IF the Ground Zero gods are with us, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and the Port Authority will miraculously change their minds about choosing Daniel Libeskind’s design over the one by the THINK architectural team this week.
The buzz has the planners incomprehensibly going with Libeskind – a choice guaranteed to nip any nascent Downtown revival in the bud, and thereby make the 9/11 terrorists’ work complete.
It is the Pit and Pendulum of design horrors, dominated by a morbid trench and a scepter-edged spire suggestive of a medieval instrument of torture.
Some Ground Zero-watchers say it doesn’t matter: The scheme will never get built, they tell us; other architects will be called in to design the office buildings – this is nothing more than a flexible site plan to get a memorial underway.
But it matters for the signal it would send the business community, especially companies deciding whether to stay, or to move, Downtown. With giant blocks of space up for grabs at bargain rents, plenty of firms are looking – but they are appalled by Libeskind’s knife-edged facades and public spaces even more hostile than the World Trade Center’s.
It does not require an urban design diploma to recognize the plan’s inappropriateness. The lessons can be gleaned by anyone with common sense willing to take a stroll around the Ground Zero neighborhood.
1) The Pit: One of the World Trade Center’s most unloved features was poor outdoor pedestrian flow. The vast, windswept plaza, tolerable only in the most mild weather, disrupted the urban fabric by cutting off Greenwich and Fulton streets.
After 9/11, planners vowed not to repeat the mistake. They agreed on the need to extend the streets through the site.
But what is the point of doing that, if the streets lead only to the edge of a three-block-long pit that can’t be crossed – a pit that will completely cut off West Street and Battery Park City from Greenwich and Church streets?
This is what we’re in for if the Libeskind proposal is chosen – instead of lousy pedestrian flow across most of the site, none at all! Reducing the depth from 70 feet to 25 feet, as LMDC is suggesting, makes no difference: A pit is a pit is a pit.
Real-estate professionals privately cringe over the pit’s poisonous effect on attracting commercial tenants to new offices nearby. Brokers have bluntly told WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein that their financial and corporate clients want no part of gazing into a hole, with or without exposed slurry walls.
Financial firms are exquisitely sensitive to the street environment around them. If the bureaucrats need a lesson, they need only stroll a few blocks to 140 Broadway, the skyscraper that Silverstein bought a few years ago.
When Silverstein took over, the Broadway sidewalk was crowded with food vendors. Tenants complained they were an eyesore. Recognizing that they were cheapening the value of his investment, Silverstein went to the trouble of spending months – and money – to install planters that left insufficient space for the peddlers to legally remain.
If financial office tenants are turned off by food carts, which at least serve a purpose, it is not hard to understand their distaste for an impassable cemetery pit outside their windows.
2) The Pendulum: The esthetics of Libeskind’s ridiculous, 1,700-foot-tall “world vertical gardens” shaft are awful enough. But what about practicality?
Libeskind would divide the tower into six habitats – alpine, tundra, deciduous, savanna, desert and tropical. Never mind that an upright botanical garden has no relevance whatsoever to Downtown or to Manhattan.
To build it would require applying fiasco-prone biosphere technology to the interior of the world’s tallest structure. One can only imagine what delicate environmental balances must be maintained to keep fragile, exotic plants happy inside narrow, tourist-trampled confines 1,000 feet above ground.
To test the premise, the LMDC and PA don’t need to hire environmental engineers. Again, they need only look in their backyard. The California palm trees in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center gave its developer nothing but trouble for years. Problems of sunlight and irrigation still vex the owners today.
Yes, the trees are lovely, and it’s nice having them back. But over the years the palms have repeatedly wilted and died.
If 16 trees in a ground-level atrium can be such a nuisance, imagine what thrills Libeskind’s loony sky garden holds in store for its unfortunate keepers.
The THINK proposal too has problems of practicality and financing. But they are chump change compared with those of the Libeskind plan.
What can Gov. Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg and the LMDC and PA honchos be thinking?
How, after 18 months of soul-searching and public hearings and architect-shopping, have we come to this?