All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
to pull its punches, dilating on ambiguity and mixed messages. But does anyone in the Issey Miyake generation actually iron (Bad Press: Dissident Housework Series)? Hasn’t the numbness of the robotic production line been better covered by Fritz Lang and Charlie Chaplin (Master/Slave)? Has anyone failed to observe the homogenization of tourism (Tourisms: suitCase Studies)? Must we still express superiority to simple folk who love their lawns or their vacations (The American Lawn: The Surface of Everyday Life)? Is surveillance really deconstructed by video monitors over the bar at the Brasserie? This is work that makes me long both for the rapier and for utopia, for the out-of-bounds, for violence or hilarity or idiosyncrasy.
The power of Diller and Scofidio’s project, though, is not its p.c. critique, but the form of its objectification. When the beauty is flat out—as in their tense suspension of Samsonite luggage in the Tourisms installation at the Whitney, or that stunning Blur building in Lake Neuchâtel at the Swiss Expo for 2002, or those intoxicatingly theatric choreographies (such as the Jet Lag multimedia play)—the longing for a better world finds focus. If the avant-garde is to have a utility beyond indulgence, it’s time for both excess and straight talking, for the surrender of irony and hair-splitting intelligence to a frenzy of demands for a better world. The strategy of the avant-garde depends, always, on too much, on some willing form of bad behavior, on blurring old certainties. But totalitarianism trumps ambiguity every time. War is the ultimate bad behavior and the canny politicians in charge of the current carnage—by constantly presenting themselves as an avant-garde, inventors of the “revolution in military affairs” and pioneers of a new “battlespace”—try to supersede their own savagery by giving it fresh form. We must do better than this. What’s needed now are clear propositions at the scale of globalizers, whole cities imagined from scratch, big chunks of alternative realities. Against the aesthetics of alienation and annihilation we must respond with fresh forms of survival and joy. Architecture must take the field.
2003
25
And Then There Were Two
The charade of a design competition for Ground Zero has now arrived at two “finalists,” Daniel Libeskind and the “Think” group. Whatever one feels about the formal merits of the two schemes, they are deeply constrained by the circumstances of their production. Survivors of a group selected by the LMDC from a list that included virtually every architect on the planet, the two finalists were premiated in camera according to unrevealed standards. As many have objected, this lack of any formal accountability to the public robs the schemes of political authority beyond logrolling, all’s-well-that-end’s-well scenarios.
The “competition” that has yielded these two schemes arose as a cover for the disaster of the summer, in which another hand-picked group of architects produced a set of schemes of such banality that the LMDC was forced into a more design-friendly strategy to cover its beleaguered ass. The premise behind this new competition among “star” architects was simple: architecture would be a sufficient source of difference, of alternatives, for the site. Displaced would be any discussion about the larger questions of program and propriety, and in their stead would stand more ineffable aesthetic categories. The LMDC, as both the programmer and adjudicator of the process, has worked mightily to preserve the core of its brief: to make sure that the site reacquires its status as a hub of corporate office space. The program, to which both finalist teams have wordlessly acquiesced, demands 10 million square feet of commercial use—including offices, hotel, and retail—as well as cultural space, widely felt to be vital to downtown Manhattan’s renewal. And, of course, somewhere in the mix is a memorial to the events of September 11. Indeed, the few arguments publicly proffered by the LMDC for picking these two finalists from the rest of the litter spring from their putative success in establishing an apt image for memorial.
This result, however, serves effectively to pull the rug out from under the actual memorial competition that the LMDC has long claimed to be organizing. So strong is the memorializing aspect of each of the schemes that a competition for further memorialization will be desperately constrained. In the case of the Think proposal, the footprints—of interest to anyone contemplating a memorial site—are to be enclosed in the 111-story cages of their twin “cultural” Eiffel Towers. In the Libeskind design, the terrain of memorial is below ground, and any fresh intervention must figure itself against the huge slurry/wailing wall left exposed—the sole architectural survivor of the attack.
The gambit of foregrounding big architecture (both of the competitors offer structures taller than the World Trade Center towers) seems to have had the desired effect, the happy sign that big buildings are to be the outcome. Although a number of individuals and civic organizations (including the Regional Plan Association) have spurned the closed-door, non-public process favored by the LMDC, others have risen to the bait. Of particular interest has been the coverage in the New York Times, which has accepted the premise of the so-called competition without a word. Instead, our national newspaper of record has remained unconcerned, focusing simply on the relative merits of the two pre-chosen schemes.
On January 21, before the final two names were announced, the Times editorialized in favor of the Libeskind project, urging that “one of the two design finalists should certainly be Daniel Libeskind’s soaring garden tower and ground-level memorial that uses the slurry wall holding back the Hudson River as a backdrop. Neither should hark to the past to recreate the twin office towers.” The editorial did not suggest which other scheme might be included in the final two, but as none of the plans proposed recreating the twin office towers, one might assume that any plan which proposed twin towers—Foster, Peterson-Littenberg, or Think—were being ruled out. The editorial concluded with a call for the architectural and infrastructural plan to be in place before the competition for the memorial begins.
On January 28, Herbert Muschamp, the paper’s architecture critic, weighed in with his choice for the winner: Think. He touted their twin latticework towers as “a work of genius, a towering affirmation of humanism in modern times.” Although the humanism of placing windowless cultural facilities seventy stories up escapes me, Muschamp’s choice was unsurprising since members of the team had already been central to his own attempt to design the site last summer. He had also already applauded the brilliant idea to place new construction—per the suggestion of one of the Thinkers—above a buried West Street, leaving Ground Zero free for future deliberation. The Think solution, however, has abandoned this entirely in favor of a site plan not unlike one of those so massively derided over the summer. (Although in their signature renderings, the 8 million square feet of office space they propose seems to have been coated in stealth materials, imperceptible to the eye.)
On February 4, the two finalists were revealed and—mirabile dictu—they were the Times’s two favorites, never mind that the paper had earlier published a news story claiming that the public strongly preferred three schemes, only one of which (Libeskind) made it into the finals. Things rapidly became more interesting on 43rd Street. On February 6, Muschamp derided the Libeskind project as a “war memorial to a conflict that has scarcely begun,” contrasting it with the Think project, described as “a soaring affirmation of American values.” Libeskind, in contrast, is burdened with the worst descriptors in the lexicon, “retro,” “nostalgic,” “pre-Enlightenment,” “premodern,” “medieval” . . . “religious.” While Libeskind is certainly no slouch in the automatic piety department (indeed, he’s a virtual self-igniting Yahrzeit candle, to paraphrase Martin Filler), this criticism is totally over the top.
Muschamp attempts to argue that memorial architecture has come to stand in the place evacuated by religion. In his formulation of the separation of civil and religious spheres, he argues that under the medieval system religion was exploited for political gain, whereas in our day political actions are accountable to reason. Left out of this account, of course, is the idea that political actions in democratic culture are also accountable to the desires of citizens. Muschamp and the LMDC see eye to eye in their preference for philosopher kings (“poets are the legislators of the world,” as he noted in an earlier column) and both see the problem of Ground Zero as primarily representational, as if the content of the project were purely wrapped up in issues of imagery, an amazingly medieval conceit. The competition is reduced to a matter of iconography—how is a giant World Trade Center–shaped lattice more intrinsically modern, progressive,