most ambitious structures ever built...Construction
of the towers started in 1969 and was completed in 1973." "Design
is our mission, our passion, our art," the note from Weiss and Manfredi
begins, "but to realize the full potential of constructing this site,
we feel the imperative to ask questions first: How can we consider
the vacancy on the horizon before we impose a new vision?...Should there
be a period of mourning before we market solutions?" That last verb,
I think, is apt. Especially when it comes to the young, up-and-coming firms,
there is much awkward striving for attention on view here. The worst offender
in this regard is probably Oosterhuis Associates, from Holland, which submitted
a glossy illustrated calendar showing views of Lower Manhattan at different
times of the year. ("February...winter mist on Valentine's Day...September...red
skies caused by a desert storm in the Middle East.") The visuals are
as slick as a fashion magazine spread or a Benetton ad, with cleavage and
girls making out with girls and model types in knit caps. There's a building
in there somewhere--what the firm calls a "fully-adjustable"
and "self-executable and programmable" example of "emotive
architecture," whatever that means. The whole thing may well be simply
a misguided parody or cultural critique, but is this really the place for
either approach?
Because Protetch provided intentionally open-ended guidelines, the proposals
on view are highly diverse. Perhaps because (with only a couple of exceptions)
the invited firms are architects rather than artists, there are very
few proposals calling for a pure memorial without any new buildings or development
of some kind. A handful call for leaving Ground Zero itself empty of construction,
but even those include rather detailed schemes for architecture ringing
the site or scattered away from it. There is no dominant approach on view,
but there are a few running themes and some common formal ground. Two participants,
Hans Hollein and Coop Himmelblau, suggest rebuilding two tall towers and
then topping them with a huge horizontal memorial. (Imagine a gigantic anvil-shaped
form sitting across the top of two skyscrapers.) Two others, OCEAN north
and Nathan McRae, propose draping a huge new edifice around the old
forms of the Twin Towers, which would remain empty inside the new mega-building
as a pair of voids. Several firms designed clusters of towers that
organically either grow together or split apart, like roots or vertical
branches. There is also a fascinating running dialogue in the show between
those who would maintain Ground Zero itself, with or without replacement
towers nearby, as some sort of pit (the late Samuel Mockbee, Alexander Gorlin,
Hodgetts and Fung, RoTo Architects, among others) and those who would focus
on building into the sky again, but tentatively, in the form of slender
towers (Preston Scott Cohen, Hariri and Hariri, and Marjetica Potrcc,
to name a few).
With a provisional, exploratory show like this one, the critical response
that seems most appropriate is simply to single out those proposals showing
the most promise for further development, as well as the ones that strike
a poetic chord. In the first category I would put Cohen's San Gimignano-like
towers; Eytan Kaufman's curving pedestrian bridge over the Hudson; Hariri
and Hariri's interconnected group of thin skyscrapers; Hodgetts and Fung's
memorial scheme, which includes a grove of trees between the footprints
of the Twin Towers; Raimund Abraham's monumental, rust-colored, Richard
Serra-like buildings sliced through with passageways for beams of sunlight;
and RoTo's hollowed out memorial bowl in the shape of an upturned palm.
In the second could go the response from Weiss Manfredi; the temporary memorial
by Shigeru Ban, made of paper; Mockbee's towers rising over a deep pit with
a memorial pool at the bottom (which he sketched out in December from his
deathbed); and the artist Mel Chin's complex, idiosyncratic scheme for redeveloping
all of Lower Manhattan. Chin suggests suspending a kind of walkable superstructure
above street level that would spread exactly as far as the dust from the
towers carried in the hours after their collapse.
In an era when digital architecture--whether the word digital refers to
modeling techniques or to multimedia elements in new buildings themselves--has
come so strongly to the fore, the Protetch show heralds an appropriately
heart-felt, if temporary, return to the attractions of the tactile and the
physical. That's one of the reasons I liked Steven Holl's design, which
calls for ramps leading up the outside of an open-air, skyscraper-sized
structure; you imagine that you'd feel your legs burning if you walked straight
to the top. Massive scale might be appropriate for suggesting the greatness
of the tragedy, but any memorial will have to include humanistic and elemental
touches as well. The reason so many people have been flocking to see
Ground Zero--and even to shows like this one when it was in New York--has
a lot less to do with voyeurism than with a frustration with the increasingly
mediated nature of contemporary culture. People were sick of watching the
towers fall over and over on their television screens; they wanted to see
the site with their own eyes. If allowed to they would have jumped at the
chance to touch a piece of twisted metal from the buildings, just to feel
it. The same observation applies to the proposals on view. Digital bells
and whistles can return another day, in another place. It's for that reason
that a memorial like Alexander Gorlin's, which would list the names of those
killed on scrolling LED screens, like so many stock quotes or baseball scores
in Times Square, strikes me as tremendously inappropriate. Whether it's
with grass or dirt or water or fire, whatever memorial eventually rises
at the site will have to say something straightforward and honest about
the earth to which the victims--and the towers themselves--were sent tumbling.
Among the more subtle and thoughtful ideas in the show is one from the New
York architect Hugh Hardy. His entry is a small artwork, unaccompanied by
text, consisting of eight panels in four horizontal rows. Each row shows
a day and night scene of Lower Manhattan, with the Statue of Liberty looking
on from the left. The scenes proceed chronologically. The first pair
shows the skyline as it appeared before the World Trade Center was built.
The next shows the same view with the towers in place. The third shows the
city as it looks today, without the towers. And the fourth shows the kind
of development that might fill the site: densely arranged medium-sized
skyscrapers filled in with a conspicuous amount of greenery. Hardy
is acknowledging that time will continue to pass, and he is pointing out
a direction new construction in Lower Manhattan might take. But he's also
content, at least for the time being, to keep his distance.
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