But which Thousand?

"A Picture Paints a Thousand Words"

Maybe so. But which thousand words out of the many millions available? That old cliche about a picture and a thousand words is incomplete, perhaps even a bit misleading, for it ignores the not-very-minor-point that one can tease a great many mutially-exclusive sentences out of the very same picture.

It is not at all clear to me what Marcus (the poster to whom I link, above) means, or what the image means to him.

I see the great and admirable vitality of a (somewhat) entreprenurial society manifesting itself, rebuilding itself, re-creating itself -- but in what I believe is an indifferent urban plan. Is that what Marcus sees as well? I like that thought but I doubt it as very few "political bloggers" seem to grasp that the rebuilding of Ground Zero is first, before it can become anything else, a physical and urban event.

(And I haven't studied the plans enough to really feel firm in my own opinion. I did, however, see part of a Frontline show on the 9-1-1 Sacred Ground which was so uninformative about the characteristics of the various physical proposals set forth by David Childs and Daniel Libeskind as to be startling.)

UPDATE: Seablogger comments on my post.He gets it partly right and partly wrong:

David Sucher of City Comforts has some doubts about the WTC site redevelopment plan. I am utterly repulsed by the image that Sucher reproduces. I only hope Libeskind's prismatic horrors are never inflicted on the skyline of New York. Even some stripped down, compromise version could hardly be as dreadful.

Better yet, surround a footprint-based plaza with low-rise structures that would welcome New Yorkers and visitors into a human-scaled environment. There will always be a morbid fascination about the site, and I think nothing tall should ever stand there again, other than the memorial towers of light.

Partly right (and I am not absolutely clear on this one as I have not studied the plans -- so see John Massengale for a more authoritative opinion) because the plan is probably not a very urbane one.

Partly wrong because it appears that Sullivan seems to be placing too much emphasis on the skyline rather than, it appears, (and I could be wrong on his intent) on how the site feels to the pedestrian.

Moreover, I wonder if the overall vision for the site -- vacant, low-rise, or high-rise -- is really fairly debatable i.e. that there is no right way. My initial reaction -- on September 11, 2001 -- was that we should go ahead and rebuild the WTC Towers exactly as they were, notwithstanding that they were a hideous urban design, because such a reconstruction would be as clear a statement of defiance as any.

I have rethought that impulse. Why should we inflict on ourselves a mistake from the past in order to epater l'Osama? But that does not mean that we shouldn't knit back the site into the life-and-commerce of the city. So I wonder about Sullivan's approach, though I don't toss it away out-of-hand. There are probably a host of meaningful ways to re-develop Ground Zero.

Comments

[Jon Newton]

A thousand words?

One comes to mind:

PHALLUS

[David Sucher]

Yes? And is there anything wrong with a phallus?

Many years ago I remember some friend commenting -- with great signficance and as if it was a great insight -- that such-and-such new building was "just a phallus."

I was young enough to be both impressed and perplexed. Now I am old enough to be only perplexed. Is characterizing a large building as a "phallus" a put-down? Why would that be? Many people love phalluses; so why should it be a term of derogation?

[Jon Newton]

No, not necessarily (but can be.) But in this context a phallus may be simply innapropriate. At the very least its boring and predictable, just like its name "Freedom Tower".

Okay, so it's not likely - but I have prefered something much more low key, simple, human.

[ian]

I suppose it says something though that the predominent image is so male and to a degree agressive - especially in the context.

[David Sucher]

Well then wouldn't it be more straightforward to say that the building is too aggressive? (I simply don't see that the buildings are in any respect "male.") And even then I'd say "And what does that mean?"

Not a major point but it just strikes me as an odd and disonant use of a sexual characteristic. I don't particularly buy into those cliches anyway -- men are forceful, women are demure, blah blah blah etc etc -- and it seems to diminish everyone to attach cliches which really aren't even very true in the first place to yet another issue such as whether a building contributes to a city streetscape.

The buildings in the photo might very well have pink tops and veins along the side but how would that indicate anything about whether they will contribute to a good city? About how it meets the sidewalk?

[winifer skattebol]

Too bad the site "Sheer Phallacy: The Phallic Symbol Collection"--a delightful page--has been taken down; or I'd refer you all to it.

[David Sucher]

Jon,
You are proving my point in a way. I agree with you as to outcome: I'd like a more sidewalk oriented project -- something in my terms which is "more human."
But then what could be more human than a phallus?

[Jon Newton]

David

Fair enough, I am glad we agree on that.

(Although a phallus one only associates with 50% of humanity?...)

Anyway, I was thinking, apart from the design not meeting with my approval, the cost is a bit excessive too? Plus I can imagine the cost of security would be high too. Wouldn't it simply become another target - and rather a prime one?

I guess I was a bit harsh criticising the name - "Freedom Tower". It just that it sounds so inevitable and obvious, I guess.

[Tim Hulsey]

Can a "Freedom Tower" exist, or is it an irreconcilable contradiction in terms? Freedom and liberty exalt the individual, after all. They place the human being and his/her choices at the center of the universe, and thus represent a logical development of Western humanism. But this tower is designed to overwhelm the individual and individual choice in one fell swoop -- which is true of most glass-and-steel towers.

In this case, the name "Freedom Tower" is not only meaningless, it's bitterly ironic. It reminds me of all those godwaful Soviet-era government buildings with names like "Palace of the People."

[David Sucher]

Tim.
You think a tower is designed to overwhelm the individual any more than does, by design, the cathedral?
I do not.

[Tim Hulsey]

You're absolutely right about cathedrals, though I think you've missed my point (assuming, of course, that I have one) on the problem with calling this skyscraper "The Freedom Tower."

