The winning design for the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site—created by Cret Professor of Architecture Daniel Libeskind, with help from GSFA Dean Gary Hack—seeks both to provide a fitting memorial to the victims of the attack on the Twin Towers and to restore the vibrant neighborhood that their original construction erased.
By Virginia Fairweather
Sidebar | Penn in the Process
“I meditated many days on this seemingly impossible dichotomy. To acknowledge the terrible deaths which occurred on this site, while looking to the future with hope, seemed like two moments which could not be joined,” writes the architect Daniel Libeskind, Penn’s Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture, describing his first visit to Ground Zero. “I sought to find a solution which would bring these seemingly contradictory viewpoints into an unexpected unity. So, I went to look at the site, to stand within it, to see people walking around it, to feel its power and listen to its voices.”
IN FEBRUARY, concluding one of the most highly publicized and politically sensitive architectural competitions in the world, the design concept that grew out of this meditation, which Libeskind called “Memory Foundations,” was selected from an initial 400-plus proposals to guide the redevelopment of the 16-acre World Trade Center site. Libeskind is jubilant about his selection, yet realistic about the challenges that lie ahead in seeing it through from design to construction. In a telephone interview from Berlin, where his firm, Studio Daniel Libeskind, has its headquarters, he says he “looks forward to working with stakeholders to make the necessary compromises without losing the integrity of the design.”
That will be a tough job, but Libeskind’s mix of highly symbolic architecture and pragmatism has been tested before. His design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin—also the result of a competition—catapulted him to fame when it opened in 2001, but that was after 10 years of controversy over the project. Libeskind moved his practice to Berlin to participate in the political process, which was so contentious that a legislator who favored his design was killed with a letter bomb.
Though his work also includes more quotidian projects such as shopping centers and department stores, he is especially celebrated for memorials and museums and his work has been widely lauded for his evocation of traumatic events. Paul Goldberger, architectural critic for The New Yorker magazine, says Libeskind has a “gift for interweaving simple, commemorative concepts and abstract architectural ideas—no one alive does this better” and that he has “a natural instinct for melding sacred space with a functioning city.” Ada Louise Huxtable, the doyenne of American architectural critics, says Libeskind has “perfected an intensely individual, profoundly moving architecture of memory and loss of unsurpassed impact and meaning.”
Libeskind’s life exemplifies the American immigrant success story. Born in Poland, he moved to Israel with his parents, who were Holocaust survivors. When he was 13, the family came to the United States, settling in New York, where he attended the highly selective Bronx High School of Science and studied architecture at Cooper Union, another elite city institution. An articulate and emotive speaker, Libeskind tells of arriving by ship like millions of immigrants before him, “seeing the skyline of New York and the Statue of Liberty for the first time … and never forgetting that sight and what it stands for.”
One of the images in the slide presentation Libeskind’s firm created for the design (from which the graphics in this article are drawn) puts the viewer at sea in New York Harbor, looking past Lady Liberty toward the restored Lower Manhattan skyline as envisioned in his design. The major elements of his concept for the site are: a memorial garden that includes the remnant of the massive underground slurry wall that protected the site from the nearby Hudson River; a 1,776 feet high tower—which would be the tallest building in the world—topped by a transmission antenna that replaces one lost in the attack; and a “wedge of light” area, in which no shadow will fall every September 11th from 8:46 a.m., when the first plane hit, until 10:48 a.m., when the second tower fell. In addition, parks, plazas, office buildings, a hotel, an interpretive museum, cultural facilities, and a performing arts center, retail space above and below ground, and extensive transportation infrastructure are all part of the conceptual plan, now being refined and detailed.
Libeskind’s selection was the end of a procedural saga, one that went forward in the maelstrom of emotional and political issues after the attack. Among the various interest groups that rapidly coalesced was the pro-bono New York, New Visions, which included architects and other design professionals, including a number of Penn alumni (see box). The most powerful was a government entity, the Lower Manhattan Development Commission (LMDC), created by New York’s Governor George Pataki in October 2001. The LMDC rushed to present six design concepts to the public within months. All were summarily rejected.
create a new icon for the New York skyline, while structures of 50-70 stories provide office space.
LMDC’s governing board then decided to hold an international design competition for the Ground Zero site, and turned to NYNV for guidance in setting up qualification documents for their search. The response was startling: 406 design firms or teams asked to be considered. NYNV also set up the requirements for the screening panel that winnowed the applicant list down to six in September 2002. The LMDC added one firm, upping the finalist field to seven firms or teams. The architects and planners had a mere eight weeks and $40,000 to create their site designs for this complex assignment. The resulting models were displayed in New York’s Winter Garden, directly across the street from where the twin towers once stood. The juxtaposition of total destruction on one side of the street, and the ideas for rebirth on the other, drew thousands of New Yorkers and other visitors.
