Music and Cats

A couple of years ago, I sat with my father and 3300 other architects in a convention hall in San Diego, listening to Daniel Libeskind speak about his winning design for the World Trade Center site. While discussing the inspirations for his design concepts for the site, Libeskind asked, “What is more optimistic than building?” For an architect, this is a rhetorical question. Architecture is a profession for optimists. We design, we build, because we believe - not only in our design visions, but in our fellow human beings, our culture, our collective future. When, at the end of Libeskind’s presentation, the crowd gave him a standing ovation, the sound of several thousand architects applauding masked the sound of almost as many in tears.

Certainly, there was grief in that convention hall, but even stronger were feelings of hope and optimism that powerful, healing structures would rise on the WTC site.

The road from design concept - no matter how strong - to building is often long and winding. When site leaseholder Larry Silverstein insisted on SOM architect David Childs’ involvement in design of the Freedom Tower, that road turned sharply downhill.

About the “collaboration” between Childs and Libeskind, reknowned architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote, “there was the unedifying sight of an architectural marriage made in hell–a shotgun arrangement between Mr. Silverstein’s architect, David Childs, and Daniel Libeskind, the architect of the plan, over the design of the Freedom Tower. Alas, poor Libeskind; both he and his tower were aggressively co-opted by the more powerful duo, and the unfortunate result of the architectural arm-wrestling–an awkwardly torqued hybrid of the original offset, prismatic form–speaks more of ego and arrogance than art.”

When I saw the most recent redesign of the Freedom Tower, unveiled at the end of June, I felt like crying, but for far different reasons than in San Diego two years ago. The obelisk-shaped, glass-skinned tower is handsome, and a stronger design than the 2004 Childs-Libeskind hybrid. However, the symbolism it has retained from Libeskind’s concept (the lighted spire reaching to 1776 feet) and its references to the twin towers (a 200′ x 200′ square footprint, roof and parapet heights that matching the twins’ heights) seem to be afterthoughts in a redesign that was - at least publicly - based primarily on fear of future terrorist attack.

Jeff Speck, Design Director for the National Endowment for the Arts, wrote in Metropolis Magazine:

Never in my most pessimistic imaginings could I have anticipated what we are now being shown: a tower rising above a solid concrete base with no windows. News reports claim this 20-story, above-ground base will be clad in a “shimmering metal curtain that will give the impression of movement and light.” The operative word in that phrase is “impression.” The first rule of planning for pedestrians is “eyes on the street”: windows and doors connecting inside and out. No one will happily walk past a blank wall, no matter how much it shimmers.

This is one of the main tenets of urban design taught to all of the mayors who attend the NEA’s Mayor’s Institute on City Design. It is undisputed. That a proven design failure is being proposed for such a prominent site only confirms how far from reason the security mandate has taken us.

There are many more subtle and sophisticated ways to provide bomb-blast security. The Freedom Tower’s talented architects know them. One solution would be to line the blast walls with external lobbies or shops facing the sidewalk. Such alternatives must be discussed publicly, and quickly, so that we can turn away from this dead-end path.

We must ask ourselves what it says about our nation to produce a “Freedom Tower” hiding behind twenty-stories of solid concrete. Better to build nothing than such an alienating monument to surrender.

Terrorists succeed when people live their lives differently because of fear. This design does not mend the ragged tear in the fabric of the city. Instead, it creates at street level a decidedly anti-urban place, one that does not support the patterns of life of people working and living there - all out of fear. This design speaks not to Libeskind’s optimism of building, but to the fear that someone might attempt to destroy that which has been rebuilt. This is an architecture of pessimism, an architecture in which the terrorists win.

(You can see video fly-overs of the proposed tower at SOM’s Freedom Tower website. Very interesting local commentary on the WTC site redevelopment is at Curbed.com, a New York City real estate blog.)

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