E sobre a Freedom Tower...11 de Setembro
"The designs unveiled last week for three sleek glass towers at ground zero rise above the mediocrity we have come to expect from a planning process driven by political opportunism, backdoor deal-making and commercial greed.
But for those who cling to the idea that the site’s haunting history demands a leap of imagination, the towers illustrate how low our expectations have sunk since the city first resolved to rebuild there in a surge of determination just weeks after 9/11.
Designed by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki, the towers are solid, competent work by three first-rate talents. But each of these architects is capable of far more. Lord Foster has shown us better work recently in Midtown Manhattan, where his faceted Hearst Tower plunges through the top of an existing 1920’s building with impressive force.
Architectural merit aside, the most telling features of the ground zero master plan remain those in which the city’s anxieties bubble up to the surface: in the paranoia implied by David Childs’s heavily armored Freedom Tower, for example, or the defiant grandiosity of Santiago Calatrava’s transportation hub.
By comparison, the three new towers are about forgetting. Conservative and coolly corporate, they could be imagined in just about any Western capital, paralleling the effacement of history in the remade, blatantly commercial Potsdamer Platz in Berlin or La Défense, the incongruous office-tower district just outside Paris."
links
But for those who cling to the idea that the site’s haunting history demands a leap of imagination, the towers illustrate how low our expectations have sunk since the city first resolved to rebuild there in a surge of determination just weeks after 9/11.
Designed by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki, the towers are solid, competent work by three first-rate talents. But each of these architects is capable of far more. Lord Foster has shown us better work recently in Midtown Manhattan, where his faceted Hearst Tower plunges through the top of an existing 1920’s building with impressive force.
Architectural merit aside, the most telling features of the ground zero master plan remain those in which the city’s anxieties bubble up to the surface: in the paranoia implied by David Childs’s heavily armored Freedom Tower, for example, or the defiant grandiosity of Santiago Calatrava’s transportation hub.
By comparison, the three new towers are about forgetting. Conservative and coolly corporate, they could be imagined in just about any Western capital, paralleling the effacement of history in the remade, blatantly commercial Potsdamer Platz in Berlin or La Défense, the incongruous office-tower district just outside Paris."
links
NYTimes, By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF, Published: September 11, 2006
"The Hole in the City's Heart", NYTimes, By DEBORAH SONTAG, Published: September 11, 2006
posted by M. @ 1:51 AM
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