The Other Side of Darkness

Scrambling to beat the symbolic deadline presented by last fall’s fifth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Center, the people with the job of putting up something new on that enormously charged ground made public their final decisions about tower designs on September 7, 2006. We learned that the architects anointed to do the work — Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Fumihiko Maki — are to provide three buildings to accompany the 102-storey Freedom Tower, by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. All are disappointingly routine exercises, as it turns out, and predictably uninspiring outcomes of an architectural process that has been clouded from the outset by too-lofty public idealism and careless private ambition, by the all-too-human vanity of architects and bureaucrats, politicians and critics, and by American uncertainties in the first years of the new millennium.

At least once during the five years before last September, however, this generally dim process became incandescent. From the murk of competing forces that hovered over Ground Zero emerged ideas about skyscraper architecture’s past and future that transcended all the much-reported political and cultural machinations in New York and made a contribution worth remembering to the culture of building in the contemporary world.

This remarkable moment began with a failure in the summer of 2002, when New York’s public and critical attention to the site of the disaster was still fervent. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, a state and city agency created after 9/11 to mend the torn fabric of New York, showed architectural ideas for Ground Zero that pleased no one. But such was the effervescent atmosphere of the time that this embarrassment, instead of discouraging further efforts at original thought, prompted a fresh determination on the part of the lmdc and other agencies, architects, and ordinary citizens to look harder for excellent solutions. The name of this fresh initiative was the Innovative Design Study.

The ids was supposed to be not a competition but a showcase of architectural ruminations about the general nature of the site. The public and professional fascination with the Trade Center location at the time, however, along with its status as the most closely watched building site on earth, quickly transformed the ids into an intellectual and artistic contest of the best and liveliest sort. The lmdc received 406 submissions from around the globe. From this number, seven teams were asked to make proposals, given three months to prepare their entries, and handed a very modest honorarium of $40,000 for taking part. When the proposals by the invited architects were made public, at a packed news conference in the Winter Garden of New York’s World Financial Center on December 18, 2002, the event got the most intense international media coverage of any architectural occasion in the world since the collapse of the towers themselves. In the weeks that followed, 100,000 visitors saw the models and drawings, and six million people visited the lmdc website.

A jury organized by the lmdc chose two finalists in early 2003 — Studio Daniel Libeskind and a team known as think, led by Rafael Viñoly and Frederic Schwartz — from among the seven groups and individuals who had been invited to enter the race. In late February 2003, Libeskind’s master plan was picked as the winner, whereupon began the next round of wrangling and bluster, conflicts between architects and real-estate interests and public agencies, all of which continued until September 7, 2006.

Though he lost his very public fight to press on from the ids and design the skyscrapers — David Childs got the commission for the Freedom Tower in May 2003 — Libeskind was always right in believing the ids was about far more than master planning. The designers involved in this exercise had created viable architecture, schemes for buildable skyscrapers that were persuasive, forceful statements of contemporary imagination, each demanding serious attention as an argument about what the tall building can be and what it could look like in the twenty-first century.

Take, for example, the proposal by think group, which included architect Shigeru Ban and landscape architect Ken Smith as well as Viñoly and Schwartz. Of their three initial suggestions, the one chosen for final consideration consisted of a pair of tall, hollow, latticework cylinders — which could be read as phantasmal recollections of Minoru Yamasaki’s twin World Trade Center towers — connected high above the ground by a diaphanous wisp of architectural fabric. Suspended inside each tube would be cultural facilities including a conference centre and a performing arts complex.

Called the World Cultural Center, think’s plan barely acknowledged the enduring desires of the private interests at Ground Zero for the replacement of ten million square feet of office space lost on 9/11. Instead, the consortium offered a monumental tribute to the creative spirit, as that elusive spirit is incarnate in plays, symphonies, and artworks. think’s buildings, with their cultural facilities held aloft by a fragile looking material, would be deeply poignant counterstatements to the mindlessness of violence and terror: a deployment of the heavenward-reaching but traditionally materialistic skyscraper form as an expression of the concerns of the spirit. In contrast to the sturdy muscularity favoured by American high-rise designers since the Great Depression, the think scheme had a fin-de-siècle delicacy about it — aesthetic, vast but frail, and faintly decadent. The project shrugged off truth-to-materials and other solemn pieties of the Modernist movement, or remained studiously indifferent to them. It suggested a way beyond the classic skyscraper: from a preoccupation with structure into psychology, or into an attenuated, postmodern spirituality.

While think gestured allusively toward Yamasaki’s Twin Towers, only a couple of the contestants dared suggest that Ground Zero needed something as mighty and imposing as the old World Trade Center. But the team that called itself United Architects — an outstanding avant-garde group that included Los Angeles architect Greg Lynn, Hollywood design firm Imaginary Forces, and Foreign Office Architects — suggested exactly that. Their plan affirmed the Modernist skyscraper’s traditional role as an immense condenser of social, technical, and visual energies, and as the biggest, boldest element in every city’s scenography. Separate at the base, the five gleaming masses that make up the project lean and bend into each other high over the ground, springing outward to form arches, combining to create enormous stacks and chimneys thrusting upward.

The visual wallop of the United Architects’ proposal sharply divided critics, some of whom saw it as attractively punchy, others as overbearing and fear-inspiring. This complex, handsome structure represents the best of Modernist skyscraper design, writ large and with high bravado. It’s declarative, determined to be an iconic American artifact in a neighbourhood of buildings with more modest ambitions, romantically eccentric, exuberant, and heroic in an era when such gestures are not in vogue.