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WD_181/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 2 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25 x 19.9 | | Size (mm): | 640 x 510 | | Catalog #: | WD_0181 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
"A Deepening Gloom About Ground Zero's Future" By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF.
Published: September 10, 2005.
There has been no healing, really. Four years have passed since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, and the road to recovery at ground zero looks bleaker than ever. A rebuilding effort that was originally cast as a symbolic rising from the ashes has long since turned into a hallucinogenic nightmare: a roller coaster ride of grief, naïveté, recriminations, political jockeying and paranoia.
The Freedom Tower, promoted as an image of the city's resurrection, has been transformed into a stern fortress - a symbol of a city still in the grip of fear. The World Trade Center memorial has been enveloped by a clutter of memorabilia.
And the promise that culture would play a life-affirming role has proved false now that Gov. George E. Pataki has warned that freedom of expression at ground zero will be strictly controlled. ("We will not tolerate anything on that site that denigrates America, denigrates New York or freedom, or denigrates the sacrifice and courage that the heroes showed on Sept. 11," he has said.) The Freedom Center, the Drawing Center, the performing arts center that would house the tiny Signature Theater Company and Joyce Theater - all now risk being dumped, either because they are viewed as lacking in sufficient patriotism or because officials were only toying with them in the first place.
On this anniversary weekend, it may be time to face up to what few have wanted to acknowledge: that nothing of value can be built at ground zero while the anguish and anxiety remain so fresh - nor while political and economic forces are eager to exploit those emotions.
I was once unwilling to recognize this. Three years ago, when the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation was opening its competition for the design of a master plan for ground zero, I paid a call on an older architect who had spent a lifetime navigating the byzantine planning politics of American cities. At the time, New York was full of anxious hope. A public outcry over the dull uniformity of the original renderings by the architecture firm Beyer Blinder Belle had sent the development corporation back to the drawing boards, and there was a sense that something bold and important might happen.
The architect, unimpressed, said flatly that the only ground zero project that was not doomed to failure was the transportation hub. Since it was devoid of symbolic importance, he explained, it would not become a political time bomb. The rest? Forget it.
I refused to believe him.
Obviously, his view was prophetic. The only promising design so far is the soaring glass hall of Santiago Calatrava's train station, which may end up as one of the most glorious public spaces to rise in New York since the construction of Grand Central Terminal. By contrast, the rest of Daniel Libeskind's master plan looks eerily like those original Beyer Blinder Belle proposals - though with more elaborate packaging - a somber memorial to the dead, neatly parceled off from a sea of corporate towers that could be anywhere.
This crushing failure results from an assumption that hollow symbols can be equated with democratic values. And it is compounded by a sincere, quintessentially American belief that any problem, no matter how painful or complex, can be solved through good intentions. Architecture's function here is to provide a reassuring gloss of cultural sophistication - and political cover.
The architects, of course, have not been entirely innocent. Mr. Libeskind, for one, could have resigned when it became clear that his master plan had been reduced to a few empty gestures. In choosing to stay, he lent credence to the illusion that everything was proceeding normally. The Norwegian firm Snohetta, architects of the Freedom Center, must now confront a similar ethical dilemma: Should it participate in a project where creativity has been so fully eclipsed by politics?
It's a stubborn situation, justified by those who believe that any development at ground zero is good for the city's economy. If the 10 million square feet of commercial space at ground zero is not rebuilt, the thinking goes, our fragile confidence will be erased, and the terrorists will have won.
But commercial space is not what is needed at ground zero. The city is building at a frenetic pace. There are plans to transform a strip along 10th Avenue into a canyon of corporate skyscrapers with 24 million square feet of office space. More office development is percolating at the West Side Hudson Yards and the former Con Edison site overlooking the East River.
The abundance of new development in the city was a bargain chip for Goldman Sachs when it struck its recent deal with the city to stay downtown. When it threatened to abandon a site just across the street from the proposed Freedom Tower for another one in Midtown, the city was forced to cough up hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives and over $1.6 billion in federally backed Liberty bonds.
This kind of back scratching is likely to become the norm downtown. Luring corporations to one of the world's most tempting terrorist targets is arduous and expensive. And it's a painful reminder of how far we still are from a state of normalcy. Four years after the towers collapsed, the city is still in a collective process of recovery, yet the grains of optimism sprouted elsewhere - in a newly reopened MoMA, for example, or in plans to transform the High Line viaducts into a lush extended garden. Meanwhile, ground zero remains the physical manifestation of our worst fears.
For that reason, the most moving ideas for ground zero have always been those that treated it with the most delicacy - Norman Foster's slender undulating glass-and-steel towers, gently rising out of a sprawling park; Ellsworth Kelly's soft blanket of green, which eloquently captured the site's need for silence.
I suppose that Governor Pataki and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation could regain a measure of credibility by starting to scale back plans for development at the site. They could solicit proposals for an interim plan, say, that offers a more realistic time frame for rebuilding - not just in economic terms, but in psychic terms as well. The point would be to allow the site's meaning to evolve over time, from a place for grieving to a place where architecture reasserts the value of life.
But none of this will be possible without shifting the emphasis back to what is most important at ground zero: the cultural and public spaces that could be emotionally transformative. It would require some patience and humility. Until then, aesthetic judgments are all but irrelevant.
©2005 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/arts/design/10zero.html
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