Category: world trade center memorial

He’s the only architect listed on the Observer‘s Dec. 2000 list of Players in New York’s real estate game. Engineering a backroom takeover of the WTC rebuilding project may just be one step in David Childs’ larger plan: to 0wn the West Side of Manhattan. The site is in line–the Eighth Ave. subway, to be specific–with other major Childs’ projects in NYC:

33rd St: The New Penn Station, which has been widely praised. (image: pixelbypixel.com)

41st St: NYTimes Headquarters, a collaboration with Frank Gehry, who pulled out after creative disputes. (Daniel, are you reading this?) (image: guggenheim.org)
42nd St: 7 Times Square, good for spying on Conde Nast.

50th St: Worldwide Plaza (I bet the model looked great)

59th/Columbus Circle: AOLTW Center. ugh.
116th St: East Campus Towers at Columbia, which would’ve gone where the Law School now is.

The LMDC announced today that 5,200 qualified entries were accepted into the Memorial Competition. That’s a much smaller yield than I estimated earlier.
Even so, it’s the largest design competition ever (my previous quality/quantity estimate still stands). Reuters reports that the evaluation schedule will now be “open ended given the volume of submissions [the jury] would have to sift through.” Finalists will still be announced in the Fall, but not necessarily by September.

For a few days, anyway. I got my Memorial competition submission done, expensively printed at Kinko’s, and delivered. (The official Competition Site forbade hand delivery and said couriers must be “listed in the phone book,” a verification system clearly designed to thwart my plan if I missed the Fedex deadline: dress up as a bike messenger using gear from my Kozmo.com collection.)
Until I saw Ed Wyatt’s Times article about plans pouring in yesterday, I was pretty satisfied with my efforts. My idea’s still great, but now, I think I didn’t pack it carefully enough.
Faced with actually producing a thing that could explain my idea in a (hopefully, at least remotely) compelling way, I holed up with the computer, but without the weblog. Trust me, at 2AM, scanning schematics drawn with fabric paint at the Alexandria, VA Kinko’s, I longed for what The Gothamsts call the “all talk, no action” approach. (Scanning barely-dry paint is like washing your dog’s blanket; it’s better to use someone else’s machine.)
But webloggers can’t stay quiet for long, even if the competition rules preclude publicly identifying oneself with one’s design. Jeff Jarvis worked the competition into a sermon and kept posting (making me jealous of either his weekly magazine-crankin’ production discipline or the team of elves he had working on his poster). So now that it’s over, I’ll tell you, not what I did, but how I did it. Inevitably, I took the ex-consultant and GMAT-taker’s Princeton Review-like approach to the competition, imagining what the real goal should be and how the judging process would play out.
Substance moves ahead of Style
This stated objective for Stage I is not to choose The Memorial, but to choose “approximately five finalists” , who will develop their concepts in Stage II. If a design has enough substance, i.e., if it’s promising, clearly thought through, and successfully fulfills the Mission & Principles, jurors will want to see it developed further. But the Final Five is just one possible goal. You could also set out to be one of the 100 concepts that’ll probably be exhibited, or the 2-300 that’ll get published in some book. Or you could hit a sacrifice fly, submitting a concept that tries to impact the juror’s thinking/discussion. Imagine how 1,000 proposals to recognize firefighters separately might ripple through the selection process.
About “clearly thought through”
Maya Lin’s nearly abstract rendering of her Vietnam Memorial proposal is repeatedly cited as a competition precedent, but that belies the understanding it actually represented. Lin said she spent far more time on her written concept than on her drawings. One juror noted that the submission showed that “(s)he obviously knew what (s)he was talking about.” “Clearly thought through,” then, applies to the concept and the experience. It specifically doesn’t require deciding every detail, material, and elevation: that’s Stage II. Get the right balance of concept images, descriptive text, and relevant, evocative references.
Memorial is not Monument
So many times, people have conflated the two things. It’s understandable, given the monumental scale of the Towers. Last year, I quoted two German artists who said, “The traditional concept of a monument only encourages people to contemplate a hulking stone building and an abstracted past.”. I took Maya Lin at her word when she asked for “a new way of defining what a memorial can be.”
