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22 December 2003
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Freedom Tower Fails as a Memorial
The biggest Manhattan real estate question of the last two years has been how to fill the hole left by the destruction of the World Trade Center. The tale of the architectural squabbles, the court case over the insurance (two planes, two buildings, one act of terrorism?), and the endless consultation with the public have proven to be good filler for the local papers during slow news days. Friday of last week, though, the final plans for the site were unveiled. And while it is an improvement over the Twin Towers, but then, they were rather ugly, and it still does too little as a memorial.
Architecture is, quite possibly, the most difficult of art forms because so much of it requires scientific support. Picasso could do what he wanted with oil on canvas, but Christopher Wren and Frank Lloyd Wright were restricted by the requirement that their buildings could not fall over. Only sculpture has the same requirement that a work of art not collapse under its own weight (unlike a great many Hollywood blockbusters this year).
And so architects say, "form follows function," how a building is to be used dictates to a large degree how it is built and how it looks. For that reason, the proposed "Freedom Tower" is an insult to the 2,752 (the official count as of October 30, 2003) murder victims who died when the buildings collapsed. Without a doubt, the tower is an attempt to replace office space that Manhattan doesn't really need -- this is clear from its form.
This revisits the question of how to remember what happened in Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001. Hiroshima recalled its devastation on a different morning by leaving part of its center untouched -- it will always be around 8:15 am, August 6, 1945 there. Gettysburg is a massive graveyard. Omaha Beach is a beach, with a graveyard attached. Berlin has left about 1 mile of its old wall intact, graffiti and all.
Leaving the "Pit" as it was after the last body came out would have been the right thing to do. Rebuilding the Twin Towers as they were, with one extra floor each, would have been appropriate in its own way (the Kensington Review would gladly occupy the very top floor). The multi-functional memorial, shopping concourse, office and residential usage proposal Governor Pataki showed the world is an insult; it is a failure. It is like putting slot machines and a mushroom farm in the Louvre. There's nothing wrong with slots or fungi, but they just shouldn't be near the Mona Lisa.
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