Another World Trade Center Horror
New York (July 25, 2002) -- The six proposals -- I avoid dignifying these retarded exercises in crushing commercial square footage and meaningless memorial voids with the term "concept plans" -- that the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the Port Authority have provided for the rebuilding of the tragically maimed World Trade Center site are six cookie-cutter losers. We do not need a necropolis of the urban-renewal mistakes of the '60s. The titles only dimly disguise the fact that the phalanxes of massed office buildings are the revealed reality of official intentions. Called Memorial This and That as a gesture to the universal desire for commemoration, they are dedicated to maximum return on the land, while obviously begging the future.
Professionals, the press and about 4,000 New Yorkers attending an unprecedented public forum have agreed. They expressed their opinions loudly, in true New York fashion. There was too much office space, too little noncommercial use, and the site was too densely built. But what they perceived, and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation apparently did not, was the absence of the creativity that turns a complex set of requirements into a vitalizing solution that adds to a city's presence and power through the arts of architecture and urban design.
What they said was that the plans weren't ambitious enough. Actually, they are dreadful. It would have taken Panglossian optimism to expect anything better when the profession's major talents were shut out of the process from the start. This is not how a world-class city gets world-class design.
If the public was smart enough to know this, why didn't the LMDC know it? The kindest conclusion is that they haven't a clue. Out of ignorance, convenience or co-option by the only system its members evidently know and understand, they chose to do it the way it has always been done in New York, using a process that neither encourages nor accommodates excellence in design.
Because they drew a blank doesn't make them blameless. There are other, better ways to go that have been well established by cities and institutions with large new building programs. But in New York, development is not planning; it is bluffing, power-brokering and well-honed legal skills. It is the art of the deal, not the art of the city. It has nothing to do with that elusive thing called vision.
The starting point for these plans was not the thoughtful resolution of complex conditions, but the bargaining position of those with a vested financial interest in the site: the Port Authority, the owner of the World Trade Center, and Larry Silverstein, the developer who had acquired the lease. They insisted that all 11,000 square feet of lost commercial space be restored. Scrooge could not have done better. The buildings are monsters.
As the game is played, the developer sets demands beyond what he knows he will settle for, negotiations ensue, and a compromise is found and called a triumph by both parties to the deal. If the developer and his lawyers have played their hand well, he ends up with perhaps more than he had set as his real bottom line, but almost certainly with as much as he needed (not wanted -- that has no limit). Amenities are trade-offs in the process, often goaded by civic protest, not part of a creative, comprehensive or community-based concept. That's how it works, and how it has been set up here.
What will now be negotiated for rebuilding Ground Zero -- and the ritual negotiations have already begun -- is totally unrelated to the conceptual poverty of the plans. There is talk of buyouts and other economic escape hatches, and rumors that the Port Authority may even cancel that onerous lease, at considerable cost, freeing Larry Silverstein to act like a hero. Although it would be naïve to think that the process is being rescripted in response to public opinion, the protests may indeed be awakening dormant instincts of civic responsibility in the face of unspeakable tragedy and the political shadow of an election year. The city has suffered a tremendous loss. Profit-as-usual hardly seems appropriate. What Mr. Silverstein had in mind when he swore to rebuild is too awful to contemplate, now that we have contemplated it.
Gestures by the LMDC meant to broaden the process included the really heroic and largely successful attempt to hear the voices of many concerned groups -- and the mistake of appointing as adviser a single architect with a single point of view, who, in turn, selected a design coordinator with a fine reputation for historic preservation but not known for vaultingly original ideas. The job was then given to less-than-earthshakingly innovative firms that became the captive planners of the financially involved parties, a guarantee that the results would be limited in a disastrous way.
One senses that all of the agencies with a controlling interest in the rebuilding of Ground Zero -- the LMDC, the Port Authority, the New York State Development Corporation, right up to the governor's office -- are also clueless. Not one of them has demonstrated the ability or desire to conceive of development beyond the most conventional, deadly design, real-estate criteria. Planning agencies (remember them?) have simply shriveled away in the face of the state agencies' coordinated power. Only New York's mayor seems to be quietly unenthusiastic.
The LMDC calls the proposals "a starting point" for discussion and modification. That will provide a convenient distraction from the real issue -- that there's nothing to discuss. These plans can't be tweaked; they have got to go. You have to begin with ideas, not clichés. They do serve a purpose, however. It is easier for most people to understand pictures than descriptions, so it is easier to grasp how awful they are. They also show what has been dropped from the guidelines -- the mixed uses, the social and cultural life. The memorial, upstaged by the massive commercial development, is pushed from place to place.
It is fashionable to say that greed at a grand scale has made New York great. That's a dismal outlook. Our buildings are great to the degree that their architecture is great; where the city is great, as at Rockefeller Center, it is because there are subtleties of scale and relationships that elevate the urban experience. If size and square footage is where all office buildings begin, they do not end there with landmarks like the Woolworth, Chrysler or Empire State buildings; they are not memorable for their visibility (like the twin towers, which were neither architecturally distinguished nor a trade center), but for their quality and character. This is not the same thing as building big with trim.
Successful, city-enriching plans are achieved by those trained and talented specialists who have surprised us ever since Michelangelo miraculously transformed the impossibly mismatched grades and buildings of Rome's Capitoline Hill into the superbly synthesized Campidoglio. The rest of us were born without the ability to conceptualize such things or the skills to execute them.
A campaign has begun to convince us that the rejection of the six proposals will mean the loss of time and money, delays in transportation facilities and further pain for small businesses. But who lost all these months doing the hopelessly wrong thing? Who shut out the gifted individuals who could take the commercial, public and private needs, and the memorial, and give them a form that honors the site rather than exploiting it? What is not negotiable is the history, symbolism and emotion on an epic scale that marks Ground Zero as a special place. We have only one chance to rebuild with glory, to memorialize with honor, to add beauty and humanity, as well as profit and prestige, to the city we love.
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