Design for yourself
Maya Lin called for people to submit “what [they] truly believe needs to be done there.” Handicapping the jurors to reverse-engineer the concept or designing to meet currently irreconcilable agendas, or playing it as a political game won’t work.
Produce for the process
We talked about it at the Charette; I imagine the judging process will comprise a series of filters, each with different criteria:
Sanity Check — move crackpot schemes into the Outsider Art bracket. Pick a few fascinating ones for the exhibit.
Elevator Pitch — Can it pass the 30-second test and get the meeting? (i.e., Does it appear compelling and smart/effective/interesting enough to warrant fuller evaluation?)
Clustering — There are only so many possibilities under the sun. Group all the Put Bush and Giuliani on Mount Rushmore proposals over here, all the How About A Gift From the French? proposals over there. Best of Breed will move on. Anything remotely French will be saved for public burning at the Republican convention.
Libeskind/Silverstein/Westfield Factor — Does a concept play well with other uses and forces on the site? Does it break the rules in a net-positive way? I figured a concept that stayed entirely within the competition’s parameters, that didn’t attempt to inform other aspects of the site, was shirking its mission.
Take the Heat — A Final Five concept will be subject to incredible pubic/family/political scrutiny, but only after they’re selected. I can’t imagine the jurors selecting a straw man concept they know will get pilloried. Unlike the Port Authority’s first attempt to redesign the site (which I, with forced idealism, choose to read as a negotiating ploy to gain public outrage-driven leverage over Silverstein and Westfield), playing hardball with the memorial won’t be tolerated.
Numbers
The unweighted probability of a concept making it to the Final Five is extremely low, but back-of-the-envelope calculations reveal submitting to be a worthwhile exercise. That–and hubris–lead me to believe my concept will get relatively serious consideration by jurors. And if it influences their minds as they choose a memorial, it’ll be well worth it.
# of registrants: 13,683
# who submitted: 10,000
minus # who meet submission criteria: 8,500
minus # of Outsider Art entries: 7,500
minus # of “traditional monuments”: 2,500
% that are evocative–beautiful, even–but ultimately unrealizable: 10
% that are conceptually interesting, but ultimately unrealizable: 10
% that break the rules, but whose concept obviously can’t survive to completion: 10
% that are compelling, but that have some dealbreaking shortcoming in terms of Mission/Principle: 20
% that are admirable descendants of the Vietnam Memorial, but which lack its refinement and staying power: 30
# of Stage II slots going to such entries: 2/5 or 3/6
Minimum percentile where I can, without agonizing arrogance, imagine my submission rankng among the 500 that are left: 80th
Where I actually rank it now, without having seen any other entries: 99.9th
Of course, I’m also sure (or at least I hope) there are proposals much better than mine.

Must. Learn. To. Photoshop. Properly.
Must. Learn. Illustrator.
Must. Admit. Powerpoint. Is. Not. A. Real. Graphics. Program.
Must. Say, puffy fabric paint and a scanner is easier than learning Form-Z.
Must. Say, I have newfound appreciation for the way artists’ studios accrete materials and tools. You can’t just go out and buy some of that stuff.
Must. Add, that the world of craft supply stores is actually a solar system of tinier worlds: the claymolding world, the tole painting world, the modelmaking world, the balsa world, the cast-and-paint-your-own-doll-head world, the make-your-own-gel-filled-candles-or-soap world. Oh, and the puffy fabric paint world.

In the MIT speech I posted last week, Rafael Vinoly made a comment that there was “no archaeology left” at the WTC site. It had been stripped to bedrock. The Bathtub/slurry wall had to be rebuilt/refaced/replaced already. The Twin Towers’ footprints themselves now only exist as coordinates in an XYZ grid. I went to the site yesterday morning to map out my idea for the Memorial Competion, and to take reference pictures, and I found there IS “archaeology” on the site.
For all the destruction, demoltion, clearing, and (now-begun) reconstruction, a part of the original WTC has been left standing. I’ve never heard anyone mention it, and I can’t find any reference to it online, but there it is, plain as day. It ain’t much, but it’s all there is.

