Schwarz
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Still, Arad and Walker’s design remains at least partially intact. The cultural buildings—a museum by the Norwegian firm Snohetta and a performing-arts building by Frank Gehry—have fared far worse, and may never get built at all. Their nemesis hasn’t been cost or security but the ability of a highly vocal group of victims’ families to force political decisions. The group objected to the fact that the cultural component of Ground Zero was to include the Drawing Center, a respected arts institution that had occasionally shown works that some felt were less than patriotic, and the International Freedom Center, a new venture that planned to tell the story of struggles for liberty in other cultures and other periods, an idea that some objected would dilute the message of the Ground Zero memorial. They urged the Governor to send the Freedom Center and the Drawing Center packing, and the Governor, oblivious of the irony of censoring cultural institutions on a site intended as a monument to freedom, agreed. The Drawing Center has had to look for other quarters, and the Freedom Center has decided to go out of business altogether. Meanwhile, security experts determined that the Freedom Tower should be set atop a base of solid concrete nearly two hundred feet high. It may, sadly, be a necessary precaution, but nineteen nearly windowless stories in a building called the Freedom Tower is hardly a good advertisement for the virtues of an open society.