The Port Authority, this time around, is having trouble persuading its own people to locate in the Freedom Tower."Today we build the Freedom Tower," New York Gov. George Pataki grandly announced as he laid the cornerstone for the building meant to rise from the ashes of the Twin Towers as a testament to America’s resilience and can-do spirit. That was on July 4, 2004, more than two years ago.
On June 23, 2006, the cornerstone was quietly removed from the site and returned to the original masons for storage and recutting. The stone was no longer the right shape, nor was it in the right place, after a redesign and bureaucratic reshuffle.
Eliot Spitzer, aspiring New York governor, warned in March that the Freedom Tower was becoming a "white elephant." He declared, "The economic viability of that building is very much in doubt."
I'm sympathetic to the proposal of Make New York New York Again.
A Reason article suggests another possibility. The International Style, or Modernism, or whatever you wish it to be, is butt-ugly.
So why not take another step backward?When the World Trade Center was completed in 1973, it was part of the late phase of an architectural revolution, and not an altogether pretty one. Modernism explicitly rejected the past, but now would be the perfect time to relearn some of the lessons that were lost in the process, so that something can be built at Ground Zero that is elegant in the most timeless sense of the word, elegant in the way that the Woolworth Building, mere blocks from the Trade Center site, is—and in the way that many buildings from the first, all too brief generation of skyscrapers were a century ago, before modernism declared ornament, decoration, gentle curves, and playful details to be frivolous.
Tom Wolfe summed up the case against modernist architecture in his book From Bauhaus to Our House, explaining how the European modernists of the early twentieth century consciously cast tradition aside, believing they could create not just buildings but aesthetics and cities themselves according to simple rational principles—with the results often being cold, ugly, inhuman, and even impractical. (Modernist buildings, with their flat roofs and massive facades, were often leakier and windier than expected.)
The past century of architectural history is enough to make one cautious about grand pronouncements and city-sized planning, but as a New Yorker, I must say I wouldn't mind seeing something rise at Ground Zero that looked less like Krypton and a good deal more like Art Deco, the style that gave New York City three of its other most spectacular building sites: the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, and perhaps most beautifully of all, the Chrysler Building, with its gargoyle-sized Chrysler hood ornaments that link the grandeur of gothic cathedrals to the future of American manufacturing without irony or apology. Art Deco, with its chrome, spires, lightning bolts, and Fred Astaire-era class, manages to respect traditional notions of beauty while making one want to leap into the future with the confidence of Flash Gordon—a future that flowed gracefully from the past instead of being a brutal break with the past. Art Deco was the product of a civilization that was prosperous, proud, eclectic, and fun—not one so worried about giving offense or invoking the wrong tradition that it would rather make heartless boxes.The Trade Center replaced The Pennsylvania Railroad's Hudson Terminal, itself a pair of early twentieth century "heartless boxes" (with setbacks and void space so as to allow for natural light and ventilation in those pre-airconditioned days.) Ground Zero is already a working transportation center. Perhaps, with cities becoming obsolete and large clusters of people offering tempting targets to bad guys, a smaller skyscraper suitable for use as both an office building and a train station as well as a memorial garden would serve. Buffalo's Central Terminal and Cleveland's Terminal Tower come to mind.
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