From a brilliant editorial in the Times this weekend:
Blueprints and Red Faces at Ground Zero - New York Times: "During his 18-year campaign to turn Albany into a Bras�lia-on-the-Hudson as some sort of bereavement therapy for his dashed White House ambitions, Rockefeller spent hour after hour looking in awed wonder at renderings of a city of dazzling white marble towers rising from the ruins of some 2,000 perfectly good homes he had ordered torn down.
In late 1962, hours before Rockefeller was to finally unveil to the press the big model of his project (and it was as much his creation as that of his court architect, Wallace Harrison) he was observed frantically trying to remove the tiny pieces of affordable housing at the margins of the mock-up, for fear it would spoil the look of his utopia.
Mr. Pataki made his most recent mark on ground zero because he objected to what the Freedom Center might or might not contain, not because he was displeased with the design of the Norwegian architecture firm Snohetta. Nonetheless, he swept the project off the board with just as regal a gesture as Rockefeller's.
Neither of these examples of the imperial uses of architectural patronage, it seems, has been lost on Mayor Michael Bloomberg. After being criticized for taking his eye off the ball when Goldman Sachs came close to quitting Lower Manhattan, Mr. Bloomberg has now signaled that he plans to take a much more visible role in shaping New York.
Messrs. Pataki and Bloomberg may or may not know it, but they are following a trail that takes them right back to the pyramids, not to mention mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, who bankrupted his country building ever more elaborate palaces, and Imelda Marcos, whose passion for monumental architecture was vastly more expensive than her better-known enthusiasm for footwear.
Clearly, there is a psychological parallel between making a mark on the landscape and the exercise of political power. Both depend on the imposition of will. And among the dictatorial, who generally regard the individual as being of little account, there is an inherent appeal in seeing one's worldview confirmed by reducing entire cities to the scale of a doll's house in an architectural model.
Saddam Hussein, following in the footsteps of Hitler and Mussolini, was a determined builder. It was only his decision to invade Iran that stopped him from building a state mosque in Baghdad designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. And his Mother of all Battles Mosque, designed so that the dimensions of the minarets and fountains are a semiotic reference to the dictator's day of birth, has an unfortunate echo in the symbolism of the Freedom Tower, which is to stand at 1,776 feet, marking a different sort of birthday altogether.
Despite a certain amount of pious rhetoric about architecture's duty to serve the community, an architect has no choice but to establish a relationship with the rich and powerful. After all, they are the only people with the resources to build. And just as a salmon will make one exhausting upriver trip to spawn before expiring, the architect is genetically predetermined to go to any length to ensure he is able to turn his visions into glass and steel.
This is why Snohetta and David Childs (the architect of the Freedom Tower) and even Daniel Libeskind (whose grand title of 'master planner' of the site makes a mockery of his ever-shrinking role in the project) all still cling desperately to the shreds of the original ground zero proposal, despite all the humiliations and endless redesigns that have cost them their dignity, if not their integrity.
Before Mr. Libeskind first unveiled his grand plan, he was regarded as a serious-minded architectural intellectual, devoted to the arcane professional discourse that is understood only by initiates. But from the moment he went live on CNN in December 2002 and described how his design 'listened to the voices of ground zero,' he was a man transformed.
For an architect to talk in human terms like this might sound hollow at any other time or place. (It certainly sounds hollow in hindsight, considering all the political jockeying and lawsuits that followed Mr. Libeskind's Pyrrhic victory in the competition.) But for Mr. Libeskind to do so while standing in the World Financial Center's glass-vaulted Winter Garden, in clear view of the pit of rock and mud that was all that was left of the twin towers, was nothing short of electric. For a moment, he stopped being an architect altogether; he was offering an emotional response to a collective tragedy, acknowledging that this particular issue was too much for architecture by itself to handle.
"
Blueprints and Red Faces at Ground Zero - New York Times: "During his 18-year campaign to turn Albany into a Bras�lia-on-the-Hudson as some sort of bereavement therapy for his dashed White House ambitions, Rockefeller spent hour after hour looking in awed wonder at renderings of a city of dazzling white marble towers rising from the ruins of some 2,000 perfectly good homes he had ordered torn down.
In late 1962, hours before Rockefeller was to finally unveil to the press the big model of his project (and it was as much his creation as that of his court architect, Wallace Harrison) he was observed frantically trying to remove the tiny pieces of affordable housing at the margins of the mock-up, for fear it would spoil the look of his utopia.
Mr. Pataki made his most recent mark on ground zero because he objected to what the Freedom Center might or might not contain, not because he was displeased with the design of the Norwegian architecture firm Snohetta. Nonetheless, he swept the project off the board with just as regal a gesture as Rockefeller's.
Neither of these examples of the imperial uses of architectural patronage, it seems, has been lost on Mayor Michael Bloomberg. After being criticized for taking his eye off the ball when Goldman Sachs came close to quitting Lower Manhattan, Mr. Bloomberg has now signaled that he plans to take a much more visible role in shaping New York.
Messrs. Pataki and Bloomberg may or may not know it, but they are following a trail that takes them right back to the pyramids, not to mention mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, who bankrupted his country building ever more elaborate palaces, and Imelda Marcos, whose passion for monumental architecture was vastly more expensive than her better-known enthusiasm for footwear.
Clearly, there is a psychological parallel between making a mark on the landscape and the exercise of political power. Both depend on the imposition of will. And among the dictatorial, who generally regard the individual as being of little account, there is an inherent appeal in seeing one's worldview confirmed by reducing entire cities to the scale of a doll's house in an architectural model.
Saddam Hussein, following in the footsteps of Hitler and Mussolini, was a determined builder. It was only his decision to invade Iran that stopped him from building a state mosque in Baghdad designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. And his Mother of all Battles Mosque, designed so that the dimensions of the minarets and fountains are a semiotic reference to the dictator's day of birth, has an unfortunate echo in the symbolism of the Freedom Tower, which is to stand at 1,776 feet, marking a different sort of birthday altogether.
Despite a certain amount of pious rhetoric about architecture's duty to serve the community, an architect has no choice but to establish a relationship with the rich and powerful. After all, they are the only people with the resources to build. And just as a salmon will make one exhausting upriver trip to spawn before expiring, the architect is genetically predetermined to go to any length to ensure he is able to turn his visions into glass and steel.
This is why Snohetta and David Childs (the architect of the Freedom Tower) and even Daniel Libeskind (whose grand title of 'master planner' of the site makes a mockery of his ever-shrinking role in the project) all still cling desperately to the shreds of the original ground zero proposal, despite all the humiliations and endless redesigns that have cost them their dignity, if not their integrity.
Before Mr. Libeskind first unveiled his grand plan, he was regarded as a serious-minded architectural intellectual, devoted to the arcane professional discourse that is understood only by initiates. But from the moment he went live on CNN in December 2002 and described how his design 'listened to the voices of ground zero,' he was a man transformed.
For an architect to talk in human terms like this might sound hollow at any other time or place. (It certainly sounds hollow in hindsight, considering all the political jockeying and lawsuits that followed Mr. Libeskind's Pyrrhic victory in the competition.) But for Mr. Libeskind to do so while standing in the World Financial Center's glass-vaulted Winter Garden, in clear view of the pit of rock and mud that was all that was left of the twin towers, was nothing short of electric. For a moment, he stopped being an architect altogether; he was offering an emotional response to a collective tragedy, acknowledging that this particular issue was too much for architecture by itself to handle.
"
posted by charles at 8:38 PM
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