What to make of the new towers proposed for the site of the World Trade Center? Justin Davidson: “The three new towers have shaken some life back into Libeskind’s ideas. Their peaks sweep upwards, more or less; they disdain symmetry and borrow mildly from his vocabulary of interpenetrating shapes. Call them Libeskind Lite.”
Tag: 09.11.06
City Of Memorials
The World Trade Center site is not the only memorial. Throughout the New York region there are other memorials. “Was Sept. 11, 2001 like Dec. 7, 1941: the start of America’s involvement in a global war that was already under way and in which the United States will eventually emerge victorious? Or was it, to name just one other possibility, an alarm that the country has completely misread, and to which it reacted disastrously? How can we properly interpret an event we have barely begun to understand? And how can we hope to do so on so large a scale?”
Failed Promise: WTC
The design and building process for the World Trade Center has been a disaster, writes Paul Goldberger. “Forty years seem not to have got us beyond the folly of Nelson Rockefeller and the building of the original World Trade Center. And they haven’t freed us from the use of sanctimonious rhetoric to cover up what, ultimately, has turned out to be a lot more like a typical New York real-estate saga than anything else.”