About 50m west of Church St, the pedestrian entry point to the original plaza, a crumbling staircase runs from street level on Vesey St, to what used to be the plaza level (which is marked in green above). It connected to 5WTC, one of the low-rise buildings that framed the plaza. On this map, it’s the green stairway next to the Children’s Discovery Center.
Read entries on the WTC Memorial Competition or more far-ranging memorial topics
[6/23 updates: in the Times, Glenn Collins writes about rebuilding/stabilization efforts for the wall. And a WSJ story about the successful evacuation odyssey of the Children’s Discovery Center.]

[via Archinect] Last month, MIT’s Dept. of Architecture hosted a presentation by Rafael Vinoly, the Al Gore of last year’s WTC competition study competition. Vinoly was part of Team THINK, and he tells about the antics at Herbert Muschamp’s NYT Ground Zero (about 20 minutes into the stream), coming up with their plan for building a World Cultural Center (about 40 minutes in), and winning the campaign.
Some highlights: (1:15:00) “Libeskind was courted; he was actually in Germany and decided not to enter, and the LMDC went to Germany to get him– because he was the Owner of Death or something (audience laughter).”
Vinoly may be more polite, but he’s not alone in his criticism of Libeskind. “Dream Teamers” Peter Eisenman and Steven Holl weren’t shy in discussing their disgust, either. And as Gothamist reports, Libeskind’s design is still under fire from many sides.
Though he pointedly doesn’t talk about waking up the next morning to find out they’d lost, Vinoly does give some advice on the Memorial Competition: (1:42:00) Q. Should entrants in the Memorial Competition take the Libeskind scheme as a departure point? A. “The major prob with the [Libeskind] scheme is that the scheme does the Memorial… I know for a fact…that what [the LMDC and memorial jury] are expecting is precisely somethng that actually changes this…Do what you want, because that’s what they’re expecting.”

Ando and Turrell collaborated on Minamidera, a Buddhist temple on Naoshima, a small island in Japan’s Inland Sea. Is it worth noting that Ando was a boxer and Turrell was a Quaker? Here is one exchange from their conversation inside the completed space:

Ando:The color is really nice. I have no difficulty just being here for 10 minutes.
Turrell:Sometimes 10 minutes is difficult in modern life. This is fine that the situation of a work like this in a small town, puts together traditional and the contemporary. It’s a way that makes some sense. I think that things in contemporary art must be something for you.They need to be near your life, too. People here at first, may wonder about this work, and about the architecture. Over time, it should be very interesting for them, because other people will come on a long journey just to see their town.

The Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum oversees “The Art House Project,” where disused traditional buildings are restored in collaboration with a contemporary artist. In addition to Turrell, the artists Tatsuo Miyajima, Rei Naito, and Hiroshi Sugimoto have completed Art Houses. The hotel on the island, Bennesse House, was designed by Ando. The crappily decorated rooms each have generally good, unique, contemporary art in them.

Thursday night, seven of us got together to discuss our questions and challenges for the WTC Memorial competition. [Here’s a sublog for the topic.] It was an extremely helpful and insightful couple of hours. The group included a journalist/weblogging guru, an architect, two artists, a designer, and me. Conversation was free-ranging; here’s Jeff Jarvis’s take(away), and here’s some of mine:

Take “performance pressure” off the Memorial, by limiting it to its Mission. Use the rest of the program at the site, e.g., the Tower, the Museum, etc. Don’t boil the ocean.

That said, meeting the needs of all the constituents/those who will be honored, is probably the single biggest challenge. It’s not something to approach blithely.

