Architecture’s Defining Moment

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On December 18, 2002, seven teams presented nine schemes for rebuilding the World Trade Center site, beamed live to television audiences worldwide. The designs appeared on front pages everywhere the next day. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s (LMDC) website (renewnyc.com) was hit 6 million times in the following two weeks. 70,000 people visited the exhibition in its first three weeks and dropped off 4,000 comment cards.

In short, the architectural plans for the rebuilding became an international media and popular phenomenon, unprecedented in architectural history. The uniqueness of the moment was not lost on team members, who, along with colleagues and well-wishers, celebrated the presentations a day later at a reception in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center, where the ideas were exhibited. Relief at the end of an eight-week charrette was mixed with jubilation at the generally positive reaction the plans had received. The presence of architect-shunning government agency heads and real-estate developers underscored the significance of the event. At no other architectural exhibition can one imagine WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein schmoozing with architect Daniel Libeskind. The normally courtly Alexander Garvin, LMDC’s chief planner, ecstatically hugged startled design-team members.

It seemed, on the 19th, that an architectural Rubicon had been crossed. Garvin gloried in the fact that at last the potential of architecture and urban design had earned a respected place in the redevelopment process.

But this apparent triumph of the visionaries may only have brought to the forefront a battle of philosophic aims that has dogged the rebuilding from the beginning—a conundrum much larger than the staggering complexities of the site. The question is no less than whether and how the city chooses to use architecture as a public investment in its future, and to express and nurturing its citizens’ ideals.

Progressive versus quotidian
In the nation, and even the world, these questions perpetually simmer below the surface, but the controversy-dogged rebuilding process keeps boiling them over. One side of the divide is represented by the ideals that motivated the “innovative” (LMDC’s term) teams’ work: With the exception of Peterson/Littenberg, they aspired to what New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp calls “progressive” notions of high design: they attempt to inspire through a future-oriented esthetic that is socially and technically innovative. These values were expressed in intentionally spectacular architecture that would use advanced construction techniques and building technology.

Recognizing the enormity of the attacks calls for such an unprecedented response, the teams’ work collectively argued. The aesthetic expression of progress has always denoted (however naively) the potential evolution of human character toward a more responsible, egalitarian ideal—offering a reproach to the terrorist attackers. The “progressive” schemes included millions of commercial square feet, as requested, but proposed—-in a startling variety of ways—-to give prominence to public space, commemorative space, symbolic space, and spaces and forms representing public ideals. Far more than aesthetic exercises (as has been frequently asserted) this commitment is the key difference from the “pragmatic” redevelopment schemes presented last July.

The inclusion of the Peterson/Littenberg team was intended to mollify critics of the “progressive” approach, who see it as ignoring the tried and true means of citymaking: the constant evolution of a widely accepted language and aesthetic of building. Doesn’t a city’s unique sense of place, they argue, derive from a street, block, and building pattern that is understandable, incremental, quotidian, consistent? Peterson/Littenberg’s plans also paid close attention to public ideals and public space, proposing, for example to extend a tree-lined visual axis south along West Street from the site. But they see the perpetual search for the new and different not as moving society out of a difficult present into a better future but as empty innovation for its own sake. Do we need—as Barbara Littenberg argued in a forum on the plans presented by Architectural Record—to repeat the mistakes of the Modernist past perpetrated by hubristic, architectural gigantism?

Akin to the aesthetic divide, is a pragmatic one: in America, where cities are built by market forces, do we dare put in place a plan that requires developers to depart—-at times radically—-from the rigidly prescribed spec-building criteria that have developed over the last 20 years?

It is clear that many people involved at the Trade Center site, whatever their leanings, view the way the rebuilding plays out as possibly redefining architecture in the American public realm. These opposed approaches to rebuilding represent “a real crisis for architecture,” says Littenberg.

And it is, perhaps, one for planning and urban design as well. Because what looks to many observers like a spat about style—progressive versus neotrad—may portend reshuffled roles for once-discreet disciplines.

Planning v. architecture?
The Port and the LMDC treaded a minefield to make a decision. So many of the plans entail “polar opposites,” Garvin said. Foster’s plan left the tower footprints off-limits to visitors, while United Architects “want you to walk in and look up and have the sense of a future city,” he explains. Commemorative opportunities abounded in the scheme offered by a team led by Richard Meier. Libeskind had carved out the largest memorial precinct of all, focusing on the slurry wall that kept the Hudson River at bay as the towers collapsed.

Plans by United Architects and Foster and Partners integrated the office-building concept closely with a transit hub. Several designs required raised plazas to bridge West Street, tying the long-isolated Battery Park City and the waterfront back into the fabric of Lower Manhattan.

These strategies reflected a notion in many of these teams’ minds that the architecture is the urban design. Libeskind said, “This takes New York and architecture where it needs to be—which is not separating urbanity from architecture. I think this is a change that has been brewing for some time. But here it looks explosively new.” Indeed, in Europe and Asia, architects are frequently commissioned to do what in the U.S. would be classified as city planning or urban design.

The December schemes didn’t change the key priorities, argued Littenberg, who had worked on the discarded plans of July 2002. “It doesn’t matter how much architecture you throw at the site, you have to figure out the essential orientation to open space and the existing urban fabric,” she said. “We assert that urban design happens before architecture.”

Doing the urban design first is precisely the task Stan Eckstut set for himself. As part of the ever-more convoluted interrelationships among stakeholders, the Port Authority hired his firm, Eckstut, Ehrenkrantz & Kuhn, to draw up the master plan for the site, in cooperation with LMDC’s Garvin.

Libeskind was among those not buying this end-run around LMDC’s process. “Urban design done by a faceless office in the shadows doesn’t make much sense to me,” he said. “We are in a world of grownups and professionals. Only a bold decision will empower the citizens of New York to create a civic space to match their aspirations.”

(Continued)

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