Imagine a bad hair day when you are not looking so good, but unfortunately, you are on display for all to see in this way in perpetuity. This happens routinely to architects and is why today, you might reconsider being, or having wanted to be (as I have), an architect. You design something which becomes literally etched in stone and await accolades or public humiliation. The stain is hard to wash off, with dirty laundry always out on the clothesline. Want to see what I mean? Here are excerpts from a book written in 1979 by Paul Goldberger (then architecture critic for the New York Times) regarding Lincoln Center:

“These are for the most part, banal buildings, dreary attempts to be classical that took the form that they did not out of any deep belief in the values of classicism, but out of fear on the part of the architects that their clients, the conservative boards of directors of the center’s constituent organizations, would not accept anything else.”
“The Juilliard School is probably the best Building at Lincoln Center, but one says that reluctantly, because here, too, architecture is being graded on a curve.”
“Harrison’s Metropolitan Opera House is merely a pompous and simplistic form, made tolerable by a pair of Chagall murals.”
“What is wrong with these buildings is not that they are classicizing, it is that they are so bad at it – they are mediocre and slick classicism, with a heavy-handedness of form and vulgarity of detail.”

Are you feeling better now? Fortunately, the quality of performances is top-notch, and the public enjoys the central plaza and its fountain, one of the most notable in the entire city.

For a glimpse into my writing process, here is what I started to write today and abandoned, when any enthusiasm I had was lost after reading architecture critiques. I also planned to feature the fountain as one of the few major ones in NYC, contrasting that to Paris or Rome. The working title was The Sun Also Rises:

Somethings loom so large or are so regular that we forget about them. Like the sun or Lincoln Center. This 16-acre complex of 8 buildings with nearly a dozen theaters is the prototype for cultural centers everywhere, and its tenants are like a who’s who of the arts: Juilliard School, The Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet, New York City Opera, New York Philharmonic, and the School of American Ballet. The “travertine acropolis of music and theater” was built in the 1960s and is located at one of the most strategic locations in NYC – between 62nd and 66th Streets near Broadway, Columbus Circle, and Central Park. You can read about it here or at the Lincoln Center website…

About the Photo: The New York State Theater is on the left, the Metropolitan Opera house in the center, and Avery Fisher Hall on the right.

People always ask me about progress at the site of the former World Trade Center, so here is Ground Zero in its current state. Mired in controversy since day one, the project is finally underway – steel should be rising above street level this year, 2008, seven years after 9/11, with occupancy anticipated in 2011. One tower or two?, Taller than the World Trade center?, How tall?, How much a part should the memorial play?, and Freedom Tower? are among the questions which dragged the process down. Of course, the design itself, won by Daniel Liebskind, has been the largest struggle. I originally saw the design competition presentations at the World Financial Center and went to a number of presentations. There were several extremely innovative designs by some of the top firms – I remember one design which called for floors of interior gardens.

However, there have been many individuals and organizations with various controlling interests in this process: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who own the right to develop the site, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, who ran the design competition, Larry Silverstein, who had signed a 99-year lease for the World Trade Center site in July 2001, and architects Daniel Liebskind and David Childs. The original plans by Daniel Liebskind saw many changes, and now, David Childs (one of Silverstein’s favored architects) is in charge of the Freedom Tower’s design.

In its final incarnation, the tower will rise from a cubic base with tapered chambered edges, forming a tall antiprism with eight isosceles triangles, which form a perfect octagon at its center. It will be capped with an illuminated spire containing an antenna. The total height will be 1776 feet (marking the year of the signing of the American Declaration of Independence).

The name of the building itself has come into severe criticism. A number of articles have said the design is defined more by fear than by freedom; some have called it the Fear Tower. Understandably, many of the structural design considerations have been built around possible future terrorist attacks. In an article entitled Medieval Modern: Design Strikes a Defensive Posture by Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic for the NY Times, Nicolai says, “The most chilling example of the new medievalism is New York’s Freedom Tower, which was once touted as a symbol of enlightenment. Designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, it rests on a 20-story, windowless fortified concrete base decorated in prismatic glass panels in a grotesque attempt to disguise its underlying paranoia.”