Lockdown at Ground Zero
James Westcott
About a year ago, when rogue plans for rebuilding the twin towers were floating around, I thought it would be difficult to top the imaginative and intellectual bankruptcy of the idea. But corporate favorite David Childs, in collaboration with his architectural partners the NYPD, seems to have done just that. Sitting on top of a 200-foot bomb-proof concrete plinth, clad in shining armor, the new Freedom Tower–which boringly resembles a single twin tower crossed with the Empire State Building–is a foreboding fortress. And despite what the New York Post says, this is not a good thing. The new tower, which will be the tallest in the world, is based on a medieval mentality: it is meant to strike fear into our enemies. But with its domineering and shortsighted security measures–truck bombs? If another attack comes, like 9/11, it will come in a way we don’t expect–what it reveals is that we are still terrified ourselves. We can’t imagine a time when our most important buildings won’t be under serious threat of destruction.
First, a quick assessment of what’s wrong with the new Freedom Tower, apart from its deep-seated pessimism. There is no masterplan any more. While Daniel Libeskind’s design for the site was pretty morbid and sentimental in the first pace, at least it had a bit of unity. But the new tower, with its pinstripes and elongated triangles, no longer bears any relationship to the crescent of towers that will surround it. And, with a newly-centralized centralized antenna, its form no longer makes reference to the raised arm of the Statue of Liberty. Developer Larry Silverstein ruled that asymmetry was too expensive. The progressive aspects of earlier designs, like the "vertical gardens" (long since ditched) and the power-generating wind turbines in the upper reaches, have disappeared. Instead, we have the automatic corporate architecture of the bottom line. It’s cringe-making to watch Libeskind continue to defend the Freedom Tower, as if he hasn’t been totally usurped and humiliated by the ransacking of his masterplan. Remember when he and Santiago Calatrava, designer of the new PATH station, planned to position their buildings so they would create a "Wedge of Light" at 8.46am every September 11th?
The Freedom Tower’s 1,776 target height remains. This weird and aesthetically irrelevant numerology–you couldn’t tell the height of the tower and feel proud just by looking at it–is Libeskind’s last remaining influence. It’s the kind of esoteric symbolism that great and frightened empires from ancient China to the Egyptians encoded into their monuments.
There are ways of demonstrating resurgence and defiance that don’t resort to the banality bombast of this surly monolith. A vox pop contributor to the free New York paper Metro last week summed things up: "There’s only so much you can do with a conventional skyscraper." Exactly. We didn’t have to build a conventional skyscraper at Ground Zero. New types of big buildings are available–and imaginable. But Silverstein doesn’t care. He just wants his 10 million square feet of office space. One wonders why though, given a downtown office vacancy rate of about 13 percent, and the fact that Silverstein doesn’t have a single tenant for either Freedom Tower or the nearly-complete No. 7 World Trade Center–apart from himself and Governor Pataki.
A building with the prominence and emotional resonance of a new World Trade Center should have a sense of public-ness beyond the predictable promise of "world class restaurants" in the sky. We should think of skyscrapers as vertical urban planning: they should meet similar conditions of public access and impact as the same volume of space would if it was laid out horizontally.
The five almost human-looking interconnected buildings presented in 2002 by United Architects met this criteria. It was a veritable city in the sky. There were multiple entrances, several "sky lobbies," a hotel and apartments, and a unified floor half way up that would have hosted a "sky park." It was a building with zero arrogance but unlimited ambition. In my wildest dreams, the breathtaking United Architects proposal would be resurrected.
Opposition to the new Freedom Tower can’t be dismissed as typical, charming New York back-talk. Can we please remind ourselves that the worst possible outcome to Ground Zero re-development has just materialized? A process delayed for years by phony public consultations (Silverstein had chosen Childs from the very start), lawsuits between Silverstein and his insurers and architects, blundering intervention by the NYPD, and political grandstanding (the cornerstone Pataki laid for Freedom Tower on July 4th last year will now have to be moved)–all this has produced a spiritually vacant corporate fortress with an Orwellian name designed to paper over the fact that there’s nothing free about it.
A version of this article first appeared in Metro New York
