Category: world trade center memorial

Gawker Media: always pushing the envelope of integration of content and advertising.

“Does it smell like smoked mozzarella out here, or is it just me?” [gawker]

Interesting. The Gutter does a quick handicap of the “winners” and “losers” in the new Frank Sciame-redesign of the WTC Memorial.
There’s one overlooked/surprise winner: Santiago Calatrava, who, the gutter points out, got the Snohetta Freedom Center-turned-Information Center removed from the northeast corner of the Memorial Quadrant, where it had previously interfered with his own soaring crown roast of a train station. [Of course, that must’ve been a pretty short meeting, since Sciame is also working for Calatrava.]
The “winner” to no one’s surprise at all, though, is the Port Authority. Another feature I haven’t seen discussed is in the drawing above: something labeled “Memorial Plaza.” That just happens to be the title of one of the six original rebuilding concepts the Port Authority commissioned from Beyer Blinder Belle way back in July 2002. It was the outcry against those six concepts, titled “Memorial [choose one: Plaza, Square, Triangle, Garden, Park, Promenade].” The original concepts and program can be seen here. Memorial Plaza is below. Look familiar?

Ouroussoff today lamented the lack of progress and vision in the WTC site rebuilding and in the Memorial design process both. But maybe we’ve been looking at this wrong from the start. If you’re Port Authority, this whole thing looks to be moving along exactly as planned.
WTC Memorial 2.0: And the Winner Is… [gutter]
“Today the LMDC released its six concepts…” [greg.org, 7/16/02]
Six Plans for WTC Site Unveiled (7/16/02) [newyork.construction.com]

What kind of tool do you use for value engineering a half billion dollars out of your terrorist attack memorial project? Well, if you’re Kevin Rampe, you use a Sciame. [rimshot]
The way Miss Representation sees it, Frank Sciame’s busy doing a “leave no trace” rub-out on the key components of Michael Arad’s original WTC memorial design. Naturally, the details, the process, and any sense of public accountability were the first casualties. But alas, it’s a familiar tale:

In reality, it is exactly what it looks like: the latest in a series of putative decision makers, people accustomed to conniving and obstruction to get their way when not in charge and who then morph into tinpot dictators when they are (because, like, they are so much more talented the those other pretenders) but fail miserably because everyone else is being as obstructionist and conniving as they can be, in hopes that they are given a shot to be the biggest idiot in the room.

Meet Frank Sciame, architect of the WTC Memorial. [missrepresentation.com via curbed]

And it’s true that things have been worse down there…
but seriously, is there nothing that can be done to stop the slide into disgusting travesty that the George Pataki is permitting the Port Authority to perpetuate?

People who cared about art and culture and constructive memorializing sound like they hold no hope for the WTC site now.

The memorial’s core feature–waterfalls into the voids of the footprints–will be turned off in the winter. Because no one thought of this before? Please.

Silverstein vs. Port Authority; empty office towers vs. a mall. If we’d known four three years ago the end game was to be a replica of the Jersey City side of the PATH train, would there have been an outcry?

Controversy Still Clouds Prospects at 9/11 Site [nyt]
What does $1,000,000,000–“excuse me, make that $1.4 billion”–get you downtown? [miss representation]
WTC Memorial Official: Waterfalls will close in the winter [dt express, via curbed]

Grr. Sometimes I don’t know which is worse: the cloying, dishonest schmaltzfest of a master plan put forward for the WTC site by Pataki’s democracy organ grinder monkey Danny Libeskind, or the de facto plan that eviscerated it, the one that’s actually being built under political cover of Libeskind’s handiwork.
Then, I read about a 9/11 memorial he built in Padua, Italy, which uses the same bogus, headbanging numerological symbolism to beat its message into visitors heads–in this case, the debunked email spasm that claimed Nostradamus predicted the 9/11 attacks–and I feel relief that that opportunistic little Minstrel of Death won’t leave a fingerprint on my city. [via archinect]

Partly because an International Freedom Center founded by George Bush’s old friend and business partner wasn’t a reassuringly hagiographic enough puppet, but mostly because it was personally expedient for them to do so, George Pataki and a dogpile of other sanctimonious politicians suddenly decided to defend the “hallowed ground” of the WTC site’s “memorial quadrant” by banning the IFC altogether.
“Memorial quadrant”?? If only the limits of this farce were as clearly delineated. How is that quadrant any more “hallowed” than the other eight-plus acres of the site? It seems like only yesterday that the “footprints” were the sacred squares that had to be defended at all costs.
How and by whom was this quadrant defined? By the MTA, who cordoned it off in an effort to keep its sacred revenue stream as more than just a memory. And to whom are the MTA and its proxy, the LMDC, beholden? To the governor who just undid their three year’s work on the IFC and the master plan “in a stroke.”
Are we done, then? Is this enough hallow now? The last three years’ of machinations around the WTC site have reduced hallowedness to a negotiable, political commodity, apparently measured in square feet. Everyone involved in this process, from Pataki to Burlingame to Clinton to the slew of unions, has dishonored and demeaned the memories of the people attacked–and the people killed–on September 11th.
Pataki Bars Museum From World Trade Center Memorial Site [nyt]
[update: now that THAT’s out of the way, the Port Authority has announced it will develop the first 500,000 square feet of retail on the completely unhallowed sections of the WTC site. This section, called the “Mall Quadrant,” is across the to-be-extended (and equally unhallowed) Greenwich St. from the “Memorial Quadrant.”]
Officials Reveal Retail Plan for World Trade Center Site [nyt]

