All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
Goldberger, Ada Louise Huxtable, and Herbert Muschamp), and the person in the street all responded with a raucous ho-hum. Even the governor (up for re-election in November and the man with the most power to influence events) wants to preserve the towers’ footprints, arguing for a design that looks beyond the limits of the site. In the post-Enron environment, there is a growing sense that the leaders of the development community may not be the most dedicated keepers of the commonweal and that their plan simply to restore the status quo ante intolerably ignores both ethical and civic values.
While the dreadful proposals presented in this first round are the consequence of failed democracy, the avarice of power, and the imperative to make money, they are also the result of a design process that is conceptually flawed. Democracy, after all, cannot create great art, only sanction it. The essence of the problem lies in one of the cherished myths of modernity—that planning is essentially rational and objective. The LMDC has offered up a model of design by deduction, based on the idea that a “correct” solution can be derived by a hardheaded look at the facts and systematic analysis of possibilities and constraints. There’s a false distinction here between planning (something on which all reasonable people should be able to agree) and architecture (the fickle realm of taste). By representing the six proposals as planning (this was not architecture, we were endlessly told, despite what we could plainly see were buildings, parks, streets, and squares), the LMDC covered its ass by acting as if the most fundamental issues of form, organization, and character were simply the outgrowth of logical thinking.
The mediocrity of the results so far can be blamed on the mindset of the designers entrusted with this project. Although the LMDC’s head of planning, Alex Garvin, is knowledgeable, dedicated, and skilled, he has no track record as a friend of the imagination. Ideologically, he is squarely in the New Urbanist camp, and his vision appears hemmed by his traditionalist sensibility. Moreover, every architectural firm “officially” working on the site shares this proclivity. And they are remarkably supine: no one from any of the architectural firms or official bodies involved in the process has publicly spoken out for a change in the office-building program, for a more far-reaching planning process, or for a competition. All are hopelessly behind the curve of public opinion.
Real decisions continue to be made behind the scenes without formal accountability, despite the pretense. The same impropriety characterizes the LMDC’s design process and style of inclusion. BBB were allegedly chosen as the site designers through an “open” Request For Proposals (RFP) and stands to make a huge fee (out of a total contract of $3 million). But to call the RFP open is like saying that Trump Plaza is open to anyone who wants to live there. The LMDC’s RFP—which attracted only fifteen proposals—was carefully restricted to very large corporate offices. (Firms had to have experience of at least three $100 million projects to be eligible.) And at the same time as the RFP was proceeding, three other firms were already working away semi-officially without having gone through any public process at all. Larry Silverstein’s architect Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) was producing plans for the site. Cooper, Robertson was master planning on behalf of Brookfield Properties, owners of the World Financial Center. And Peterson/Littenberg (a very small firm that would never have qualified via the official process) was hired by the LMDC to be its “in-house” design consultants. This particular choice was presumably based on long personal association with Garvin, their shared traditionalist taste, and collegial days at the Yale architecture school.
Before designating the six schemes for public presentation, the LMDC looked at nine plans from BBB and two from Peterson/Littenberg, as well as at the plans commissioned by Brookfield and Silverstein. The board members then voted to select two of the BBB plans, two from Peterson/Littenberg, and one each from Cooper, Roberston and SOM. This choice caused a number of people to go ballistic, among them BBB’s John Beyer who—according to the New York Post—went to Joseph Seymour, head of the Port Authority, to grouse about the substitution of the two developer plans in lieu of similar schemes by his office.
Chastened, Seymour and LMDC director Lou Tomson agreed to replace the two developer plans with the BBB versions, a move which, in turn, caused a number of members of the LMDC task force to become enraged at the high-handed violation of “the process.” Arguably, though, Seymour and Tomson’s coup can be seen as restoring the process, since in theory only plans produced by BBB, the “publicly” designated architects, should have qualified.
By the end of July, the LMDC, barraged with criticism from all sides and losing its political backing from the mayor and the governor, itself came out in favor of opening out the process to smaller firms and to offices from abroad. But there’s little cause for confidence that this revised process won’t also be based on cronyism. Bromides about participation notwithstanding, it is clear that the architects with millions in public money to spend and with the sanction and public relations efforts of officialdom are working at an advantage. Other ideas simply cannot be heard.
Perhaps it is time for a little less management and a little more democracy. One possibility is to open the process to everyone with an idea. Let us immediately have not a competition, but an open call for ideas from around the world. Let us spend some money on a wonderful exhibition. Let us give the people some authentic choices instead of an elaborate scheme for pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes. Let us have the kind of real discussion that can only come from having real alternatives.
2002
10
The Dimensions of Aura
In the aftermath of the devastation of September 11, the clearing of the site was accompanied by widespread claims for its sanctity. Everyone recognized that this was sacred ground, a gravesite, a place permanently marked by tragedy. In those first days, many of us called for the preservation of the entire fourteen acres as a memorial to the 3,000 victims of the horrendous attack. In the intervening months, this idea—most forcefully demanded by the survivors of those who died—has been quietly disappeared. The media barely refer to it, and none of the schemes proposed to date by the LMDC—all of which call for the restoration of massive amounts of office and retail space—even approach such a solution. Indeed, among those officially empowered to make choices, there seems to be a consensus that such a mode of remembering is either impractical, overly sentimental, or in some other way simply disproportionate.
It is clear though that most people consider the site permanently saturated with solemnity and therefore entitled to special consideration, not just the restoration of commercial activity. Just as the battlefields of the Civil War, the site of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan have been marked sacred and retain the power to arouse tremendous emotions when encroachment threatens, the World Trade Center site has an aura that must remain unbreached. The question is, what is its range and weight? What is its influence on both its immediate and extended environments? In recent months, the “footprints” of the towers have come to serve as a metonymic representation of the larger space of this tragic event. Since Governor Pataki’s pledge over the summer that nothing would be built on these footprints, their preservation as the space of memorialization has become the default. Indeed, most of the plans promulgated by the LMDC have respected the idea of the inviolability of the footprints, despite the inclusion of massive construction around them.
Given that the site has now been cleared, the footprints are, however, an entirely conceptual notion: there is no longer any physical evidence of their presence. To be sure, the “bathtub”—the vast retaining wall that surrounds the entire site—is legibly clear. But the footprints themselves would have to be reconstituted in any scheme to “preserve” them. Would it make a difference if they were shifted by a few feet? Does their sanctity demand that nothing intrude in the airspace above them? Does their auratic power extend into the earth below?
A remarkable hair-splitting proposition has just been announced by the Port Authority that offers the first precise measurement of the official dimensions of this aura. Under pressure from survivor groups, the Port Authority has concluded that locating commercial space beneath the footprints is inappropriate but that retaining the alignment of the PATH commuter train (presumably a less crass, more public use) under the former south tower is okay, despite survivor arguments that the sacred space extends to bedrock.
This