Ground Zero in 288 Pages
An annotated look at Libeskind’s opinionated new memoir.
By Boris Kachka ny metro
Ground-zero architect Daniel Libeskind, subject of blanket local coverage, hopes to fill in the remaining gaps in his new memoir, Breaking Ground: Adventures in Life and Architecture. One of the biggest adventures, of course, has been his very public battle with architect David Childs, chosen by lease-holder Larry Silverstein to execute Libeskind’s master plan.
An index
Childs, David
Compared to the Jabberwocky (243)
Gives Libeskind “a warm hug” (244)
Ground-zero takeover plans compared to The Brothers Karamazov (249)
Libeskind’s “forced marriage to” (243–266)
Power-sharing arrangement compared to North–South Korea border tensions (255)
Treats wife Nina and female Libeskind CEO “like dogs,” says Libeskind lawyer Ed Hayes (255)
Storms out of a meeting (263)
Early employment
Constructs whalebone corsets for his mother, sees them as “applied Euclidean forms” (58)
Asked to perform “mindless, robotic action” as assistant for Richard Meier, quits (41)
Asked to sweep Peter Eisenman’s office, quits (42)
Eisenman, Peter
“No one has ever called him a mensch” (41)
Ground-zero developer Larry SilversteinM
Compared to Nikita Khrushchev (261)
“Not a man who cares much about how things look” (244)
Tells Libeskind, “I don’t want you touching my building” (245)
Jewish Museum in Berlin
Called an “architectural fart” by Berlin building director (134)
Opens on September 11, 2001 (13)
Philip Johnson says, “My God! It’s not possible that this building is actually going to get built, is it?” (140)
“Would not be about toilets” (6)
Johnson, Philip
Calls architecture “this queasy feeling in my stomach” (107)
“Gestured at the AT&T building and laughed—laughed at his own work!” (140)
Libeskind, Daniel
Accordion child prodigy (8–9)
Attends Cooper Union in the sixties, misses out on all the drugs (159)
Contributes a list to Rolling Stone’s “Cool” issue (156)
Labors manually at kibbutz as a child (225–226)
Late bloomer (6, 81, 98)
Lumped in with Sartre and Mao in the London Times (194)
“More cornball than cosmopolite . . . a grateful immigrant” (159)
Possibly a direct descendant of Prague’s Rabbi Loew, creator of the Golem (111)
Storms out of meetings (31, 134, 260)
Upstages a young Itzhak Perlman (9)
Upstages the New York Times’ Herbert Muschamp (31)
Work is brilliant, with human imperfections, like Mozart’s (128–130)
Libeskind, Nina
At age 20, first impression: “so beautiful she must be stupid” (105)
Single-handedly saves the Jewish Museum project (140–146)
Smooths things over with Muschamp (31)
Meier, Richard
Perry Street towers as gross violation of privacy (69–70)
Muschamp, Herbert
Comes out against Libeskind’s ground- zero proposal; Libeskind comments, “What insanity was this!” (167–172)
Has “wrapped his power around himself like a luxurious fur-lined cloak” (21)
Internal compass “swings quixotically” (22)
Keeps Libeskind waiting for an hour because he’s taking a long bath (22)
New York
A place where “nobody has said anything nasty to me” (274)
This is so good.
There are quite a few books on Ground Zero that have just recently been released (the most interesting one I think includes the 'unofficial' proposals - coincidentally it is also the book that caused the final controversy with Herbert) Imagining Ground Zero
.
Here is Leonard Lopate and the (first) 'meeting of the minds.'
Via Gotham Gazette
ground breaking, the mighty wind...
Again?! damn this guy gets too much play.
Waiting to hear who won the competition for the new art complex at the site (the Joyce and Signature Theatre). The short list was announced two weeks ago and apparently the jury (bizarre jury) met last weekend to decide. Did I miss it? They say it won't be announced until early October, but someone out there knows.
