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AIA
New Hampshire Forum
Donald Maurice Kreis
Ours
is so often such an ugly world, in which everything that is creative,
delightful, life-affirming, community-empowering and justice-inspiring
is trampled beneath the juggernaut of greed, expediency and repression.
So, regardless of what is ultimately built on the site of the
World Trade Center, let us take a moment to celebrate the selection
of Daniel Libeskind as the architect for this most conspicuous of
commissions. It truly is an occasion for dancing in the streets.
One
could dance in the streets of Berlin, a city beleaguered by the
evils of the Twentieth Century at least as much as New York has
been by those of the Twenty First. There Libeskind has created
his masterful Jewish Museum, with a plan that assumes the form of
an exploded Jewish star. This form, in its execution, is more
than just expressively sculptural, for the lines of Libeskind’s
building literally reach into the neighborhood surrounding the museum
in ways that directly allude to the fate of Berlin’s once thriving
Jewish community. Talk about site-specific design! And if ever
there were a place on Earth that required a site-specific architectural
sensibility, it is the former home of the Twin Towers. Here, the
lines (as proposed) would reach toward the fire houses and other
places from which help, comfort and courage came running on that
otherwise-horrible day.
One
could dance on the streets of Washington or Salem, Massachusetts,
to name two locales where it has already been conclusively proven
that the most effective and enduring memorial design is that which
directs the attention of the visitor downward to the solid and reassuring
ground. This is a key principle implicit in Maya Lin’s design
for the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial as well as James Cutler’s memorial
commemorating the 300 th anniversary of the Salem witch trials.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, the central and compelling
vision of Libeskind’s plan for the World Trade Center site is to
preserve (as much as is practicable) the pit where Minoru Yamasaki’s
skyscrapers once stood, and the slurry walls that both held the
nearby Hudson River at bay and did not yield to the terrorists’
fury, as an enduring sign of the strength and fortitude of New York.
One
could dance on the streets of Chicago, which is the city that can
rightly claim the soul of American architecture by virtue of having
nurtured Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.
It was Chicago’s lakefront that was the imagined site for Wright’s
elegant, tapering Mile High skyscraper, whose needle-like form is
so clearly an inspiration for the 1,776 foot vertical garden that
Libeskind proposes as the counterpoint to his downward-looking memorial
site.
One
could dance on the streets of Hanover, where Dartmouth alumnus Nelson
Rockefeller saw to it that his favorite architect, the great Wallace
K. Harrison, received an important commission in the form of the
Hopkins Center. In form and spirit, Libeskind’s proposal owes
much to the Trylon and Perisphere that Harrison created as the icons
of the 1939 New York World’s Fair and its focus on “the world of
tomorrow.”
One
could dance on the streets of Exeter, where Louis Kahn was somehow
allowed to create a library for Phillips Exeter Academy that paid
tribute to its historic architectural setting without even pretending
to imitate the look of its neighbors. Likewise, Libeskind’s Jewish
Museum is actually an annex to an adjacent Eighteenth Century former
courthouse, whose cream colored façade and red roof are so beautifully
reflected and thus so movingly honored in the jagged zinc cladding
of Libeskind’s building. Lower Manhattan, where the local ‘vernacular’
includes works by Cass Gilbert, Cesar Pelli, the firm of McKim,
Mead & White, and Skidmore Owings & Merrill, needs an architect
who understands that the best way to honor landmarks is not to imitate
them but to create buildings that will themselves someday be worthy
of landmark status.
One
could dance on the streets of Newark, and other once-and-future
places in the Garden State with a direct mass transit link, via
the PATH trains, to the World Trade Center. Like the Potsdamer
Platz that Renzo Piano and others revitalized in Berlin, the World
Trade Center site is a key urban transit hub. At the end of the
PATH tunnel, via the banal subterranean shopping mall of Yamasaki’s
creation, one scuttled into the city like a rat. One might enter
it now like a god.
One
could dance on the streets of any community where The New York
Times is delivered, containing the heavy-handed writing of
its architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp. It was victory in the
struggle against parochialism and the Old Boy Network when the Lower
Manhattan Development Corporation chose to ignore Muschamp’s blatant
effort to use his good offices to gain the commission for his pals
on the runner-up THINK team, Rafael Vinoly, Frederic Schwartz and
Shigeru Ban. Their proposal was intriguing and owed much to the
Eiffel Tower. (More interesting was the elegant set of ribbon-like
structures that Vinoly had proposed several months earlier for a
World Trade Center transit facility as part of a Times
magazine spread facilitated by Muschamp.)
Our
Mr. Muschamp is a great critic – he writes with such passion and
insight – but he deserved to be slapped down here as a stern rebuke
to disingenuousness. Or is there some other adjective to apply
to the fact that Muschamp originally praised Libeskind’s design
(when the question was whether anything other than commercial imperatives
would govern the site) and later disowned the praise by claiming
that the design’s “meanings became more disturbing with each viewing”?
One
could dance, finally, anywhere the accordion is played. A recent
issue of Smithsonian Magazine contained the revelation
that Libeskind was a boy prodigy on the accordion and a mere twist
of fate caused him to pursue architecture and not music as a career.
Perhaps it is too facile to wonder if Libeskind is deriving design
inspiration from the bellows of the squeeze boxes from his youth.
But surely if one is trained to play an instrument that is constantly
changing its shape, one will be drawn to buildings with forms that
are non-static – not just gratuitiously, a la Frank Gehry, but with
a purpose.
On
Sackett Street in the once obscure but now-trendy Carroll Gardens
section of Brooklyn is a fourth-floor walk-up apartment that 20
years ago housed a young journalist who eventually moved to New
England, became a lawyer and began indulging his love of buildings
by writing about architecture. From the roof of the building one
got a postcard panorama of lower Manhattan. From the windows of
the apartment, just one floor below, one saw only the tallest part
of the Twin Towers. From that distance and vantage point, they
were a beneficent presence and a reminder that the glories of the
big city were just a few minutes away by subway. Maybe it is hubris,
or mere sentimentality, for an exiled New Yorker to delight in the
prospect of that demolished panorama being replaced by something
even more inspiring – a spire full of life-celebrating greenery,
reaching higher into the sky than ever, a rebuke to the destroyers
and haters and the very embodiment of Burnham’s exhortation to make
no small plans.
O
beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain – to quote
the opening lines of Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House
– has there ever been another place on earth so deserving of the
finest architecture that our civilization can summon? The choice
of Daniel Libeskind gives reason to hope that it might really happen.
* * *
Donald
Maurice Kreis, formerly of 238 Sackett Street in Brooklyn, now lives
in Grantham, N.H.
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