In early February the list was reduced to two: Studio Daniel Libeskind; and THINK, four prominent architects led by Rafael Viñoly. Both had two weeks in which to revise their plans before a final decision. On February 27, Libeskind was announced as the winner. According to the LMDC Web site, “The Memory Foundations design reconciles the conflicting impulses to preserve the site of the World Trade Center and to rebuild a new skyline. The Libeskind design is imaginative and inspiring, honoring those who were lost while affirming the victory of life, and signaling the rebirth of Lower Manhattan and its iconic skyline.”
As soon as Libeskind’s proposal made the short list last fall, he called his colleague Gary Hack, Paley Professor and dean of the Graduate School of Fine Arts, and asked for his help. Hack, who has been involved in vast, long-term urban projects such as the Prudential Center in Boston, says that the Ground Zero conceptual work required an army of designers. (Other team members included Robert Hargreaves, a landscape architect from Harvard, and Jeffrey Zupan of the Regional Plan Association.) In particular, Hack’s expertise helped with the issues of “where the buildings would sit, where the transportation would fit, where the street should be.” Libeskind does not stint on superlatives in describing his contribution: “Gary is a fantastic human being, and an absolutely fantastic urban-design expert. He knows about the complexities of cities.”
It was Hack who invited Libeskind in 1998 to take on the Cret Professorship, to which he gives “part of his time,” says Hack. He calls Libeskind a “philosopher architect,” and the most interesting person in the architectural world, one preoccupied with how one captures peoples’ “meaningful ties to a building.” Many contemporary architects are either minimalists or are involved in highly technical issues, but Libeskind sees narrative in a building, Hack says.
The Jewish Museum, for example, has cuts and slashes in its surface that point toward where Jews such as Arnold Schoenberg and Albert Einstein lived in Berlin. Another Libeskind memorial design is the Imperial War Museum North, in Manchester, England, which opened last summer. There, the narrative includes three rounded, jagged-edged sections that look like fragments of a broken globe—the world torn apart, in one sense, but they also represent Britain’s three armed services. At the lower Manhattan site, Hack continues, Libeskind plans commemorative markers for each rescue company, with lines in the gardens and street from the memorial site back to where the rescuers came from—the firehouses, police stations, and office buildings.
Robert D. Yaro, Practice Professor of City and Regional Planning at GSFA, who, as president of the Regional Plan Association in New York, was highly involved in the debate over the site, says Libeskind is the master of symbolism in architecture, and that the idea for the memorial area was “brilliant” in its combination of symbolism and functionality. The focal point of Libeskind’s design concept is the slurry wall, originally constructed to hold back the Hudson River when the foundations for the Twin Towers were dug—and now all that is left of the buildings. This grim and utilitarian barrier had a profound effect on Daniel Libeskind the first time he went to the site:
“The great slurry walls are the most dramatic elements which survived the attack, an engineering wonder constructed on bedrock foundations and designed to hold back the Hudson River. The foundations withstood the unimaginable trauma of the destruction and stand as eloquent as the Constitution itself asserting the durability of Democracy and the value of individual life.”
This somber remnant of concrete and steel seems to have touched everyone who sees it, critics and the general public alike. The remaining wall fragment is “our unasked-for Stonehenge, the inanimate hero of the attack” says the photographer Joel Meyerowitz, writing in a New York Times op-ed. Gary Hack sees its starkness as preserving the memory of what happened there. Others have explored the meaning of going down into the earth for a memorial as “reminiscent of ancient catacombs.” The wall represents brute strength, the idea of endurance, of man’s ingenuity, and more. Critic Ada Louise Huxtable likens the remnant to the ruins of past civilization, and invokes the term “archaic survival.” Libeskind himself says it “speaks of our vitality in the face of danger and our optimism in the aftermath of tragedy … the memorial will lead us down into reflection, meditation.”
Libeskind demonstrated his flexibility in accommodating his vision to necessity when, during the last stage of the competition, he altered the design for the sacrosanct slurry wall after its stability was questioned. In fact, says Gary Hack, “it was a miracle” that it withstood the pressure from the river without structural support of the towers, and the wall must continue to keep the river from the site.
So the wall will be visible for 30 feet down, instead of the originally planned 70 feet. Parking garages for tourist buses will be placed below the 30 foot level, and their ceilings will help buttress the wall, along with other surface bracing. The original design depth of 70 feet will be retained in a much smaller space, 40 by 200 feet, so visitors can still descend. Glass will likely cover the exposed section of the wall, and Hack thinks this will enhance its effect, making it seem “even more precious,” while allowing for climate control and dramatic night lighting.
