“[The notion of] the architect as artist is a dead end,” one local architect said. “It doesn’t develop a set of principles or a school of architecture that can be taught or leads anywhere. The artist has licence, but the architect has to consider the end user and the political, social, and economic context.”
Libeskind is both artist and politician, and his work comes with two decades of theory, a collection of writings that read like manifestos. “By dropping the designations ‘form,’ ‘function,’ and ‘program,’ ” he wrote, “and engaging in the public and political realm, which is synonymous with architecture, the dynamics of building take on a new dimension.”
Where does the recurring crystal shape come from? “I have no idea,” Libeskind says, laughing. “Intuition, you draw something. Forever you draw something and you’re stuck. Architects don’t have hundreds of ideas, or writers, or Mozart even. They pursue one idea. Where it comes from, who knows? But I like the precision of the geometry, I don’t like the blobby indeterminate approach. I like architecture that is very crisp and very definite and kind of uncompromising in its relationship to the sky, to the horizon, the profiles that it presents, the massing of it.”
The twentieth floor of the Millenium Hilton hotel in Manhattan looks down on the collective wound of Ground Zero, an immense crater filled with workmen, machines, and debris. The offices of Studio Daniel Libeskind are a block away, on Rector Street. Just as the Libeskinds moved to Berlin for a decade to address the politics of the Jewish Museum, they have now moved to New York to deal with the equally charged politics of Ground Zero. There are twenty or so architects in the office, most of them young, working at cluttered common tables, gazing at computers. It is a purposefully unstructured office environment, one that attempts, Libeskind says, “to break through into the excitement, adventure, and mystery of architecture.”
Other members of Studio Daniel Libeskind are in Switzerland, where Libeskind is doing a shopping centre. There are roughly 120 employees worldwide. A team remains in Toronto, sequestered at the Bregman + Hamann offices, the associate architects of the ROM project. There they work odd hours, some arriving late and working until four a.m. It is a young, international group, devoted to Daniel,expounding on his genius and methods. There is a mood of Warholian revolution.
Nina Libeskind manages all the offices. She has an array of communication devices – a Blackberry, a cellphone, a Treo, and her computer, and she frequently picks one up to deal with personal matters, political issues, press releases. The most recent model for Ground Zero sits on a table. Libeskind’s Freedom Tower is flanked by four office buildings that are placed in a partial spiral that mimics the swirl of the Statue of Liberty’s robe. “They want to move the Freedom Tower,” Nina says, “but we’re sticking to our guns on that one. And they want five office buildings instead of four. We’re sticking on that one too. There’s progress.”
Progress has been slow and hard-won. The selection process to choose a design for Ground Zero became – perhaps inevitably, given the political and financial egos involved and the national import of the commission – a bonfire of the vanities. The competition process lacked clarity. Like the ROM competition, it was perceived as a fishing expedition rather than as a standard architectural competition. Much of the public was unclear as to whether it was commissioning an idea, a design, or an architect. More problematic was the attenuated profile of the client. Who was the architect working for? Was it the Port Authority, which owned the land, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, a political body created to administer rebuilding, or Larry Silverstein, the developer who controlled the World Trade Center leases? Or was it the citizens of New York? Or the American people? There were other stakeholders. The city of New York has an interest in the streets and parks on the site. “Then you have Westfield,” Nina said, “which is the retail component, who are concerned about how the design works for retail. You have the families of the victims, the local residents. There are lots of taskmasters. The responsibility is quite clear; what is interwoven is the authority.”
There is also the politically charged issue of what the site symbolizes. The British philosopher John Gray suggested that the collapse of the towers was symbolic of the collapse of the myth of Western civilization. In America, the symbol has been much broader and more marketable: the site represents heroism, and the resilience of a people. These various minefields taxed Nina Libeskind’s considerable political skills. “The dignity of growing up in a family of New Democrats has stood me well in Europe and Canada, and in cities like San Francisco and Denver,” Nina said. “New York is a tougher field. Everything here is in a fishbowl, and the stakes are just so incredibly high. We’re under a lot of public scrutiny. The [New York] Post, which is not sympathetic to us, had Daniel on the gossip page, sighted at the Strand bookstore, reading a book about medieval architecture. I said, ‘Well, thank God you weren’t in the erotica section.’ It’s like politics.”
Libeskind campaigned vividly and, at times, acrimoniously for the job. Studio Daniel Libeskind hired a publicist in New York, and played on his New Yorker status. (He is an American citizen, though, at the time, he was still living in Berlin.) He appeared on Oprah and was accused, in the world capital of self-promotion, and with the indignation that TV evangelists muster so easily, of being a self-promoter.
With Ground Zero, Libeskind took the idea of narrative to Dickensian lengths. The crystalline spire of the Freedom Tower was to be 1,776 feet tall, embodying America’s independence, and its shape was to echo the profile of the Statue of Liberty. It was a narrative that was partly told in the first person. “I arrived by ship to New York as a teenager,” Libeskind wrote, “an immigrant, and like millions of others before me, my first sight was of the Statue of Liberty and the amazing skyline of Manhattan. I have never forgotten this sight or what it stands for. This is what this project is all about.” The design was hard-edged, glittering, and rigorous, but the story was Capraesque. And, as any Hollywood producer will tell you, schmaltz works. The heroes of 9/11 would be celebrated by the “Wedge of Light.” On every September 11, between 8:46 a.m., when the first plane hit, and 10:28 a.m., when the second tower collapsed, “the sun will shine without shadow, in perpetual tribute to altruism and courage.” This was challenged by Eli Attia, the architect of the Millenium Hotel, who said the site would in fact be in shadow for much of the time. Libeskind’s response in the Times was rambling, and suggested that the gesture was metaphorical rather than literal.
