Word: libeskind
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After a year and a half, it remains the ground of murder. And the elegant stilts of steel, the extended wings of gossamer glass with which Daniel Libeskind proposes to sculpt a new Babylon above Ground Zero do not alter this truth. It is not that Libeskind is not a fine sculptor; it is that sculpture is too fine for the site...
...complain because I doubt Libeskind. In making its decision on what should replace the twinned frailties of emptiness and memory which confront us in the void where the Twin Towers stood, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) has surely chosen the lesser evil. It is fitting that the garish skeletal frames of the towers that the THINK team proposed have been dismissed. They were a foolish piece of constructivist hyperbole—an ecstatic vertical jungle gym obscuring their funereal base...
...correct moral decision is not always the correct aesthetic decision. And in Libeskind’s blueprints for new buildings above the place of slaughter, the second has been mistaken for the first. Libeskind has said the site was “a place of mourning, a place of sadness, where so many people were murdered and died.” He is exactly right. He has also said that he wanted his design for the WTC site to be “something that is outward, forward-looking, optimistic, exciting.” He is exactly wrong...
...finalists, the firm of Daniel Libeskind and the THINK team, led by Frederic Schwartz, Rafael Viñoly, Ken Smith and Shigeru Ban, were chosen, amid calls for a novel structure that would be a rejoinder, a memorial, a monument—a symbol and functional buildings and planning strategy. It is far from clear whether either of these proposals will ever be realized; what is apparent is that any plan must reckon with complex, and sometimes contradictory, public feelings about appropriate future uses of the site...
...Libeskind is playing for a big audience again, so he is planning to return with his family to New York. It was probably an advantage to have lived so long in Berlin--a city that is everywhere a reflection of its own near extinction--as preparation for the World Trade Center project. Aside from any specific monuments, every neighborhood remembers in its bones the catastrophe of World War II. Long streets where no old buildings survived lead to others where a single Wilhelmine facade is wedged between stretches of postwar Housing Emergency Modern. Every inch of the city tells...