Dennis Hollingsworth

Rebuild Them!

Nicolai Ouroussof had a few incisive things to say about the World Trade Center Freedom Tower in the NYTimes today:

...the widely anticipated announcement that Gov. Eliot Spitzer will support the construction of the Freedom Tower may signal an end to any hope that a broad vision ? or even a level of sanity ? can be restored to a project tainted by personal hubris and political expediency.

The most recent debate over the tower has centered narrowly on real estate values. With the developer Larry Silverstein set to build six million square feet of office space in three buildings just alongside the Freedom Tower, some have questioned whether it will be possible to lease enough of the $3 billion project at a high enough rate to make it profitable. The tower?s symbolism alone is likely to scare off tenants who will see it as a potential targets for terrorists. The suggestion that we simply pack the building with government offices is almost perversely Strangelove-ian.

Remember, bureaucracy is the natural enemy of art:

Yet the problem is not simply whether enough bureaucrats can be coerced into working there one day; it?s also what the building expresses as a work of architecture. Governor Spitzer may recall the looming presence of the twin towers on the downtown skyline, at once proud and intimidating; the Freedom Tower will have an equally powerful effect on the daily lives of New Yorkers as well as on the city?s image throughout the world. Yet its message will be very different from the old towers.

Hurriedly redesigned more than a year ago after terrorism experts questioned its vulnerability to a bomb attack, the Freedom Tower, with its tapered bulk and chamfered corners, evokes a gargantuan glass obelisk. Its clumsy bloated form, remade by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, vaguely recalls the worst of postmodernist historicism. (It?s a marvel that its glass skin hasn?t been recast in granite.)

It should be telling that the Freedom Tower is the best we can do at this moment. But we don't have to go there, do we?

Let's rebuild the original design but with a twist:

Here's Ouroussoff again:

If built, the lamentable Freedom Tower would be a constant reminder of our loss of ambition, and our inability to produce an architecture that shows a genuine faith in America?s collective future rather than a nostalgia for a nonexistent past.

Nowhere is that failure of ambition more evident than in the tower?s base. In a society where the social contract that binds us together is fraying, the most incisive architects have found ways to create a more fluid relationship between private and public realms. The lobby of Thom Mayne?s Phare Tower in Paris, for example, is conceived as an extension of the public realm, drawing in the surrounding streetscape and tunneling deep into the ground to connect to a network of underground trains.

By comparison the Freedom Tower is conceived as a barricaded fortress. Its base, a 20-story-high windowless concrete bunker that houses the lobby as well as many of the structure?s mechanical systems, is clad in laminated glass panels to give it visual allure, but the message is the same. It speaks less of resilience and tolerance than of paranoia. It?s a building armored against an outside world that we no longer trust.

Well, let's make it a real fortress:

Strangelove indeed.

For those who need to know: the Phalanx Ornamental Self Defense Gargolye Bots? is a humorous aside. But you know, you could outfit them with industrial sized tasers or a humongous glue gun or something.

Seriously though, nothing elides a formal expression of hunkered down cowardice than standing back up after you've been sucker punched.

UPDATE: Laser Phalanx Ornamental Gargoyle Bots!

Posted by Dennis at February 19, 2007 5:25 PM