Excuse the language on a Sunday, but Libeskind’s a pain in the ass. His design has so many loaded elements in it, things that intrude on the memorial site, it’s not designated, so much as leftover; options that stay within the official site are severely constrained. The odd ramps, some mega-waterfall, trenches, glass walls, his cultural buildings; in order to pretend one cultural building doesn’t impinge on the footprint of the North tower, it’s being called a bridge. And sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I’ll never know. The right memorial has to correct aspects of Libeskind’s plan.

Practical notes: working back from the delivery deadline, factoring in production time for the board/images/text, leaves two weeks, max, from today to pin down the design. Unless you’re a 3D rendering master (and even if you are, but you don’t have infinite time/resources), adapted photocollage is the medium of choice. Of course, Maya Lin submitted a pastel drawing so abstract, one juror figured whoever the guy [sic] was who submitted it sure must know what he’s doing to send something so simple.

With over 13,000 submitters, you’ve also gotta factor in the amount of time your board will receive. Is it 15 seconds? 30? It has to be quickly compelling enough to make that first cut.

There’s more, but I can’t give away all my strategies…

The LMDC held a forum for the public to tell WTC Memorial Competition jurors what kind of memorial they want, and how to make it relevant to future generations. [Check here for an archived webcast.] In the 1,000-seat auditorium, approximately 500 seats were filled, 300 by firefighters and their families, who clearly came to the meeting with an impassioned, cohesive message: rescue workers must not go unrecognized in the memorial. Let me come back to this.

This, my first-ever public WTC event, was emotionally exhausting. Whatever effects I may still feel from the attacks, it pales in comparison to the formalized anguish that is central to Ground Zero Process veterans. It plots somewhere on the scale between consuming and addictive.

Nearly everyone was representing, reading from prepared (and, once their affiliation was known, largely predictable) statements. Twice, though, when rancor seemed ready to spill over, unscripted and wrenching comments from a family member silenced the room.

What can sometimes seem like another bullet point on the Memorial Guidelines suddenly felt like the memorial’s very essence: for at least a quarter of the families the WTC site will be the only grave they will ever have. “Give us somewhere to go.”

Because of the nature of their daily lives, firefighters and their families are more pre-something…prepared, I guess, for sudden (but not entirely unexpected) loss. Their culture is fiercely attuned to it. Other such “cultures” can learn from them how to come together and mourn and remember. But I think the ultimate unifying factor for all the people killed is not victim, target, rescuer, hero. It’s daily life. These people were killed (or injured, or they made it out or sacrificed themselves for others) while living whatever lives they chose, and the memorial should reflect that.
[I said as much when I decided to make an impromptu statement; it’s a little over two hours into the stream. Details later.]

A Brooklyn artist, James Peterson, has created a mural in Tribeca that has some people upset. See it at Gothamist.

I’ve held off for a few days, waiting to finalize the list of participants, but in the mean time, I created a separate page where I’ll post charette-related items. Tentative date: Wed., May 28, one day before the competition registration deadline.
There is still space for another person (or maybe two), to join, so if you’re going to submit a proposal to the WTC Memorial competition, you may want to join our discussion.

Been fielding some interesting responses from people on the WTC charette, including several about the word, “charette.” A couple of people said it’s snooty, a couple complained that it’s architect-y, a couple complained it’s French. As they say in darts, nice grouping. Please feel free to call it a roundtable, a workshop, a klatsch, hell, call it a “freedom cart” if your politics demands. Just call.
Several folks, including me and the aforelinked Jeff Jarvis, have been concerned about how the competition requirements (one 30×40-inch board) may skew against non-architects’ proposals: no slick, no realized, no comprehensive, no chance. This prompted me to track down Maya Lin’s 1982 account of entering the Vietnam Memorial competition, which she only published in 2000 in her book, Boundaries.
Even in my last WTC memorial post, I was unconciously channeling Lin’s essay. I mean, I knew she shows up in my script for Souvenir (November 2001), but still. It was the degree to which the Lutyens memorial at Thiepval influenced her that sets S(N01) in motion. Here’s part of what she says:

To walk past those [75,000] names [on the Thiepval memorial] and realize those lost lives — the effect of that is the strength of the design. This memorial acknowledged those lives without focusing on the war or on creating a political statement of victory or loss. This apolitical approach became the essential aim of my design, — I did not want to civilize war by glorifying it or by forgetting the sacrifices involved. The price of human life in war should always be clearly remembered.
But on a personal level, I wanted to focus on the nature of accepting and coming to terms with a loved one’s death. Simple as it may seem, I remember feeling that accepting a person’s death is the first step in being able to overcome that loss.
I felt that as a culture we were extremely youth-oriented and not willing or able to accept death or dying as a part of life. The rites of mourning, which in more primitive and older cultures were very much a part of life, have been suppressed in our modern times. In the design of the memorial, a fundamental goal was to be honest about death, since we must accept that loss in order to begin to overcome it. The pain of the loss will always be there, it will always hurt, but we must acknowledge the death in order to move on.
What then would bring back the memory of a person? A specific object or image would be limiting. A realistic sculpture would be only one interpretation of that time. I wanted something that all people could relate to on a personal level. At this time I had as yet no form, no specific artistic image.
The use of names was a way to bring back everything someone could remember about a person.

With this powerful realization–which perfectly met the competition requirements of including the names of all 57,000 Vietnam casualties on the memorial–Lin’s submission was so simple, it prompted one judge to react, “He must really know what he is doing to dare to do something so naive.” She submitted “drawings in soft pastels, very mysterious, very painterly, and not at all typical of architectural drawings.” In fact, she spent more time on the one-page essay, which she felt was critical to understanding her idea. (This text is on the official NPS site.) The takeaway from this: Your proposal can be compelling enough to win, if your idea is compelling enough to win.

A couple of people saw some cynicism my last post on the WTC Memorial competition’s designation as “open to all” and “part of the mourning process.” It was partly a reaction to that member of the axis of eager, Jeff Jarvis. And there’s my (not unfounded) skepticism about poorly guided democratic/populist design solutions. But mostly, it was about my own ambivalence about the process itself, what role a memorial there will play, and the use/impact/value of my own response.
I made a film about memorials, which looks at how people and places mark and deal with terrible events. I intended it to be something useful to people–to New York–for dealing with the WTC attacks. It occurred to me that the WTC Memorial competition is precisely when I/it can be of some use. But since it’s not in any way definitive, or authoritative, or even necessarily that influential, the way it can contribute is as one perspective in a discussion among equals. If I am ambivalent-yet-still-interested in proposing a design for the WTC Memorial, there are probably others in the same situation.
For me, and you (if you’re in the same competition boat as me), I’m putting together a WTC Memorial charette.
What’s a charette, you say? In architecture, it’s a quick-fire, problem-solving design exercise. When MoMA held one to select their architect, participants whipped up their ideas, models and sketches and submitted them in a shirt-box. Even though it’s called a charette, this exercise will put more emphasis on discussion and problem-solving and less on specific design. The goal will be to discuss our own real–not hypothetical–questions, ideas, and challenges around making our proposals for the WTC Memorial. Then, after an invigorating, thoughtful, and (hopefully) interesting charette, we’ll all be primed to make our proposals to the competition.
Here’s how I envision it so far:

It’ll be a small group (8-10 people max; I already have 4), with an architect moderating, but with a healthy mix of professionals (architects, artists, designers) and amateurs (everybody else). Importantly, there are no armchair generals; each participant must be registering for the competition. (For those who want to follow along, we’ll put it on the website.)

If you already know exactly what should go on the WTC site, congratulations and best of luck. This charette won’t be of use to you.

Demagogues need not apply. Since only brilliant people will participate, there will be no need to prove our brilliance to each other.

This isn’t a way to find a partner, join a team, or crib designs from others. If some people click and decide to work together afterwards, that’s cool, but it’s not expected.

