IN THE AFTERMATH of September 11, Senator Charles Schumer recommended the World Trade Center be replaced with “something grand.” It’s a curious word. Who speaks of grandeur any more? Certainly not many of the fashionable architects, designers, and pundits suggesting what to do with the site. There have been, of course, any number of suggestions that something big be erected where the World Trade Center stood, if only as a gesture of defiance. Minoru Yamasaki’s 1970s twin towers–stark, steel-sheathed, 110-story buildings severely geometrical and devoid of human scale–were very big indeed. But big isn’t the same as grand. And nowhere does the difference matter more than on the ground of the buildings obliterated on September 11. This place demands a monumental architectural setting. A preliminary plan for reconstruction at the sixteen-acre site, which extends over what were once twelve city blocks, should emerge in the next few months. Cleanup at the site has gone much faster than anyone imagined and is expected to be finished in June. Which raises the question: When it comes to rebuilding, will New York learn from the seemingly endless stream of errors it has made in its architectural patronage over the last half century? Fortunately, the likelihood of a clone of Yamasaki’s Corbusian towers-in-a-desolate-plaza is practically nil. The new buildings will probably rise about fifty stories: hardly pygmies, but short enough to allow the Empire State Building to assert its primacy on Gotham’s skyline once again. Larry A. Silverstein–the developer who only last July took out a $3.2 billion, ninety-nine-year lease on the towers, two adjacent buildings in the complex, and the retail mall–has retained Alexander Cooper to work on a new scheme. You can see an example of Cooper’s work in Battery Park City, which he and his former partner Stanton Eckstut laid out two decades ago, eschewing the Corbusian blueprint for more traditional, finer-grained planning. But Silverstein’s design architect is David Childs of Skidmore Owings and Merrill–and Childs’s specialty is, alas, slick, uninspired postmodernism. Whatever buildings are erected at the site, there remains the question of a memorial. Given the ideas floating around New York these days, it’s not hard to imagine a park at the site with walls inscribed with names or mechanically etched with computerized images of the dead. An unadorned fountain might offer the minimalistic spectacle of water shooting up in jets from a pavement or cascading over slabs of granite. We might even anticipate a landscape strewn with the remnants of the twin towers’ steel sheathing–if they’re not displayed in an on-site museum–along with twisted girders, or even flattened police cars and fire trucks. Thus might the postmodern preoccupation with “authenticity” and “metaphor,” “memory,” and “meaning” be satisfied. The players in the decision-making include the new Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corporation headed by former deputy secretary of state and Goldman Sachs co-chairman John C. Whitehead. This entity, a subsidiary of New York State’s economic development corporation, will produce the preliminary reconstruction scheme, and it has received a stunningly bountiful $2 billion appropriation from Congress as part of an emergency aid package for New York City. Then there’s the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which built the World Trade Center and owns the land. Silverstein, for his part, is expecting to collect a huge sum from his insurers that will allow him to build his new skyscrapers. Finally, the federal government may demand a say in return for billions of dollars for cleanup and infrastructure repair at the site. NOT SURPRISINGLY, the memorial has become the lightning-rod issue. Shortly before leaving office, Mayor Giuliani declared that a “soaring, monumental, beautiful memorial” should be the first priority. He suggested that such a memorial would be a major international attraction, and that Silverstein could build in another part of Manhattan. But comments by Whitehead–and by Giuliani’s successor as mayor, Michael Bloomberg–indicate that there will almost certainly be a very considerable amount of office, retail, and possibly residential construction at the site. In fact, the space allotted the memorial will be determined in tandem with other planning questions bearing on this most valuable chunk of real estate. Will the rebuilt precinct serve as a more important transit nexus, serving not only as the terminus of a PATH railway from New Jersey, as before, but also of the Long Island Railroad and Metro-North commuter lines which now terminate in Brooklyn and at Grand Central Station? Will this nexus include just the two old IRT subway lines that served the old trade center, or will it extend to the dozen other lines running through the Cortlandt Street station and the tangled Broadway-Nassau-Fulton