How Is the Freedom Tower State of the Art
Art & Design | A Belfry That Sends a Message of Anxiety, Non Ambition
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/19/arts/design/19towe.html
Compages
A Tower That Sends a Message of Anxiety, Not Ambition
Ground zero has gone through its own kind of war fatigue. With every stride forrard in the reconstruction process, New Yorkers were asked to buy into the rhetoric of renewal, only to be confronted by images that reverberate a city all the same in a state of turmoil and delusion.
Perhaps if we shut our eyes, one might wishfully imagine, it will all simply go abroad.
Just the widely anticipated announcement that Gov. Eliot Spitzer will support the construction of the Freedom Belfry may signal an end to any promise that a broad vision — or fifty-fifty a level of sanity — can be restored to a project tainted by personal hubris and political expediency.
The most recent debate over the tower has centered narrowly on real estate values. With the developer Larry Silverstein fix to build six million foursquare feet of role space in 3 buildings just alongside the Freedom Belfry, some take questioned whether information technology will be possible to lease enough of the $three billion project at a high enough charge per unit to make it assisting. The belfry'southward symbolism solitary is likely to scare off tenants who will see it as a potential targets for terrorists. The proposition that we simply pack the edifice with government offices is virtually perversely Strangelove-ian.
Yet the problem is not but whether plenty bureaucrats can be coerced into working there one twenty-four hours; it's besides what the building expresses as a work of compages. Governor Spitzer may recall the looming presence of the twin towers on the downtown skyline, at in one case proud and intimidating; the Freedom Tower volition take an as powerful effect on the daily lives of New Yorkers likewise equally on the city's image throughout the world. Yet its message will be very different from the onetime towers.
Hurriedly redesigned more than a year ago after terrorism experts questioned its vulnerability to a flop attack, the Liberty Tower, with its tapered bulk and chamfered corners, evokes a gargantuan glass obelisk. Its impuissant bloated course, remade by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, vaguely recalls the worst of postmodernist historicism. (Information technology's a marvel that its glass peel hasn't been recast in granite.)
Prototype
Recently cities like Paris, London and San Francisco accept held major architectural competitions for towers that will reshape their skylines. All of them drew on an array of ambitious architectural talents; many of those designs pushed technological and structural limits while reimagining the skyscraper as role of a holistic urban vision.
Even in New York, which has lagged behind much of the world in its architectural ambitions over the concluding decade or and then, projects similar Norman Foster'due south new Hearst Tower suggest that a higher standard is demanded in the design of our urban structures.
If congenital, the distressing Freedom Tower would be a constant reminder of our loss of ambition, and our inability to produce an architecture that shows a genuine faith in America's collective hereafter rather than a nostalgia for a nonexistent by.
Nowhere is that failure of ambition more axiomatic than in the tower's base. In a society where the social contract that binds the states together is fraying, the nigh incisive architects have plant ways to create a more than fluid relationship between private and public realms. The entrance hall of Thom Mayne's Phare Tower in Paris, for example, is conceived as an extension of the public realm, drawing in the surrounding streetscape and tunneling deep into the ground to connect to a network of underground trains.
By comparison the Freedom Tower is conceived as a barricaded fortress. Its base of operations, a 20-story-high windowless concrete bunker that houses the lobby besides as many of the structure's mechanical systems, is clad in laminated glass panels to requite it visual allure, but the message is the same. It speaks less of resilience and tolerance than of paranoia. It'south a building armored against an outside globe that we no longer trust.
There is no reason to have this every bit fate. Although structure has begun on the belfry's foundations, we are still a year or and so away from the point that the building will begin to rise. The foundations could even exist completed while a procedure is set in motion to begin rethinking the design. Meanwhile construction could begin on Mr. Silverstein's towers to the south, which should testify much easier to lease.
Governor Spitzer of course would accept to summon the will to venture into ane of the most emotionally and politically charged sites in the world less than two months into his tenure. To do so he must first accept that the Liberty Tower's message is not directed solely at real estate-obsessed New Yorkers just at the world, and that the message it'southward sending now is the worst of who we are.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/19/arts/design/19towe.html
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