All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
striated dunescape of the Arabian desert.
The Doha museum has another of SITE’s signatures, the use of simple plan geometry as the medium for registering the dissolution of architecture into landscape. Here, the orthogonal system set up by the parallel walls of the building emerges in the landscape as a grid that organizes a garden which begins to wiggle and loosen as it approaches the edge of the site, lapsing finally into pure landscape. The same recurs in the Dresden Garden project and in the first full-formed version of the scheme, the civic center for Le Puy-en-Velay, France. In this work, the grid is the medium of translation between a group of historic buildings and a surrounding terraced topography, decreasing the degree of the artificial as the force of the project wanes over distance.
This technique of the graded wash between building and landscape parallels James Wines’s own beautiful pen-and-wash delineations, a technique that also depends on the artful blur and controlled transition. This dissolve—rendered either as cut or fade-out—works both as blur and as seam. At the Perpetual Savings and Loan Bank of 1980, a “traditional” stone bank building changes into a greenhouse along a diagonal seam. At the San Leandro Best of 1983 and Frankfurt Museum of 1984, the joint between masonry and glass is created by a rotation in plan, one building type turning into or passing through the other, producing forms that are suave, rich, and surprising.
SITE delivers its message by merging cultural and natural landscapes to both advertise and enable a sustainable future for the earth. The embedded critique is not simply of an architecture that resists its environmental duty, but of one that fails to investigate and invent the richness of sustainability’s formal palette. SITE’s work is not shy about its individuality as art, re-infusing architecture with the relevance of both difference and co-determination, seducing us into a logical future.
2002
20
Who Decides?
In a phrase that can charitably only be described as disingenuous, Lou Thomson, President of the LMDC, announced that the seven new proposals for the World Trade Center site “were forged in a democratic process.” If only it were so: deliberations over the future of Ground Zero have become progressively less and less democratic as layer after layer of bureaucracy is inserted between the citizens of New York and the final decision about the site.
The situation was bad enough to begin with, the most powerful players being the Port Authority—an agency of Olympian detachment from public control—and the venal Larry Silverstein, its largest lessor, who tried to claim his insurance payout for 9/11 should be doubled since, he argued, two catastrophes had occurred on the site.
In late 2001, the LMDC also entered the picture and quickly hired (through some oblique process) an “outside” planner to prepare the misbegotten, conceptually identical, and universally derided office schemes presented in July. Clearly embarrassed by the outcry, the LMDC immediately announced a so-called “competition” to elicit more “visionary” architectural proposals. And so it set up a new “non-political” committee to choose six new teams which nevertheless managed to include the architects already working for Larry Silverstein, British mega-practice Foster and Partners, a group of architects heavily promoted by the New York Times, and the architects already introduced through the back door by the LMDC for the first go-round.
Although the seven new schemes offer some dramatic form-making, they actually serve to make the process even more obscure and inaccessible. While more alternatives are vital if we’re to reach a wise and democratic decision about the future of Ground Zero, the powers in charge are using this addition of “choice” not to widen but to narrow the options. It isn’t just a refusal to consider any idea broached by the “competitors,” but that virtually every scheme they do endorse serves to legitimize an even more primary lack of choice—that of the use of the site. While several of the projects do include interesting ideas for the memorial, they are all—like their roundly reviled predecessors—predominantly strategies for locating vast amounts of office space on or near the site, most offering some variation on the world’s tallest building.
Two fundamentally bogus arguments are used to defend the process that has produced this outcome. The first is that the LMDC, the Port Authority and Larry Silverstein have all “listened” to the people. This is a familiar dodge of autocrats everywhere, like the Saudi Arabian princes who claim the audiences they hold, in which boons are selectively offered to long lines of mendicants, reflect some culturally specific form of “democratic” governance. Yet democracy is not simply a matter of being heard but of having the power to sway the course of events, and no amount of focus groups or sessions of “listening to the people” offer that rightful certainty of power.
The second justification lies in the similarity between the LMDC’s form of decision-making and New York’s indigenous style of democracy. The city’s particular approach to planning lies in the “power” of individuals (or Community Boards, or civic groups) to just say no, whether through foot-dragging, litigation, demonstrations, or civil disobedience. Such democracy by negation can help curb the excesses of both elected and unelected officials but it is, at best, a gamble: no statute obliges anyone to pay attention, and initiative belongs to the powerful. Indeed, the mess we are in grows precisely out of the extralegal, back-room style of planning that has dominated the reconstruction process from the outset. It reflects the contemporary grail of efficient development as building “as of right,” which is to say, without any public input.
Although planning, architecture, and democracy are difficult bedfellows—no amount of public participation can substitute for either artistic genius or genuine expertise—rebuilding Ground Zero is too important to the collective life and identity of New York to be relegated to the bottom-line mentality that is driving it. What is excluded (in much the same way that survivor representatives were excluded from the board of the LMDC) is the idea that the plan must be driven by the memorial; that commercial activity is not the invariable default; that designs might come from people other than those carefully filtered by the uninspiring leadership of the LMDC or produced in secrecy by the Port Authority or the lessor.
American democracy is not direct but representative. Such representation is least responsive when it is most attenuated, when decision-makers are furthest removed from popular recall. Downtown, decisions are being made by the appointees of the appointees of the appointees of elected officials. So perhaps it is time for a simpler strategy: let the people decide themselves. I don’t suggest this as a universal formula for planning. As a general matter, direct democracy is a terrible way to plan, a lowest-common-denominator approach. But this is a special case. It is important to recognize that September 11 was an event; it happened to all of us, not to buildings or businesses or an area downtown. September 11 included everyone, and it is the extraordinariness of this fact that must be acknowledged in the plans for Ground Zero. The process of deciding becomes, in this instance, far more important than the efficiency, profitability, or even the aesthetics of whatever is finally built. The first step still remains: to find a way to ask the public about its desires for the use of Ground Zero that begins with all options on the table. The duty of a democratic politics includes the education of its citizenship, the provision of the necessary information for informed debate. The crowds that now gather in the Winter Garden to look at the new schemes testify both to the strength of feeling and depth of interest in the site’s future, and to the public’s ability to assimilate architectural and planning ideas.
But why just these seven choices? Why must the LMDC be interposed as gatekeeper, narrowing and coercing possibilities instead of helping us look at every idea that might (or might not) work on the site? Why can’t we have an open invitation to anyone with a cogently drawn plan or intelligibly written text to post it at the Javits Center or the Winter Garden for a month or two to draw out a conversation about possibilities? This profusion of ideas (and there are thousands out there) would allow the public to coalesce around a program, to make known what they want built on this fraught site. An open process would also allow the public to make fiscal decisions properly its own, to decide how to pay for the memorial, how to compensate stakeholders, if necessary, and what transit infrastructure improvements to include. Then, and only then, can there be a genuine competition for the entire site. Such a competition would seek solutions that merge memory and moving on, and must be