Cathedrals don't stem from Western humanism, and they usually don't claim to do so. In fact, as an architectural memory of a time when church and state were one, the cathedral's outsized scale and verticality represent precisely what Western humanism had to reject in order to survive.

When authoritarian designs are covered with a patina of Western secular values, the results are the self-consciously awe-inspiring structures of an Albert Speer or a Philip Johnson -- profoundly anti-humanist and thus anti-freedom. Like the cathedral, the authoritarian glass-and-steel tower-in-a-park conditions individuals to consent to the underlying ideology, one which dwarfs the human and renders him/her irrelevant.

Nobody has built (or likely will build) a "Freedom Cathedral," in part because it would be an obvious contradiction in terms. A "Freedom Tower" would also be a contradiction in terms, and for the same reasons. Building such a tower would provide America with the sort of "Palace of the People" one used to see in places like Rumania, or the former Soviet Union. And I fear it would prove that we Americans no longer know what freedom looks like, let alone what it can do for us (or we for it).

[Hal O'Brien]

"Nobody has built (or likely will build) a "Freedom Cathedral," in part because it would be an obvious contradiction in terms."

A quick Google shows this to be demonstrably untrue. Or, rather, there's a church called "Freedom Cathedral" in Arkansas -- whether they have structure by the same name is unclear.

I also find myself bemused by the idea that "freedom" necessarily precludes a whole range of activites a group of people can do of their own volition. But perhaps I'm just too familiar with Popper's Paradox.

[David Sucher]

I see Tim's point and it is a good one and from that perspective -- the Medieval churches were not humanistic at all and the strtuctures tools of reinforcing a hierarchical society -- well I agree.

The only thing I'd say is that the most important thing about a building can be measured with a 30' Stanley carpenter's tape: all else is epilogue. When walking by it, there is little practical difference between a 15 story building and 100 story building: they are both, compared to a human, very very big. Even a blank-walled 2 story building at street-grade is oppressive. So I have no problem with very tall buildings so long as they meet the sidewalk according to The Three Rules.

[Alan Sullivan]

Actually, David, I intended the skyline comment as a mere opener to the principal topic: how the site should feel from street level. So I do agree with you about that. But even if a tall structure met your 'three rules,' I think the best way to honor the dead and to use the site is to leave it as open as possible. This would not, to my mind, make 9/11 a 'victory for terrorism.' Victory is won on the battlefield, not in a planning office. Let the low-rise buildings include any mix of residential, commercial, or arts facilities. By all means the place should be part of the city's life. But great office buildings are dinosaurs. The internet is dispersing work.

[David Sucher]

I don't know, Alan. The office towers in Seattle and Bellevue are pretty full and they keep building more world-wide and they keep getting occupied. There were many predictions right after 9-11 that the "tower is dead" but a recent WSJ article (alluded to elsewhere/I haven't read it myself) supposedly told a very different tale i.e. towers are being built in many places around the globe.

[Tim Hulsey]

I'm not claiming that freedom is incompatible with religion -- just that it can't coexist with the authoritarian merger of church and state, an impulse expressed architecturally through the cathedral. Human freedom is also incompatible with the glass-and-steel statism embodied through the "Freedom Tower." The name is downright offensive.

The "three rules" strike me as a vital countermeasure to preserve the visual signifiers of human scale and human freedom within outsized urban architecture. A fifteen-story building may dwarf all comers regardless of how it's designed. But if it's built on the sidewalk, with retail space on the first floor, the building can still privilege the horizontal, democratic gaze over the vertical, hierarchical one.

I agree with Alan that a decentralized model of power and authority makes sense in our computerized age. So could the allure of autocracy, especially to today's business and governmental leaders, explain why office towers remain popular? In a disturbing trend, more and more government buildings (esp. in the suburbs of DC) seem to take the form of "towers in a park." Most of the old WTC's clients were government departments, and that will surely prove the case for our "Freedom Tower" as well.

Interesting to hear that Rogers AR has a "Freedom Cathedral." It looks as though Suffolk VA has one, too. I consider myself duly corrected, though I doubt Mother Church recognizes either one. The basic point about cathedrals and office towers -- in particular, why they emphasize the vertical over the horizontal -- still applies, I think.

[David Sucher]

Decentralization of power in the computer age? I would suspect that the opposite is just as likely.

The allure of towers is closeness: the desire/need/utility for the face-to-face & even serendipitous, chance encounter.

[Tim Hulsey]

Where does one have such chance encounters -- aside from those overcrowded elevators?

I think, actually, that the centralization of power is more likely (and more absolute) in the computer age than at any previous point in human history. But my point was that a decentralized model makes more business sense -- reduce overhead, let individual operators work within localized and/or "niche" markets. The decentralized model has long been the secret of Wal-Mart's success.

But oddly, we seem not to have learned the obvious lesson. In corporate America, and in American government, power continues to accrue at the center -- the tower -- instead of flowing outwards toward individuals. You can see this craving for power embodied in the new WTC plan: Instead of two outsized, alienating towers-in-a-plaza, we're building a single tower that will nonetheless prove larger, taller, and (likely) even more alienating than its predecessors. A throne, it would seem, cannot exist in two places at once.

[David Sucher]

Tim,
By itself, per se, the tower does not promote the chance encounter & enhanced social/business interaction. But it allows very large numbers of people to be in close proximity. Then the key is to have a good pedestrian-oriented street where people can bump into each other. You might want to download the sample chapter (of my book) on that very subject: bumping into people.

And from what I understand, Wal-Mart is also an example of the enormous success of centralization of decision-making.