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anthony risser
website review of the week
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Weekly website reviews written by Anthony Risser,
for your enjoyment here at divinestra.For the week of 19 January 2003:
Daniel Libeskind has emerged as one of the more public faces of architecture in post-9/11 cultural and design life. As the century turned, the likes of Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry seemed to be emerging as the key players in creating new urban settings in NYC - with, respectively, the beautiful Prada showroom and a design for a Guggenheim on the East River that would take Balbao to an excitingly new level of urbanism. Libeskind and others like Tadeo Ando are of a school that brings a different conceptual depth to design - a depth with resonance to more sobering times. No doubt, both approaches will keep a firm footing in 21st-century urban design (despite the recent cancellation of the Guggenheim project, but just look at arquitectonica's cool Westin Hotel at Times Square). Conceptual deep-thinking, however, seems more responsive in Lower Manhattan.Libeskind was in the public debate in the city about Ground Zero for a good part of 2002. He reached a national audience with a couple of appearances on the Charlie Rose show. Through these events, he put forward an approach to architecture that he has championed: one organically in tune with history and symbolism and with actual civic use. He first came to broader public attention having won the competition to design the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the decade he spent guiding that project to successful completion (he uprooted family and firm to relocate in Berlin to keep an on-site presence). More recently, his Imperial War Museum of the North in Manchester, Britain has been well received, with an imaginative design that he conceputalized though imaging a globe of the world tossed to ground and broken into shards. However, his audience has never been broader than it has become with his musings and specific plans about the World Trade Center site.
According to the New York Times several days ago, Libeskind's design for the Lower Manhattan site has been one of three (of the second set of six) that appear to be receiving the most favorable response. Whatever happens in the competition and any subsequent development, his design is worth a careful look. The design includes a memorial to 9/11 that makes use of the exposed sub-street-level concrete "bathtub" that one would descend to on foot with the same unfolding-story approach as he took for the Berlin museum. The most visible element of the design is also the most imaginative: a tall office tower with an accompanying svelte extension tower of gardens ("Gardens of the World") tipped with an antenna. The garden tower stretches 1776 feet above ground (a figure chosen for its obvious symbolism). The greatest feat of symbolism, though, is that the plan moves away from 9/11 per se and embeds it in the optimism of Americanism: it is an architectual homage to the Statue of Liberty - the garden tower rising from the office tower in the same manner as the uplifted arm of the Statue.
The firm's modest website provides a background to this musician-turned-architect, a smattering of commentary, and a listing of projects completed, under construction, and submitted for consideration.
All reviews Copyright, Anthony Risser, 2003;
All Rights Reserved.
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