Architecture: This is a page-turning account of a failure of architecture in the rebuilding at Ground Zero. It is written by a witty architect-cum-critic, Philip Nobel, who is a sort of Frank McDonald of New York, who names names, writes Shane de Blacam.
He tells the inside story of the search for meaning in the new buildings and lays bare the reputation of the architect who won the commission to design the new buildings to replace the World Trade Towers, Daniel Libeskind.
The book begins with a question and answer put by Libeskind: "What is the response to the event? It is what we build here. That is the response."
In an early chapter, Nobel establishes the architectural weakness of the original Trade Towers (Pomo Architecture before this style was invented). They were the work of Minoru Yamasaki, and the history of architecture professor at Yale, Vincent Scully, said of them: "As you know very few of us liked the World Trade Towers. They seemed too big, dumb and inarticulate. When they got hit all of the associations changed. All of a sudden, instead of looking too tall, they looked heart-rending. Now I love them."
Larry Silverstein, the developer who held the leases on the 16 acres of land at Ground Zero from the New York Port Authority, immediately set about the replacement design with architects Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM), the most powerful architectural firm in New York. Ada Louise Huxtable, the grand dame of American architecture writing, set the critical scene with a statement: "It's a very large, tough subject and there is too much static out there, too much talk and not enough thought. I frankly wish everyone would just shut up for a while".
Max Protech, the architecture gallery owner, invited 58 architects to illustrate their ideas for rebuilding Ground Zero, which designs he showed in his gallery in New York and attracted queues that stretched out the door and lined the streets around the block. This exhibition was later shown in Washington and at the Venice Biennale. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) commissioned planning studies and the Governor of New York declared that "where the Towers stood is Sacred Ground".
Within months of September 11th the LMDC announced its selection of seven firms and consortia to compete in an architectural competition that included some of the stars of world architecture - Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmay, Norman Foster, Daniel Libeskind, SOM, Think Team, et al - for the design of the new buildings at Ground Zero.
Libeskind, whose only important completed building is the zigzagging Jewish Museum in Berlin, whose work clearly has issues with Euclid and Plato, proposed to "turn the site into a kind of shattered crystal city with a piercing needle spire". The spire was stacked with hanging gardens, "the gardens of the world, a constant affirmation of life", Libeskind said. Other elements of Libeskind's design were loaded with symbolism: across from his glass-lantern design for a museum in front of the new train station, the centrepiece of his design was a triangular public space, opening to the east, which he called a "Wedge of Light". The lines of the two facades flanking the public space, pointed at a precise location of the sun in the sky at the end of the attack on September 11th. The result was a kind of urban Newgrange on midwinter day, on to which "each year on September 11th between the hours of 8.46am when the first plane hit and 10.28am when the second tower collapsed, the sun will shine without shadow in perpetual tribute to altruism and courage". Libsekind designed the tower to stand 1,776 (Declaration of Independence) feet tall.
Norman Foster's scheme of two towers that "kiss and touch and become one" were also laced with brain-dead, bone- crunching descriptions of little relevance to building - for example, "cross-cultural symbols of harmony, wisdom, purity, unity and strength".
The combined talents of the New York stars were judged "to have been given a chance to solve the greatest architectural problem the city had ever faced and they had come up very visibly short of greatness". The Think Team schemes were adjudged non-starters.
PHILIP NOBEL APPEARS to want to suggest that Frank Gehry might have been the one architect capable of delivering a great building, but Gehry played a longer game than his colleagues and set the project to his studio class at Yale as a one-room building (Bilbao writ large?), on the basis that "students have to go straight to architecture and can't muck around". He told his students that the only space he could imagine as a precedent was the Aya Sofya in Istanbul. However, Gehry's interest waned in a curious argument about the honorarium of $40,000 for participation in the competition, when the real costs were of the order of $500,000.
Libeskind, having won the competition, instead of embarking on the development of the design, went on a campaign of political, media and public selling of the project, always assisted by Nadia, his very, very, very supportive wife. He engaged public relations and town planning consultants and ran into massive problems of credibility. Eisenman lead the attack on the Libeskinds. Another New York architect, Eli Attia, responded by building a computer model that instantly put the lie to Libeskind's design. Attia found that the wedge would never be bathed in light: at 8.46am each September 11th, 40 per cent of it would be in shadow; at 10.28am it would be 99 per cent dark. The results of Attia's study were reported in detail in the New York Times but the news was hardly shocking because there were 10 blocks of skyscrapers between the site and the nearest open sky to the east.
The exposure of the Wedge of Light fiction was the architectural equivalent of a campaign-trail bimbo eruption, and the Libeskinds reacted like red-faced candidates with their pants down, eventually disguising their embarrassment behind the suggestion that the Wedge of Light was a metaphor.
The public relations tide turned against the Libeskinds. Larry Silverstein was in pole position and, with the Libeskinds fatally wounded, the way was clear for the masterplan to be stripped of its hyperbole. After heads had been knocked together, a forced arrangement between SOM and Libeskind resulted in a changed situation for Libeskind and an e-mail press release from the LMDC said it all: "We are pleased to announce an historic collaboration between Skidmore Owings and Merrill and Studio Daniel Libeskind to design the world's tallest building, the Freedom Tower. SOM, one of the world's leading skyscraper design firms, will serve as design architects and project managers leading a project team that will design the tower. Studio Daniel Libeskind have been designated by the Port Authority as masterplan architect for the World Trade Center site . . . The two firms will begin collaborating immediately."
THE PUBLIC PRESENTATION, including the titles, of two recent exhibitions of Irish art, Connemara as Metaphor and William Orpen: Politics Sex and Death, represent the same triumph of spin over content in fine art that misdirected architects in the competition in New York. Some felt that the Connemara show failed to make a single coherent point and Orpen certainly does not need the appendage of politics and sex to introduce his work.
By the same token, it is worth recording that the reason the Irish artist, Sean Scully, is teaching in Munich is to point a younger generation of artists, through the redress of painting, away from the world of conceptualists.
In the end, New York did what New York does, which is to build a property investment at Ground Zero where a dignified building, such as the Seagram Building by Mies van der Rohe, was called for.
Go out and buy the book- it is a good read if you are interested in this sort of stuff.
Shane de Blacam is a partner at deBlacam and Meagher Architects. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and trained as an assistant architect on the Mellon Center for British Art at Yale University. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland in 2004
Sixteen Acres: The Rebuilding of the World Trade Center Site. By Philip Nobel, Granta Books, 288pp. £17.99