Thoughtfulness is expected. Experience and expertise are welcome; credentialism, however, can wait in the hall. If you’re seriously entering the competition, and you have questions and issues around the memorial, mission, design, or competition, you’re qualified to participate.

How much preparation you do is up to you. At minimum, though, be familiar with the official competition materials. The charette should be a means, not an end in itself, though, so don’t go overboard. If it contributes to the program, I’ll show my short film, Souvenir (November 2001).

Logistical details are TBD, but it’ll be a couple of hours, on an evening or weekend, near the end of May, in NYC. If you’ve got ideas for a place, network, or other useful resources, don’t be shy.

Don’t think this is at all a proprietary deal, either. If this group fills up, and you want to start another one, be my guest. To participate, or if you have any questions or suggestions, email me at Author gregPosted on May 6, 2003Categories world trade center memorial

A controversy is brewing over Daniel Libeskind’s design for the WTC site, which is moving, rapidly and significantly, from what he’d originally proposed–and won with. The NYTimes‘ Edward Wyatt is on top of things. Yesterday, he reported on a study which showed one of the Libeskind design’s core elements, the Wedge of Light–a zone where unobstructed sunlight shone in between his buildings every Sept. 11th morning–was a physical impossibility. Busted, Libeskind tried to pretend that, all along, the Wedge wasn’t literal but metaphorical. From someone whose design is based on making symbolism and metaphor into the literal and physical, it’s an unconvincing crock.

Today, Wyatt collects some other opinions, including one from “Dream Team” member, Richard Meier (himself no slouch in the not-coming-clean-about-your-WTC-design department), who asks, “How could you not take it literally?” (Remember, a Liberty Wall, symbolizing the Constitution and a 1,776-foot tower are the other major elements of the design.) In addition to the collapsed tower fragment-shaped, tic-tac-toe buildings, the Dream Team proposal included a garden of trees and lights,in the shape of the Twin Towers’ shadows, which would have extended across the World Financial Center and into the Hudson. It was a moving design; I hope they’ll pony up $25 and enter it in the memorial competition.

Other changes Libeskind’s made so far: making room for the MTA’s bus station by shortening his foundation wall from 7 stories to 3 (roughly the depth of the Rockefeller Center skating rink), placing said bus station under the designated Memorial site, encasing said wall in a “glazed screen,” and cantilevering his museum over the footprint of the North Tower. Maybe these were all part of his winning proposal. Why not ask Libeskind about that?

That could be the sub-title of this site, really. I made Souvenir (November 2001), in part, to ask what could New York be like in 80 years, after the generation of us who experienced the attacks are all gone. How would the as-yet unborn people then and there remember us here and now? I should clarify: us=those who experienced (ie, died, survived, rescued, ran, watched, etc.). And already, in less than two years, here and now is becoming then and there.
Now, (tens of? hundreds of?) thousands of designs for the WTC Memorial will start pouring in, invariably affected by the intervening events, mourning, healing, revenge, renewal, bitterness, anger, loss, politics, war, protest, obfuscation, certainties and uncertainties. Although Rules have been set, but not in stone: submitters should feel free to “go where their imaginations, where their mourning needs to take them.” On the LMDC’s registration information site, the only surprise is that they’re not accepting Paypal.
WWI itself changed the memorial game. For the first time, it was not just the generals and heros, but the average soldier–the individual, not an abstracted symbol–was to be memorialized and remembered. Metal dogtags were a standardized response to the sheer numbers of the Missing in WWI. Like the Thiepval Memorial, the object of two New Yorkers’ search in S(N01), the WTC Memorial will also serve as a grave-by-proxy for the hundreds whose remains were never identified.
Due in part to an overly individual-centric reading of the Viet Nam Memorial’s personal/collective experience, the focus of memorial designs in Oklahoma City and the Pentagon is almost wholly on the lost individual and “achieving closure.” And now, the individual is designing the memorial. Maybe if designing is such an effective way to meet our memorializing needs, we should just set up a perpetual workshop on the site. Of course, what would that look like to people 80 years from now?