over the summer. (Although in their signature renderings, the 8 million square feet of office space they propose seems to have been coated in stealth materials, imperceptible to the eye.)
On February 4, the two finalists were revealed and—mirabile dictu—they were the Times’s two favorites, never mind that the paper had earlier published a news story claiming that the public strongly preferred three schemes, only one of which (Libeskind) made it into the finals. Things rapidly became more interesting on 43rd Street. On February 6, Muschamp derided the Libeskind project as a “war memorial to a conflict that has scarcely begun,” contrasting it with the Think project, described as “a soaring affirmation of American values.” Libeskind, in contrast, is burdened with the worst descriptors in the lexicon, “retro,” “nostalgic,” “pre-Enlightenment,” “premodern,” “medieval” . . . “religious.” While Libeskind is certainly no slouch in the automatic piety department (indeed, he’s a virtual self-igniting Yahrzeit candle, to paraphrase Martin Filler), this criticism is totally over the top.
Muschamp attempts to argue that memorial architecture has come to stand in the place evacuated by religion. In his formulation of the separation of civil and religious spheres, he argues that under the medieval system religion was exploited for political gain, whereas in our day political actions are accountable to reason. Left out of this account, of course, is the idea that political actions in democratic culture are also accountable to the desires of citizens. Muschamp and the LMDC see eye to eye in their preference for philosopher kings (“poets are the legislators of the world,” as he noted in an earlier column) and both see the problem of Ground Zero as primarily representational, as if the content of the project were purely wrapped up in issues of imagery, an amazingly medieval conceit. The competition is reduced to a matter of iconography—how is a giant World Trade Center–shaped lattice more intrinsically modern, progressive, and meaningful than a hole in the ground. Clearly, these are tangled, difficult choices only to be unraveled by clerics like Muschamp.
As if to bolster this reduction of content to a purely formal matter, a kind of fashion obbligato has been played and replayed in the ancillary sections of the Times. In a recent story, Daniel Libeskind—a lifelong nebbish with a fresh eye for fashion—was celebrated for his habit of wearing cowboy boots. Accepting his physiognomic account of the colossal benefits to his stride, the story neglected the real reason shortish people often take to stacked heels. The piece also reported admiringly Libeskind’s Alain Mikli eyeglasses, which turned out to be the harbinger of a full-blown story about the eyewear of the finalists. Here Ken Smith of Think in his Corb redux specs. Here Fred Schwartz in his horn-rims. Those Miklis on Libeskind reappear. Rafael Viñoly is seen in this signature two-pairs-at-once look. Never was vision so conflated with sight or sore eyes. Whom the Times would employ, it first makes bad. The Times has given the LMDC a virtual free pass as far as this process is concerned.
As a decision nears, the Times has pumped up the volume both in corroboration of the cynical process and in handicapping the winner. A news story the week before the decision was to be made indicated that the political powers that be were tending to the Libeskind scheme. On the Sunday preceding the decision, a guest column by art historian Marvin Trachtenberg—appearing in the architecture slot generally occupied by Muschamp—denounced the Think scheme as “mainstream modernism,” an architecture he associated with “the repression of history, memory, place and identity; the exaltation of functionalism, technology, and the machine,” and a “hatred of the city.” These scary attributes were alleged to be the spirit behind Think’s thing, its “flayed skeletons of the World Trade Center,” a description Libeskind himself used repeatedly in public to describe his competition. As if that weren’t enough, Trachtenberg identified what Muschamp had called “a soaring tribute to American values” with “a model taken from the realm of totalitarianism, the famous Monument to the Third Communist International” proposed in 1920 by the great constructivist Vladimir Tatlin.
Liebeskind’s design, on the other hand, was lauded for its putative lack of abstraction, its “deeply creative, organic relationship to the specificity of ground zero and its environment and meaning, as well as its accommodation of human needs and sensibilities . . . profoundly ‘user friendly’ on all levels.” In short, it was “a miracle of creativity, intelligence, skill, and cutting-edge architectural thought; it looks to the future of architecture, just as Think remains mired in the past . . . it reminds us what it means to be human in a city.” Say what?
Trachtenberg and Muschamp, looking at schemes alleged to be polar opposites, manage to adduce exactly the same meanings for their favorites. This pathetic argumentation does nothing to advance the contest of ideas and reveals—in its glib and unanalytical associationism (Think is fascist! Liebeskind is humanist! Think is humanist! Liebeskind is fascist!)—just how bankrupt, how feckless, criticism divorced from actual reasoning can be.
The day before the winner was to be announced, the Times took three final shots. Under the headline “Designers’ Dreams Tempered By Reality,” Muschamp described modifications in the finalists’ schemes to meet objections from the Port Authority and the LMDC. After some boilerplate about the process having interested the public in architecture, he took a wistful dig at Libeskind, claiming that because of his particular compromise (shrinking the pit), “the design’s symbolic heart no longer exists.” While later allowing that Think’s scheme had also been shrunk (by the removal of most of the program from within the lattice), he insisted that “the conceptual heart of this design remains intact.” Lub dub.
On the same page—under pictures of the finalists surrounded by microphone-wielding media types—another article, “Turning A Competition Into A Public Campaign,” appeared. This described the twin media blitzes launched by the finalists, ranging from a full court hustle of media outlets, to the hiring of two flacks (one of whom resigned over being second-guessed) by the Liebeskind camp (which had demanded air time with Larry King, Connie Chung, and 60 Minutes), to the hot pursuit of survivor support by both teams. Indeed, the Times even reported on its own reporting, citing—not unsardonically—the boots and glasses stories the paper had run.
Finally, a news story reported that the site planning committee of the LMDC had come out in favor of the Think scheme while, as reported earlier, both the mayor and governor were supporting Libeskind. The decision was held to be the result of strong lobbying for Think by Roland Betts, a local business tycoon, best buddy of George Bush, and a member of the LMDC Steering Committee, itself charged with the final decision. That committee, however, is dominated by members who owe their jobs to the governor and the mayor—Port Authority officials and members of the two administrations. If I were a betting person, I would have to say it looks like Libeskind.
Either way, though, the Times will have called it. Having supported both projects and having piously editorialized about the fairness of the process, the paper has signaled its readiness to fall into line. The more cynical among us are inclined to see the competition as so much smoke-blowing, the real plan awaiting the culmination of multiple deals involving Larry Silverstein, the philistine leaseholder; the Port Authority, the site’s owner, currently preparing its own plan in secret; the City of New York, still trying to engineer a swap of Ground Zero for the land under JFK and LaGuardia airports; and the governor, the player with the most cards. Indeed, the only dissent from all of this has come from Rudy Giuliani, who declared that none of the plans had captured the significance of the event or the place.
2003
26
Density Noodle
What is a city? They’re certainly easier to recognize than to describe. Traditional definitions tend to be dense with comparison, per the useless description in Webster’s: “a large town.” As to a town, the dictionary has it as “a thickly populated area, usually larger than a village, having fixed boundaries, and certain local powers of government.” A village is “a small community or group of houses in a rural area, larger than a hamlet and usually smaller than a town.” A hamlet is,
