I get a letter!

From Tater Spud Man Marc Velazquez up in the frozen North of Carolina:

Curious to hear your take on the "winning" design on the new World Trade Center.

(Yes, there was more to the letter than that, but it was just stuff about Bill Clinton and pain and kneecaps and bosomosity--nothing you need to know about)

Anyway, in a semi-serious vein, back to the question.

First, my biases--I think that it is impossible to design any great artwork--building, painting, sculpture, book--based upon a committee decision. The greatest works of literature or art or music or architecture are the distillation of a singular vision, either by the maker or the patron. Strength, vigor, timelessness are the result of a single-mindedness of purpose or outlook. This is not to say that some very good design decisions cannot come through collaboration, but that collaboration must not come at the expense of the central idea. In too many cases, the desire to please everyone leads to solutions that filter out uncomfortable genius in favor of a more palatable design that offends no one, but one which also one which inspires no one.

I don't think all ideas are equivalent in their greatness. Despite our deep respect for the idea of democracy and making sure everyone has a voice, in the end we must realize some ideas are just plain dumb, and some of those voices are to be heard only inside of someone's head. A process that does not rightly discard the ill-thought and ignorant is doomed to produce a mess. This CNN site has tons of designs submitted by folks all over the world--each person who submitted something was intensely earnest about the value of their solution, but in the end 98% of them are just mindless drivel. And that includes most of the ones which were obviously produced by architects.

Swiss Army knives aren't very good at anything. Applying that concept to the built environment works about as well. The desire to load the emotions of this site into one design is nearly impossible to do and still maintain the integrity of any of the individual parts--it is a unique battlefield/ subway stop/ cemetary/ workplace/ memorial/ marketplace /visual anchor /symbol of New York /symbol of America place which calls for both exuberance and solemnity, pride and humbleness, reason and passion, love and hate. I don't think that this is insoluable, but expecting one thing to do all things equally well is probably too much. Again, it is impossible to please everyone, and attempting to give equal weight to all possible viewpoints damps down the overall level of utility to the point where the saw blade is too dull, the knife blade is too short, the tweezers are too springy, the magnifying glass is too tiny, and the whole thing is too big and bulky to fit in your pants pocket.

Last bias--my own ideas about what I value in architecture. I detest novelty for the sake of novelty; I prefer clearly visible design intent with a minimum of mumbo-jumbo and hand-waving; I prefer whittling away the unessential to adding layer upon layer of philosophy; I prefer a design with strength and unity of purpose (even if some might find it disagreeable) to something inoffensive, weak and dissipated. But, that's just me--I am not, and never will be the world's greatest architect (or anything else, for that matter).

But I know good when I see it.

HAVING SAID ALL THAT, on to the design itself, which can be seen here.

Whatever.

It's the Port Authority's money; if that's what they want to spend it on, I say go for it. To me, it has too much of the wacky, folded-glass-origami-and-odd-intersected-lines vernacular that is all the rage with Serious Architects, and none of the muscular vitality of Lower Manhattan. The tallest tower is meant to house a "virtual Windows on the World," while the tops of the buildings all bow toward Ground Zero (which is intruded upon by more glass and sticks), to which I say, "Nuts!" I want me a real, live, restaurant on top of the place, and I want the whole building complex to stand there with its sleeves rolled up and its hands on its hips. The site deserves a place to remember, and a place to look forward. The jumbled shards and angles and swoops and blips and chirps prohibit any sort of dignified sense of grief down at ground level, while the surrounding buildings simultaneously interfere with our ability to get up off our knees and go on with civic life--in this case, a historically vital civic life that gave us the "New York minute" and the "New York alphabet."

But, that's just my opinion. That and buck will get you a cup of coffee.
posted by Terry at 3:16:00 PM