From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
The Disaster That Has Followed the Tragedy
A bad plan for Ground Zero.
A newspaper cartoon some years ago showed a very large building in the shape of a massive dollar sign, Power Towers, being contemplated by two smiling, portly men, one saying to the other, "I find it charming and you find it charming and all the others just like us will find it charming."
It would be a stretch to call the three enormous towers proposed for the World Trade Center site charming, but many in New York's development community will undoubtedly feel satisfied that the highest aspirations of art and profit have been met by these "signature" buildings by three internationally famous architects, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers of London and Fumihiko Maki of Tokyo. The designs were released for the fifth anniversary of 9/11 by the Port Authority, which owns the land, and developer Larry Silverstein, who holds the leases for the World Trade Center towers and is committed to rebuilding.
Given the notoriety of the site, a passionately observant and deeply involved public, and the proven financial advantage of what goes by the dreadful name "starchitecture," Mr. Silverstein's move from standard commercial construction to high-end high style required no great sacrifice or philanthropic awakening. Good design makes excess palatable. Marquee names command higher rents. These are all virtuoso performances--architecture as spectacular window dressing and shrewd marketing tool for the grossly maximized commercial square footage that has remained the one constant through the perversion and destruction of Daniel Libeskind's master plan, a process in which vision succumbed early to pressure groups and political agendas. Call it irony or destiny, the architecture once rejected as a costly "frill" is now embraced for its dollar value.
The first and most obvious comment to be made about these buildings is that whatever the pious rhetoric, their proximity to sacred ground, and the care with which the reality is skirted, they are machines for making money, just as the Twin Towers were, with only some rearrangement of the square footage. Wringing every possible dollar from a piece of property is a traditional New York practice celebrated in the oft-repeated real-estate mantra, offered with a straight face and impressive hubris, as "the highest and best use of the land." Say it often enough and no one will question the absence of any need or purpose other than profit in the calculations.
The second observation is that these buildings don't talk to each other or to the site. They do not so much reach for the sky as drop down from it on a designated parcel. There is no suggestion of interaction except Mr. Foster's claim (is he serious?) that his building is tipping its slanted hat to the memorial far below. If these architects were really working together in the same room, as we have been told, what were they thinking? Did they have any concept in common except building big? How in the world did they define collaboration? Or is there a new mantra, the highest and best use of the land is to establish the architect's unmistakable trademark style, above all other symbolic or urban considerations?
Only Mr. Maki's solution has a refinement and urbanity that suggests the possibility of compatibility rather than competition. This is not the place for the dramatic chaos of unrelated development that defines so much of New York; Ground Zero begs for something more. The original concept of spiraling, crystalline towers was stunning and magical. It identified the site and made a unified impact on the skyline. There is no meaning or magic left in the token rise in building heights to a much-compromised Freedom Tower.
The balance of commercial and cultural facilities meant to be the basis of the area's rebirth and regeneration is also gone, sabotaged by the supine political response to the escalating demands of those bereaved families whose inconsolable grief required the elimination of the plan's cultural components on the disturbing and specious grounds that the arts and liberties that mark a free society equaled disrespect, or less honor to the dead. They became Ground Zero's censors and de facto designers, eliminating buildings and dictating content to a commission that seemed to have no clue about appropriateness or professional expertise.
The intensely moving image of the surviving slurry wall that saved Lower Manhattan from the waters of the Hudson River was buried under the weight of an expanding memorial that pre-empted the site, discarding guidelines and voiding the commitment to renewal and the need to build creatively for future generations. Official pandering and political waffling tortured the master plan to death. Piecemeal dismemberment and an unfulfilled mandate have gone hand in hand.
For some of us there has been a persistent sense of déjà vu. A generation that never knew the city without the Twin Towers has placed them high in skyscraper hagiography because of their terrible fate. But the New York skyline has changed many times, and will again. An earlier skyline, dominated by earlier icons, the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, had a richness and variety not yet diminished by the brutal breaking of scale and loss of architectural detail when the Port Authority built not one, but two of the tallest buildings in the world. Whether the move from bridges and tunnels to gargantuan real estate was vanity, greed, or the deal of the century, the Twin Towers could be built only by using the authority's independent powers to override all of New York's height, building and zoning codes and restrictions. The same excessive bulk is being reproduced today.
Power has shifted from the Port Authority to Mr. Silverstein, who holds the leases and the insurance payments as bargaining chips in a spectacular demonstration of negotiation as spectator sport, turning the screws to his advantage in every conceivable way while foreclosing the possibility of a more publicly responsive development.
After 9/11 it was easy to forget that the Twin Towers were an economic disaster that depressed the New York rental market for years. As a palliative, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller packed the near-empty buildings with New York State offices. Learning, or not learning, from the past, Gov, George Pataki is once again dragooning government agencies to avoid the same problem in the tenantless Freedom Tower, while protests rise against the unseemly public subsidy of Mr. Silverstein's creatively calculated $59-a-square foot rent, and captive workers revolt at occupying a high-rise symbol of terrorism.
New York has been no stranger to controversial projects of this scale. What began as a search for a new home for the Metropolitan Opera became Rockefeller Center when the Met withdrew as the Depression deepened in the 1930s and John D. Rockefeller Jr. found himself holding a huge, money-losing tract of midtown land. A businessman who always insisted on his 6% of any philanthropic undertaking, he turned the project into a hardnosed real-estate development. The bottom line, and there always is one in New York, is that these sites involve some of the highest land values in the world, which inevitably influences the outcome.
But Rockefeller Center was built with a master plan. When millions of square feet were thrown onto a market that could not absorb them--déjà vu all over again--this distinctive complex of commercial and cultural facilities with its attractive public spaces was able to survive as a prestigious international business venue and a popular entertainment center. Not least, its coherent style was the work of a group of architects as prominent in their own day as those currently involved downtown. Raymond Hood had designed the Daily News Building and Wallace Harrison would become the lead architect of the United Nations, but both were part of a consortium of top practitioners known simply as the Associated Architects. No one did his own thing. Together, they achieved a lasting level of coordinated excellence.
Rockefeller Center is not a model to be followed literally--every age has its own style and sensibility. Today's aesthetic and technological resources are enormous; they can support a wide variety of solutions. I do not believe for a moment that we are no longer capable of building great cities of symbolic beauty and enduring public amenity. What Ground Zero tells us is that we have lost the faith and the nerve, the knowledge and the leadership, to make it happen now.
Ms. Huxtable is The Wall Street Journal's architecture critic.