Street complex to the east? Another decision crucial in determining the character of the new precinct and its memorial will be the degree to which the old street grid–the two north-south and three east-west streets which Yamasaki’s superblock interrupted–will be restored. And there remains the question of what to do with West Street, a ground-level extension of the West Side Highway that isolates Battery Park City and its World Financial Center from the trade-center site and the rest of Lower Manhattan. SPARKS are going to fly. The bereaved will be pushing for a generous memorial program. They can draw on deep reserves of public sympathy, and politicians will be hearing them loud and clear. But many influential New Yorkers are deeply concerned about the economic vitality of Lower Manhattan and see the loss of fifteen million square feet of commercial real estate as a dire threat to the district’s global primacy as a financial venue. Only the widespread sense that rebuilding must proceed quickly is likely to keep turf battles from degenerating into a morass of prolonged litigation. Given contemporary architecture’s pathological inability to engage the public interest, however, the danger is that no unifying or compelling artistic outlook will guide construction of the new buildings and the memorial, leading to an aesthetically fragmented or simply sterile environment. Our designers talk a great deal about vision, but seldom has it been in shorter supply. From the Hellenistic age in the ancient world all the way down to the Progressive era and the City Beautiful Movement in this country, Western urbanism integrated art and science. Ever since the eclipse of the classical tradition during the 1930s, art has been the loser. To do justice to the trade-center site we need visionaries like Daniel H. Burnham, whose inspiring plan of Chicago in 1909 incorporated the technical aspects of city planning into a classical vision of the modern city–transforming and vastly improving the city’s Lake Michigan shoreline, the Chicago River, and major thoroughfares such as Michigan Avenue. We need the kind of vision that, during the same period, endowed Manhattan with Grand Central Station, with its superb sculptural embellishment on the exterior and breathtaking celestial vault within, and the elegance of a Park Avenue rebuilt on top of the newly subterranean tracks. ANTI-CLASSICISM has ruled for sixty or seventy years, and its failure to enhance the quality of our built environment has been catastrophic. Classical visionaries, meanwhile, may not be chic, but they are by no means extinct. An impressive World Trade Center reconstruction scheme appeared in the Fall 2001 issue of City Journal. The work of Franck Lohsen McCrery Architects and the Scottish sculptor Alexander Stoddart, the scheme embraces planning as well as architectural and memorial design, and is imbued with the sense of urban drama that animated Burnham’s work. It restores civic art to its rightful place in American urbanism and recognizes the classical tradition as the most promising source of a truly meaningful artistic response to September 11. More, it o
ffers the kind of vision that, sooner or later, will once again assert itself in our great cities, despite the best efforts of a deeply entrenched postmodern regime propped up by the establishment press, the academy, fashionable artists and architects, curatorial staffs at leading museums, and official design review boards. The Franck Lohsen McCrery scheme reestablishes the old grid in the trade-center precinct. It reconnects Battery Park City by configuring West Street as a boulevard with a landscaped median and by extending the now-truncated Little West Street northward. The West Side Highway is sunk underground. The plan also includes a major commuter rail and subway station. These sound urban planning ideas, which emphasize the complexity of circulation patterns and the amenity of streets with orderly building frontages–as opposed to the haphazard configuration of the old trade center–are enriched by a grand architectural scheme focused on a Liberty Square extending over two blocks. (The plaza would interrupt Dey Street.) Lying on a north-south axis, the square would be surrounded by skyscrapers, the tallest of which would be situated at the north end. At the opposite end a Liberty Station for trains and subways would stand about as tall as Grand Central, but with a much smaller footprint. A fraction of the height of the lofty skyscraper facing it, the domed railway station would create a dramatic contrast in scale and allow more sunlight into the square. The tall buildings surrounding the square would not be the usual functionalist steel-and-glass slabs (with or without the tiresome neo-Deco trappings that have appeared in recent years), let alone abstract sculptural curiosities, but pleasingly massed classical buildings whose decoration would allow