Sorry for the cut and paste, but it is a buy only link at this point and I happened to have saved it (did you already post it? If so, apologies}:
September 18, 2004, Saturday
METROPOLITAN DESK
A Shorter List Of Visions At Ground Zero
By DAVID W. DUNLAP (NYT) 1467 words
Some of the most celebrated architects in the world, and some whose names are barely recognized outside their own countries, will be competing in the next few weeks to design the museums and theaters at the World Trade Center site.
Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Daniel Libeskind were among those on two long ''short lists'' of designers that survived a winnowing earlier this week; six for the museums, 10 for the theaters. Kevin M. Rampe, the president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, announced them yesterday to a conference of architects and planners (at least one of whom, Hugh Hardy, made the list) at New York University.
A final selection is expected in early October, Mr. Rampe said, and will be made by the institutions themselves: the Joyce Theater International Dance Center and the Signature Theater Center, for a 250,000-to-300,000-square-foot performing arts complex next to the Freedom Tower, and the Drawing Center and the International Freedom Center, for a 250,000-to-275,000-square-foot museum complex across Fulton Street.
''It's going to be a very difficult process because we have tremendous architects in both of those lists to choose from,'' Mr. Rampe said. ''And the one thing we know for certain is that these are going to be amazing buildings once they're designed and constructed,'' which should be by 2009. The teams were instructed not to begin designing yet but to wait for interviews that are to begin next week.
Two selection panels chose the firms for the lists from among 60 proposals that the development corporation had received by its Sept. 1 deadline. Well-known names on the short lists were Shigeru Ban, Gehry Partners, Rem Koolhaas OMA, Enrique Norten of TEN Arquitectos, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, Polshek Partnership Architects, Moshe Safdie & Associates, Rafael Viñoly Architects and Tod Williams Billie Tsien & Associates.
Among the firms that are not yet household names in New York -- but certainly could be with such a commission -- was Snohetta, the Norwegian firm responsible for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the new library of Alexandria, Egypt.
''I thought it was a good list,'' said Fredric M. Bell, executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, which organized the conference, ''Learning from Lower Manhattan,'' at which Mr. Rampe made his announcement. Mr. Bell added, ''I don't know the long list, so I don't know who was left off.''
Impressive as the lists are, the prospect of more architects descending on a 14.6-acre site where at least eight architects are already working raises the question of whether the final trade center redevelopment will be -- or should be -- a harmonious ensemble, a vibrant mix or a dissonant jumble of architectural styles.
''I don't believe it's a place for the baroque expression of personality or for techno-virtuosity,'' said James Stewart Polshek of the Polshek Partnership in Manhattan, one of two firms that made both short lists.
Mr. Polshek said the architects faced the complicated challenge of trying to design buildings that expressed, distinctly and unambiguously, the identities of their cultural occupants while serving ''a larger population that's interested in the sanctity of the site.''
Mr. Safdie, whose firm in Somerville, Mass., was also on both short lists, said, ''There are so many agendas here to be fulfilled.''
''To me,'' he said, ''it's going to be a delicate balance between cohabiting effectively -- almost, I'd say, with respect to what's around it -- and at the same time making a strong statement.'' Also, he said, by the very nature of the compact site, both museum and theater complexes, which are typically horizontal, will have to be vertically organized.
Because the Joyce and Signature companies will be choosing one architect and the Freedom Center and Drawing Center will be choosing the other, it is theoretically possible that Mr. Polshek or Mr. Safdie could end up as the designer of both buildings.
Studio Daniel Libeskind, which is the master planner of the trade center site but has yet to actually design one of the buildings there, was placed on the short list for the theaters but not the museums, even though Mr. Libeskind's reputation when he arrived on the New York scene two years ago turned largely on the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
''We move on,'' said his wife, Nina Libeskind, chief operating officer of the architectural practice. ''There are other things in life that are very exciting. The performing arts short list is something we're delighted to be participating in.''