In the aftermath of 9/11, it seemed that just about every New Yorker had an opinion about the memorial and restoration of the site—and was eager to share it. The many public meetings that were held were often contentious, but it was clear that people wanted a new marker in the skyline that included the destroyed antenna, says Mark Ginsberg GAr’85, an architect with Curtis+Ginsberg in New York. Libeskind was chosen in part because he combined both requirements in his 1,776 feet high tower, Ginsberg believes. He also revised his original tower to add a developer-friendly restaurant.
The people who lived or worked downtown had long seen the World Trade Center as a barrier that separated neighborhoods and cut off the waterfront. Libeskind’s plan was to re-create the old neighborhood, to restore the old street connections, and to “re-integrate” the site and the waterfront amenities. Ginsberg, an executive committee member of the pro bono New York New Visions, says that Libeskind’s concept was also “phaseable,” which is a help to the New York real estate market, which has 14 million square feet sitting empty now.
In other revisions before his final selection, Libeskind created more entrances to the memorial site, and made some other building designs more boxy, and thus more appealing to developers in terms of rentable space. The revisions were not a process forced on him, Libeskind says. “Working with the stakeholders was helpful.”
In the end, it is hard to predict what will be built. Every big city has its political factions, governmental subdivisions, power brokers, and complex network of regulations and procedures. New York might have more than most. But when insurance monies materialize for the destroyed buildings, development will proceed. And when it does, Libeskind will have an extraordinary degree of design control. In March, the LMDC and Port Authority named him “Master Design Architect” for the redevelopment, making him perhaps the most powerful architect in the world right now.
His contract with the Port Authority includes design oversight of the new transportation terminal and underground concourses. He will also set the design guidelines for commercial buildings at the site down to the square footage, building outlines, height, and floor sizes, so that architects working directly for developers will conform to his master plan. Libeskind’s contract with the LMDC covers the memorial, the cultural space, and the museum. LMDC will also oversee the competition to design a memorial on the 4.7 acre Memorial Garden.
Billie Tsien, New York architect and LMDC board member, wrote before the final selection that “whoever wins will have to be a person with the ego and the interest in manipulating the system—a person who can hang in there for the long run.” This description fits Daniel Libeskind, who exhibited those qualities in Berlin. He says, “You have to be there, to speak to all the stakeholders, you have to be committed, you have to have the passion to be there until the end.” In his telephone interview, he said the next step is to implement his concept, to move to New York “to work with New Yorkers, to whom the site belongs.” He and his wife, Nina, the firm’s business manager, will now divide their time between New York and the Berlin office.
Libeskind’s intent, he says, is to “recreate the neighborhood that was once there, to give dignity to the heroes who died there, and to affirm optimistically the future of the greatest city in the world.”
Planner Robert Yaro emphasizes that Ground Zero is not about real estate—“it’s about an iconic new place, a setting for a memorial, a powerful concept.” This is the beginning of a long saga, but whatever happens, Daniel Libeskind will have his say.
Virginia Fairweather writes about architecture and engineering.
Penn in the Process
Eugenie Birch, chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning at GSFA, was one of quite a few Penn faculty or alumni who were part of the planning process for the redevelopment of the 16-acre World Trade Center site. She was on the executive committee of the pro-bono group of architects and design professionals, New York New Visions (NYNV), and was chosen to represent the group on a six-member screening panel that cut the list of 406 candidate proposals down to six, she says. She and other NYNV members also critiqued all of the finalist proposals.
The group helped develop “Listening to New York” forums during the year, getting feedback from a cross-section of citizens and stakeholders, Birch adds. These were conducted with the Civil Alliance, created in October 2001 by Robert D. Yaro, Practice Professor of City and Regional Planning at GSFA, and head of the Regional Planning Association. The RPA is an 82-year old civic group that focuses on long-range planning for the tri-state area. The alliance included about 85 representatives of the business sector, a wide array of design professionals and academics. The final meeting attracted close to 5,000 participants, and at the end of the day, it was clear, says Yaro, that the public wanted a great design and a better selection process.
On the personal level, Laura Starr GLA’84 is a landscape architect with a family, who lives and works near Ground Zero. She was “emotionally numb” after 9/11, she says, but she and Katherine I. Mathews GLA’83 quickly decided to do a design workshop with the community, in which, for example, area residents were asked to map where they went on a typical day. The meetings were not only a way to get a lot of ideas, they offered rejuvenation, she says. “Looking at the possibilities to improve the neighborhood was healing.”
