[Brookside]

New York Times' Architectural Critic on Freedom Towers Redesign


A rendering of what Manhattan would look like with the new buildings.

by Nicolai Ouroussoff/NYT/9-11-006


The designs unveiled last week for three sleek glass towers at ground zero rise above the mediocrity we have come to expect from a planning process driven by political opportunism, backdoor deal-making and commercial greed.

But for those who cling to the idea that the site’s haunting history demands a leap of imagination, the towers illustrate how low our expectations have sunk since the city first resolved to rebuild there in a surge of determination just weeks after 9/11.

Designed by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki, the towers are solid, competent work by three first-rate talents. But each of these architects is capable of far more. Lord Foster has shown us better work recently in Midtown Manhattan, where his faceted Hearst Tower plunges through the top of an existing 1920’s building with impressive force.

Architectural merit aside, the most telling features of the ground zero master plan remain those in which the city’s anxieties bubble up to the surface: in the paranoia implied by David Childs’s heavily armored Freedom Tower, for example, or the defiant grandiosity of Santiago Calatrava’s transportation hub. By comparison, the three new towers are about forgetting. Conservative and coolly corporate, they could be imagined in just about any Western capital, paralleling the effacement of history in the remade, blatantly commercial Potsdamer Platz in Berlin or La Défense, the incongruous office-tower district just outside Paris.

Lord Foster set out to confront the emotional trauma at ground zero in a design he submitted in a master plan competition four years ago. His proposal, for two slender glass-and-steel towers that swayed in and out as they rose, seeming to meet here and there in a gentle kiss, captured the aura of the old twin towers. That proposal, a plan for the entire site, was rejected.

This time he was limited to a single tower at the northeast corner of the site, with a mandate to pack commercial and retail space onto a more constricted area. The result is bulkier. The building, which at 1,254 feet, with an additional 85-foot antenna (not pictured in the widely distributed renderings) would be the second tallest in the city after the Freedom Tower, rises straight up from its base with no setbacks. A vertical notch cut into each of its facades creates deep, brooding shadows; the top is sliced at a sharp diagonal that tilts toward the memorial pools below. One assumes that this is intended to imbue the structure with a quasi-mystical significance, but it’s a cheap gesture.

more: > http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/ar...gn/11zero.html


Wow, He said almost exactly what I posted earlier. Maybe he cut the architects a little more slack...but the buildings, as imposing as they'll be, are pretty ordinary. Brookside