Ms. Libeskind noted that the firm is also now working on the Performing Arts Center at Grand Canal Square in Dublin. ''This is something new for us,'' she said, ''and it's something we're very excited by, and it expands our repertoire.''
The lists are also notable because they bring back two architects to the site -- Mr. Ban and Mr. Viñoly -- who were runners-up last year to Studio Daniel Libeskind in the selection of a master planner. In 2003, they were allied in a team called Think, which proposed the World Cultural Center: two open latticework towers in which different architects would have designed a memorial, an interpretive museum, a performing arts center, a conference center and an amphitheater.
This year, Mr. Ban appears in partnership with Frei Otto on the short list for the museums. Mr. Viñoly, whose office is in Lower Manhattan and who recently completed the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, is on the short list for the theaters.
''It's a great opportunity and something that certainly brings me back to the excitement of the whole process,'' Mr. Viñoly said yesterday. ''It's a spectacular chance. It's a kind of ingredient that could not only propel the success of the site as a whole but also the success of the whole neighborhood, the whole region.''
Mr. Hardy, of H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, is on the list for the performing arts center. His previous firm, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, renovated the former Elgin Theater at Eighth Avenue and 19th Street for use by the Joyce Theater. He is working with Mr. Norten, a juror in the memorial competition who is designing the Visual and Performing Arts Library of the Brooklyn Public Library.
Asked yesterday whether he and Mr. Norten had begun their design, Mr. Hardy said cheerfully, ''Good God, no,'' explaining that the finalists had been instructed not to produce any drawings and renderings. But he did say of the underlying planning principles: ''It should all fit together. That's what cities do.''
''We don't need a Lincoln Center,'' he added. ''We already have one.''
The finalists, Mr. Rampe said, were chosen by the development corporation and cultural institutions, working with a group of advisers: Alexander Cooper of the architectural firm Cooper, Robertson & Partners; Agnes Gund, former president of the Museum of Modern Art; Kate D. Levin, commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; Joseph V. Melillo, the executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Charles A. Shorter Jr., a trustee of the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Anne Van Ingen of the New York State Council on the Arts.
"He gave me the patronising look reserved for the village idiot," he notes on another occasion, describing it as "weird to inhabit David Childs's universe, where everybody knew his or her prescribed place ... Childs wasn't interested in what we were working on; he was proceeding with plans for the building he had proposed to Larry Silverstein many months before."
"Libeskind's febrile imagination rooted in this baroque sense of place. "Trust the Invisible," he writes. "That's what my father taught me." Confronting trauma and memory, the architect tunes in to what he calls the void—"the presence of an overwhelming emptiness created when a community is wiped out, or individual freedom is stamped out; when the continuity of life is so brutally disrupted that the structure of life is forever torqued and transformed." In The Shining, little Danny peers into the void of memory. That's what "shining" is. It's the furious conjuring otherwise called architecture."
|
An annotated look at Libeskind’s opinionated new memoir.
By Boris Kachka ny metro
Ground-zero architect Daniel Libeskind, subject of blanket local coverage, hopes to fill in the remaining gaps in his new memoir, Breaking Ground: Adventures in Life and Architecture. One of the biggest adventures, of course, has been his very public battle with architect David Childs, chosen by lease-holder Larry Silverstein to execute Libeskind’s master plan.
