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A rebuilding process full of holes

BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON | Staff Writer

September 12, 2004

New York is not a city erected on ideas like, say, Washington, D.C. Here, buildings go up as needed, where there is money to be made.

But the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, created a 16-acre void that demanded a plan full of meaning — a city of symbols, anchored by an enormous shrine. And so, ready to address the desire for a philosophical city, New York seemed poised for a while to do something magnificently out of character and build one man's vision.

For a few months after February 2003, when architect Daniel Libeskind smiled into the klieg lights and conjured a glittering, angulated neighborhood at Ground Zero, it looked as though art had harnessed political power.

The moment didn't last long. By that fall, New York City was asserting the primacy of its ancient real estate routines over any claim to historic holiness. Unity and resolve metamorphosed into a multi-way tug of war among commercial developers, politicians, assorted public agencies, architects, the victims' families and the non-negotiable needs for sewage to flow and trains to run again.

So, instead of an overarching idea, the proposals made in the three years since the attack include a super-tall office tower for which the market has shown no great demand, a commuter rail station to replace one that already exists, a cultural complex that arts organizations will have difficulty raising the money to build and a memorial to a historical event we have not yet begun to understand.

The rebuilding process addresses only one absolute need: to get rid of that awful void.

Raymond Gastil, the executive director of the Van Alen Institute, which promotes good public design, sees the planning process at Ground Zero as an example of flexibility, shared idealism and group improvisation.

"It has that American, muddling-through quality. No matter how effective the technocrats are, there are just too many people involved [for a single vision to endure]. That's a good thing. People really are trying to make that site a mix of commerce, culture and society."

That's the way cities work, but it is also a diffuse answer to the early questions that planners, thinkers and architects posed: What does what we build or decide not to build on these resonant 16 acres say about the city's state of mind? How do urbanistic and architectural decisions represent an interpretation of what happened on that day and since?

The architect and preservationist Paul Spencer Byard argues that these questions fell into a deep well of confusion. The original World Trade Center was premised on the notion, however faulty in the long run, that New York could build urban strength through financial strength, regenerating its economy by centralizing global commerce.

"Now that the thing has been blown up, nobody has an idea of what goes there instead," Byard says. "The failure to identify what downtown Manhattan is about is why this thing is starved for legitimacy. So it becomes a real estate project dressed up by a lot of fancy architecture."

Libeskind had attempted to answer an epic act of violence with creativity on a similar scale.

"Libeskind's were giant ideas, not just incidental," says Wendy Joseph, president of the Architectural League. "This isn't miniature golf where there are 18 different things and you go from hole to hole."

Yet that's what the site has become: a sequence of manageable problems to be confronted, delegated and dispatched.

In part, Libeskind's master plan was a casualty of the city's resilience, the simple need to get on with it. Crammed as it was with memorial metaphors and architectural elegies, the plan celebrated the city's wound, while New York preferred to think of itself as quickly convalescing.

The Port Authority quietly rebuilt the train tracks below ground and on Nov. 23, 2003, when commuters began flowing beneath a temporary but graceful canopy of thin steel struts, Governor George Pataki was on hand to declare that Lower Manhattan was reporting to work again.

Meanwhile, the public debate over ideas had lost its noble cast. Pataki held a shotgun to the forced partnership of Libeskind and another architect, David Childs, demanding that they hurry up and produce a design for a 1,776-foot-high office building worthy of the pre-ordained name Freedom Tower.

What had begun as a public, participatory process had narrowed into a spat between two intransigent artistes. The city decided to heal its scars by a chaotic, combative process in which short-term political and economic gains trumped long-term foresight.

From the beginning, Libeskind argued that his master plan could withstand a collaborative approach, and this flexibility helped to kill it. His crystalline construct turned out to be a sculpture made of ice: embrace it and it melts away.

The multiplicity of metaphors and ringing titles — Park of Heroes, Heroes' Walk, Liberty Plaza, Wedge of Light, Gardens in the Sky — meant that any of them could be edited out, and so almost all of them were.

Years from now, when all the decisions about what goes where and who puts it there are finally fleshed out, reversed, reinstated and revised, the site will be sprinkled with excellent works of architecture, but they will not cohere into an urban monument, like Rockefeller Center, or offer a symbolic response to destruction.

At best, that section of the city will become whole again, the light now flooding in will not be blocked out, memory will be adequately served and buried infrastructure will be graciously ornamented above ground. That's a lot and New York is no longer inclined to ask for anything more.

The lesson of past mega-projects is that they evolve even after they are built, and that the rationales for their existence change. The World Trade Center never was what its name suggested, but it did become a symbol of American financial brawn. Rockefeller Center began as a home for the Metropolitan Opera, which was supposed to go where the skating rink is now.

The story of Ground Zero still has many chapters to go, though probably few of them will be written by Libeskind. They may not all be set in Lower Manhattan.

Even as the city passed up the chance to do something visionary, radical and new with those 16 devastated acres, the very existence of that enormous crater has fired up an architectural energy that is spilling over the East River and to other part of Manhattan.

The real architectural legacy of Ground Zero may be a high-rise Long Island City, a Frank Gehry complex in Brooklyn or a sinuous hotel tower in Harlem.