them to impart a sense of human scale. At the square’s north end would stand two great statues of female figures, their contours inspired by Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, standing on a stepped base and a pair of high pedestals. One would represent History, pointing to a tablet, while the other would represent Memory, holding a torch aloft. A draped catafalque would be situated between them as a symbol of the dead. At the other end of the square, in front of the train station, would stand statues of a policeman and a fireman. In between would lie a long patch of turf, approached by three downward steps. On each side, moreover, the plaza would be flanked by arches doubling as pedestrian bridges and extending between tall fa ades fronting on Dey Street. THERE ARE PROBLEMS with the Franck Lohsen McCrery plaza. First of all, the dispersion of Stoddart’s statues prevents the memorial from reading as a unified design. And the plaza’s plot of grass is bewildering. Is it a slightly sunken symbolic cemetery? Will people want to bring their lunch to such a space? And will they be willing to go to the trouble of crossing a traffic-clogged street to get there? An alternative is proposed by the artist Elliott Banfield and the architectural historian Henry Hope Reed. They suggest a great column in a pedestrian plaza, flanked not by automobile traffic but by arcades of monumental scale that could lead into tall buildings set back from the plaza. The column would provide Dey Street with a far more dramatic vista than the glazed vault of the World Financial Center’s Wintergarden presently offers. Were this column incorporated into the Franck Lohsen McCrery scheme, it might commemorate the fallen heroes of September 11, complementing Stoddart’s two female figures and catafalque. In that case, the angel crowning the column could bear wreaths as tokens of valor, with reliefs on the base portraying firemen and policemen, and eagles perched above. Statues of particular heroes, such as Father Mychal Judge, the venerated Fire Department chaplain who was killed by falling debris while administering the last rites to a fireman, might then be set in front of the train station. Banfield and Reed’s plaza differs in two other respects. It extends over just one block, opens onto West Street and is aligned with Dey Street (whereas Franck Lohsen McCrery’s Liberty Square is situated a block to the east and runs perpendicular to Dey). The arcaded fa ades proposed by Banfield and Reed are splayed to create a forced perspective, or illusion of spatial depth, when viewed from the east. Their plaza would be intimate and grand at the same time, with their memorial column providing a powerful artistic focus. THE GREAT SIGNIFICANCE of both Franck Lohsen McCrery’s design and the Banfield-Reed proposal is that they are grounded in the idea of cultural continuity–the persistence of time-tested forms and conventions–as a source of enduring meaning and aesthetic resonance in architecture and fine art, and in the idea that the horizons of human life reach beyond death, loss, and grief. These ideas, and all they assume about the supreme legitimacy of a humanist art that rejects the assertion of personal creativity as an end in itself, are positively anathema to the postmodern regime. Perhaps that’s why we find a ballyhooed authority on memorial design, Edward Linenthal of the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, telling the Daily News, “The process of deciding what to do–to rebuild, to memorialize, to make a park, or put up lights–and deciding what it means in the culture, means people need to agonize. In the end, the process of conversation is as important, if not more important, than the result.” The postmodern memorial, in other words, just doesn’t matter that much. The “lights” Linenthal mentions, by the way, are the twin “towers of light” proposed as a temporary art installation at the World Trade Center site. The New York Times Sunday magazine put a variant of this scheme on its cover, and pronounced it “haunting.” The proposal, surely more noteworthy as a technological concept than an artistic one, is under review at City Hall. Impermanence, at least, is an explicit part of the package in this case. But the main point here is that “process”–rather than, say, artistic norms–is what really matters to Linenthal and the arts establishment. “The visioning process is just getting underway,” an official of the influential Municipal Arts Society says of the memorial. In a draft report posted on the Internet shortly after New Year’s Day, an ad-hoc confederation of 350 architects, engineers, planners, graphic designers, and academics called “New York New Visions” advocates “an expanded concept of the memorial as both commemoration and continuing process.” New York New Visions, which came together after the terrorist attack to provide ideas for reconstruction, includes–you