The great Chicago planner Daniel Burnham spoke of the power of a “noble, logical diagram.” Once recorded, he said, it “will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing asserting itself with growing intensity.”
Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for the former World Trade Center site, selected Wednesday, is a new noble, logical diagram — one that is sure to need a shield if real estate interests try to torture it with death by a thousand “gnat bites,” as Robert Ivy, the editor of Architectural Record, so trenchantly put it.
The plan, whose hallmarks are a sunken memorial and a garden-filled, 1,776-foot spire that would be the world’s tallest building, is more a road map than a finished blueprint. It inevitably will be changed, as all master plans are, as the economy rises and falls, as interest groups like the victims’ families make their voices heard, and as political actors enter and exit from the stage.
The questions are: Will the change be for good or ill? Will Libeskind’s noble, logical diagram grow in intensity or become fainter and less forceful?
Already battle lines are being drawn over such issues as the amount of commercial space the project will contain, how much retail space will be underground and whether a parking garage and transit center should be located where many of the nearly 2,800 victims from Sept. 11 were recovered.
Also uncertain is who will pay for the memorial that is at the heart of Libeskind’s plan and who will control the rebuilding — the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site; developer Larry Silverstein, who holds the lease to the site; New York Gov. George Pataki, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg or the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the city-state agency that ran the design competition.
Danger signs are present in the fine print and in the revised drawings that appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the world. Libeskind’s original design, which called for 7.6 million square feet of office space, proposed relatively slender, beautifully proportioned towers. The new version, which suggests at least 10 million square feet of office space, has skyscrapers that appear much bulkier. The danger may not be death by thousand gnat bites, but death by a thousand extra pounds.
Protecting design’s integrity
It was for good reason that Robert D. Yaro, the thoughtful chair of the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York, put out a statement Thursday that said: “We must protect the integrity of the design while making development decisions that acknowledge market forces and aim for the revitalization of all of Lower Manhattan.”
Striking that balance may turn out to be far harder for Libeskind than winning the design competition. It may make the backbiting over the competing master plans seem like a tea party.
But Libeskind has aces up his sleeve — not just the political backing of Pataki and Bloomberg, but public pressure. It’s the reason we’ve reached this tantalizing stage of the rebuilding process, when greatness seems possible. It’s the reason that the original six dreary designs for ground zero were discarded after the development corporation released them last July.
The routes that cities don’t take are every bit as important as the paths they do follow, a truism that turns out to be the case here. The development corporation’s planners wisely did not mix and match ideas from the seven teams of architects, including Libeskind, that were selected in September for a second round of planning. Nor did they allow themselves to be bullied by The New York Times’ architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp, who on Feb. 6 dismissed Libeskind’s plan as “an astonishingly tasteless idea.”
In comparison to the losing finalist, the twin lattice structures proposed by the international THINK team of architects, Libeskind’s design is far more nuanced. A series of glass, angular buildings, it may, at first, seem chaotic. But it actually is an exquisite essay in taking the equivalent of exploded glass shards and reassembling them into a new, and coherent, whole. The quiet symbolism of death and rebirth could not be more powerful or appropriate.
Critics have attacked Libeskind’s plan for literalism — the 1,776-foot spire is an obvious reference to the year of the Declaration of Independence, for example — but they forget that a plan, like a play, needs to appeal on many levels. This one does that, both figuratively and literally.
The power of depth
While it is easy to focus on the record-setting height of Libeskind’s unoccupied, garden-topped spire, which would soar above a 70-story office building, the core of his design reveals the power of depth — specifically, the architect’s inspired notion to preserve a portion of the sunken pit that was the foundation of the twin towers.
The pit will serve as the place for a memorial to the victims who died on Sept. 11 and will be framed by the concrete slurry walls that hold the Hudson River at bay. Like the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, those walls will have an authenticity — and a sense of strength — that is palpable. They will remind visitors that the memorial is as much about resilience as it is about remembering.
Within his chock-a-block district of offices, housing, a hotel, shops and a cultural center, Libeskind correctly puts his emphasis not on massive objects, as the THINK plan did, but on public space, the streets that would be shaped by his buildings and, most of all, the sunken memorial.
Yet his angular office buildings don’t simply frame the memorial. Their facades, seemingly sheared off by the explosions that destroyed the twin towers, make them part of the memorial. The whole site, not just the memorial, is sacred, they seem to say.
There are, too, skillfully worked out nuances, like the public space designed to capture a wedge of sunlight each year on Sept. 11, from the time the first plane hit until the time the second tower fell. Called the Wedge of Light, it would be one of two public spaces that provide grand entrances to the memorial.
But such nuances may count for little to the real estate developers who like to say that real estate is to Manhattan what oil is to Texas.
These barons of the bottom line could wreak havoc on Libeskind’s plan in any number of ways, from cut-rate office buildings that could erode the power of its shardlike ensemble to insensitively placed buildings that would disturb the power of urban spaces like the Wedge of Light.
Political maneuvering
To date, Libeskind has shown himself to be as adroit at the art of political maneuvering as he is at the art of architecture. He made his pit shallower, for example, to stabilize the slurry wall and to accommodate a bus parking garage and a transit stop beneath the memorial. He also skewered THINK’s towers as “skeletons,” crystallizing a view that they would be ghostly reminders of the death and destruction of Sept. 11 rather than symbols of hope.
But moves like that will only go so far.
A key question is whether the development corporation will fulfill the promise, set out in its report on Libeskind’s winning design, to create design guidelines that will allow growth at ground zero, but within constraints that preserve the integrity of Libeskind’s plan. Such guidelines, especially if they are written to promote design excellence, would give Libeskind’s noble, logical diagram added force — and the resilience it needs to withstand the attacks that inevitably will be made against it.
The sexy design contest is over.
Now the real work — and the real battles — begin.