My daughter became very sad this morning as she tried to coax her day-old balloon up off the floor.
It was heartbreaking to watch, and we tried to console her, but then I realized that on some September 11th to come, I’ll have to try to explain far worse things to her about this date.

Are you better of than you were four years ago?

Indeed, what’s most shocking is not any particular mistake that was made but how often federal officials were left to brainstorm or hash out on-the-fly just what the federal government’s responsibilities were, how to coordinate federal, state and local relief efforts, or even simply who was in charge.
Reading those passages of the article, there’s one conclusion I think any fair-minded person would have to come to. And that is that in the four years to the day since 9/11, the administration appears to have done little if any effective planning for how to mobilize a national response to a catastrophic event on American soil.
And given all the history that has passed before us over these last four years, that verdict is devastating.

Josh Marshall on the NYT’s report of the government responses to Katrina.

I’ve gotten some pretty angry emails since my International Freedom Center post comparing GWB’s cult of infallibility to Kim Jong Il’s. Most of them single out my insensitive characterization of 9/11 family member Debra Burlingame as a toady, unwitting or not, for the current administration.
I’m no pundit, and I don’t honestly know why anyone cares what I think, but let me say it straight out: I think both the IFC and The Drawing Center should be removed from the WTC site as it’s currently planned. From the beginning, I’ve thought they were, respectively, an awkward, artificial, potentially controversial sham born out of political expediency, and a wholly inexplicable, inappropriate mis-fit with the site. Both institutions were canaries in the coal mine of the WTC rebuilding process; that they’re now controversial and should not be part of the WTC Memorial should’ve surprised no one observing this Georgian (Bush or Pataki, pick your poison) mess.
So on the basis of outcome alone, I would say that Burlingame and I and Jarvis–and now the FDNY, apparently–can agree on the most appropriate outcome: no Other Centers at the World Trade Center site. We only disagree on the reasons (i.e., the politics) why.
Burlingame has repeatedly put herself, and by implication, the families of 9/11, at the service of GWB’s political agenda. In this case, that agenda is served by deflecting responsibility for the Snohetta Centers debacle away from the Bush/Pataki crowd who made this politically exploitative bed. And every time the stalking horses of “America-bashing” and “liberal, politically correct” historical revisionism are cited as the reasons for these institutions being cut–and no mention is made of Pataki et al’s long record of pandering and political manipulation of the WTC rebuilding process–that obfuscatory agenda marches on.

Did you know George W. Bush shot a miraculous 11 holes-in-one on the first round of golf he ever played? This and other such signs of his divine leadership in the face of terror will soon be on display, if Debra Burglingame, in her infinite wisdom, permits it. She campaigned for Bush, though, so I’m optimistic.

Freedom Center’s Place at Ground Zero in Question [nyt]

Santiago Calatrava’s desgin for a WTC site transit hub has been altered for security reasons. The soaring wings and the glass atrium? Gone, filled in with concrete, to match the new “beak” and solid concrete wall surrounding the joing. According to the NYT’s achingly diplomatic David Dunlap, the new design “will almost certainly lose some of its delicate quality, while gaining structural expressiveness. It may now evoke a slender stegosaurus more than it does a bird.”
But didn’t birds evolve from dinosaurs, not the other way around?

Approval Expected Today for Trade Center Rail Hub [nyt]

Well, that’s one way to keep the memory of September 11th alive. Remember how people had these stories about how they were supposed to be at the World Trade Center, but then for whatever reason, they didn’t go? And how lucky they felt?
Well, now you can add The Drawing Center–and possibly the Joyce and Signature Theaters to that list. The Drawing Center is putting its move and development plans on hold until it gets assurance that its curatorial program won’t be subjected to LMDC or any other governmentally mandated censorship.
In related news, the Freedom* Center, which is to share space with the Drawing Center, “in response to a request by Gov. George Pataki, has assured the LMDC that its content wouldn’t be un-American.”
* offer not valid if it displeases anyone named George.
Drawing Center may quit WTC [crain’s, via curbed]