guessed it–a “Memorial Process Team” with over fifty members who are preparing a briefing book on precedents for New York’s Governor Pataki, Whitehead’s redevelopment corporation, groups of the bereaved, and other concerned parties. The memorial team’s co-coordinator Ray Gastil (who graciously shared draft portions of the briefing book with me) is, I believe, fully sincere when he says the book is intended to be objective, wide-ranging, and non-prescriptive. But the fact remains that the team’s interest lies mainly in memorials erected only quite recently–and such memorials tend to be deeply flawed. We’re talking about projects like the Kobe Port Earthquake Memorial Park, whose centerpiece is a generous portion of a pier ravaged by the 1995 earthquake that took 6,400 lives in the Japanese city and its surrounding region. Then there’s the Irish Hunger Memorial, now under construction in Battery Park City. This memorial will consist of a quarter-acre grassy landscape including the ruin of an old two-room stone house imported from County Mayo, overgrown potato furrows, and stones donated by all thirty-two counties of Ireland–tilted on an irregularly shaped platform. Under the platform’s cantilevered upper end, the base will carry numerous quotations, some documentary and others poetic, inscribed in bands of glass that alternate with bands of stone. IN ONE of the draft articles from the memorial team’s briefing book, the memorial landscape of the Gettysburg batt
lefield is treated as a matter of ideological controversy, without the slightest suggestion of the transcendent aesthetic power of this essentially classical landscape. The AIDS Memorial Quilt, for its part, warrants consideration because “it is as much a process as it is an artifact.” All these memorials–like Oklahoma City’s stark portals, pool, and empty chairs–reflect an ephemeral sensibility utterly at odds with design’s higher possibilities. More than likely, a memorial that takes its cues from these precedents, rather than the classical tradition, will lose much of its resonance once those affected by the cycles of grief, loss, and healing are gone. What’s more, the documentary ethos and minimalist aesthetics will likewise drift into oblivion. New York New Visions unwittingly lends support to such an outcome when it cites as a compelling precedent the 350-member task force that produced the mission statement for the Oklahoma City National Memorial. Regarding input for the World Trade Center site, the draft report suggests that, apart from those who lost their loved ones, “there should be wide representation by many groups at all income levels, including private and public property holders, small business owners, and downtown civic and business leaders; neighborhood residents, workers, artists, cultural producers, religious leaders, schoolchildren, representatives of small arts groups and landmarks; city, state, and federal agency representatives; and concerned citizens from the community, city, five boroughs, state, other states, and the world.” This is a formula for confusion, not vision. And for all the talk of “inclusiveness,” it is entirely possible that traditional proposals like Franck Lohsen McCrery’s and Banfield-Reed’s will be excluded from serious consideration. This can only be prevented by political means. Influential New Yorkers who understand the aesthetic and symbolic power of true civic art will have to prevail upon Whitehead and his colleagues to brave the ire of New York’s “cultural producers” and make sure that classical architects and artists are heard in the councils of debate that will shape the future of the World Trade Center site. To be sure, the firemen and policemen of New York, along with the survivors of the heroes who gave their lives on September 11, will keep a close eye on the “process.” It seems reasonable to assume that where design is concerned, these are the people most likely to understand that the memorial and its architectural setting should incarnate the heroic dimension of the human spirit, drawing on the same emotional wellsprings that inspired so much valor on that terrible day. AFTER James McCrery of Franck Lohsen McCrery and Alexander Stoddart presented their scheme in a November press conference, they received a tour of Ground Zero and visited the famous “war room,” the operations center at 1 Police Plaza. They encountered about forty policemen, as well as FBI, Coast Guard, and Secret Service officers, and distributed copies of their proposal to those present. “They loved it, they just loved it,” says McCrery. “It’s legible. A police officer can pick it up and tell us, ‘Hey, this is great,’ and point out what’s going on with the statues and the buildings. These guys want soaring, in-your-face buildings. American skyscrapers.” They want something grand, in other words. Catesby Leigh writes about architecture and fine art, and lives in Washington, D.C.
