Architect 2014-07.pdf

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as it was being built and wrote it off as dull
work of architecture, cheapened by the intense
reflectivity of the glass. But suddenly, on
completion, it has emerged as something rather
different. It’s restrained, in a Japanese way, and
not boring at all. Off the white marble lobby is a
trio of elevator corridors, each lined with shiny
brown African anigre wood, each culminating
in a video installation—wind, trees, sky—
accompanied by a Philip Glass composition.
From the higher floors, the views south and
west are astounding, and from the 57th-floor
terrace, 1 WTC looks somewhat as its various
architects imagined—slender and angular—
rather than the clunky, value-engineered
bunker you currently see at street level. And
the effect of the façade mirroring the sky on a
sunny day is positively cinematic.
While I’ve come to admire 4 WTC, my
misgivings about the memorial have only
intensified since its completion. Maybe this
is because the one piece of Libeskind’s plan
that always resonated with me was his vision
of the slurry wall as heroic object. Originally
built to keep the Hudson River out of the Twin
Towers’ excavation site, the wall was, after
all, the last remaining artifact that conveyed
any of the monumental nature of the old WTC.
Although the towers fell, the slurry wall stood,
and prevented the river from inundating Lower
Manhattan. Libeskind’s winning proposal for
the site was built around the wall’s symbolic
beauty. His drawings showed a series of towers,
stair-stepped in height and arranged around a
greensward, sheltered by the top 30 feet of what
could have become New York’s Wailing Wall.
But, of course, a memorial in which you
could see the slurry wall would have to be set
below grade, and the site’s nearest residential
neighbors, the good people of Battery Park City,
rebelled against the idea: too sad, too much of
an impediment to their ability to cut across the
site on their way to work. (I can’t imagine that
the site’s commercial interests warmed to a
depressed memorial, either.) And so Libeskind’s
most powerful concept evaporated, replaced by
Michael Arad, AIA’s massive, square fountains.
In theory, I like Arad’s idea of commemorating
the two footprints, but there’s something
about the execution, particularly the way the
fountains are framed by heavy ribbons of
bronze into which the names of those who died
on Sept. 11 have been inscribed, that feels wrong
to me. The memorial’s aesthetic reads like a
rebuke of the deceptive lightness of Minoru
Yamasaki’s vision.
And it strikes me as almost immoral that,
above ground at the memorial, there is nothing
left of the old WTC except for a single tree, a
callery pear pulled from the rubble, replanted,
and named the Survivor Tree. Visitors, hungry
for some connection to what was once there,
crowd around the tree and take pictures.
MANY VISITORS to the memorial, myself
among them, used to press their noses to the
glass of Snøhetta’s asymmetrical entry pavilion,
completed years before the National September 11
Memorial & Museum opened its doors in May,
to see the remnant of the WTC visible within, a
pair of the complex’s familiar steel tridents. So
it was exciting to finally go inside and see the
tridents accompanied with a large photo that
showed them in context at the base of the Twin
Towers.
Much has been made of the museum’s
gaffes–appalling products on sale at the gift
shop (the cheese board!), a capsule history of
Jihad that some Muslims found offensive—but
in truth, the museum does what it’s supposed
to do, diligently and surprisingly well, with
a level of detail so conscientious that it’s
overwhelming. What I realized as I made my
way through the multimedia re-creation of
Sept. 11 is that most events of great historic
significance are far enough in the past that
the amount of related ephemera has been
winnowed by time. Not so Sept. 11. It seems
like the museum has every sad missing poster,
every victims’ artifact, and countless objects
like dry cleaner hangers commemorating the
first responders. There is simply too much.
The onslaught, after a while, is numbing.
Some aspects of the panoramic
documentation of that day are genuinely
stunning. There are alcoves where you can sit
down and listen to first-person accounts from
people who were in the towers, with schematic
diagrams pinpointing their locations. The
simple graphics and the fact that you actually
have to stop and focus on one story at a time
makes these displays unusually powerful.
Aside from Snøhetta’s crystalline pavilion,
the impact of which is undermined by the
airport-style security maze you must negotiate
to get inside, the museum has two defining
architectural gestures. Davis Brody Bond
(DBB), the firm that designed the underground
portion of the building, created a series of
ramps that lead you downward, 70 feet into
the earth, to the spots where the old towers
met bedrock. Access to bedrock is, in fact, one
of the highlights of the museum. The bases of
the buildings’ box beams and other elements
of the foundations are treated as if they were
archaeological finds, remnants of some lost
civilization—which, arguably, they are.
But DBB’s best architectural moment is
what’s known as the Foundation Hall. It is
a compelling open space, where Libeskind’s
68-foot-tall slurry wall actually fulfils its
symbolic destiny. At first, you see the wall,