An index
Childs, David
Compared to the Jabberwocky (243)
Gives Libeskind “a warm hug” (244)
Ground-zero takeover plans compared to The Brothers Karamazov (249)
Libeskind’s “forced marriage to” (243–266)
Power-sharing arrangement compared to North–South Korea border tensions (255)
Treats wife Nina and female Libeskind CEO “like dogs,” says Libeskind lawyer Ed Hayes (255)
Storms out of a meeting (263)
Early employment
Constructs whalebone corsets for his mother, sees them as “applied Euclidean forms” (58)
Asked to perform “mindless, robotic action” as assistant for Richard Meier, quits (41)
Asked to sweep Peter Eisenman’s office, quits (42)
Eisenman, Peter
“No one has ever called him a mensch” (41)
Ground-zero developer Larry SilversteinM
Compared to Nikita Khrushchev (261)
“Not a man who cares much about how things look” (244)
Tells Libeskind, “I don’t want you touching my building” (245)
Jewish Museum in Berlin
Called an “architectural fart” by Berlin building director (134)
Opens on September 11, 2001 (13)
Philip Johnson says, “My God! It’s not possible that this building is actually going to get built, is it?” (140)
“Would not be about toilets” (6)
Johnson, Philip
Calls architecture “this queasy feeling in my stomach” (107)
“Gestured at the AT&T building and laughed—laughed at his own work!” (140)
Libeskind, Daniel
Accordion child prodigy (8–9)
Attends Cooper Union in the sixties, misses out on all the drugs (159)
Contributes a list to Rolling Stone’s “Cool” issue (156)
Labors manually at kibbutz as a child (225–226)
Late bloomer (6, 81, 98)
Lumped in with Sartre and Mao in the London Times (194)
“More cornball than cosmopolite . . . a grateful immigrant” (159)
Possibly a direct descendant of Prague’s Rabbi Loew, creator of the Golem (111)
Storms out of meetings (31, 134, 260)
Upstages a young Itzhak Perlman (9)
Upstages the New York Times’ Herbert Muschamp (31)
Work is brilliant, with human imperfections, like Mozart’s (128–130)
Libeskind, Nina
At age 20, first impression: “so beautiful she must be stupid” (105)
Single-handedly saves the Jewish Museum project (140–146)
Smooths things over with Muschamp (31)
Meier, Richard
Perry Street towers as gross violation of privacy (69–70)
Muschamp, Herbert
Comes out against Libeskind’s ground- zero proposal; Libeskind comments, “What insanity was this!” (167–172)
Has “wrapped his power around himself like a luxurious fur-lined cloak” (21)
Internal compass “swings quixotically” (22)
Keeps Libeskind waiting for an hour because he’s taking a long bath (22)
New York
A place where “nobody has said anything nasty to me” (274)
- bill 9-28-2004 7:01 pm
This is so good.
There are quite a few books on Ground Zero that have just recently been released (the most interesting one I think includes the 'unofficial' proposals - coincidentally it is also the book that caused the final controversy with Herbert) Imagining Ground Zero
.
- selma 9-29-2004 12:24 am [add a comment]
Here is Leonard Lopate and the (first) 'meeting of the minds.'
Via Gotham Gazette
- selma 9-29-2004 2:22 am [add a comment]
ground breaking, the mighty wind...
- bill 9-29-2004 10:25 pm [add a comment]
Again?! damn this guy gets too much play.
Waiting to hear who won the competition for the new art complex at the site (the Joyce and Signature Theatre). The short list was announced two weeks ago and apparently the jury (bizarre jury) met last weekend to decide. Did I miss it? They say it won't be announced until early October, but someone out there knows.
Sorry for the cut and paste, but it is a buy only link at this point and I happened to have saved it (did you already post it? If so, apologies}:
September 18, 2004, Saturday
METROPOLITAN DESK
A Shorter List Of Visions At Ground Zero
By DAVID W. DUNLAP (NYT) 1467 words
Some of the most celebrated architects in the world, and some whose names are barely recognized outside their own countries, will be competing in the next few weeks to design the museums and theaters at the World Trade Center site.
Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Daniel Libeskind were among those on two long ''short lists'' of designers that survived a winnowing earlier this week; six for the museums, 10 for the theaters. Kevin M. Rampe, the president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, announced them yesterday to a conference of architects and planners (at least one of whom, Hugh Hardy, made the list) at New York University.
A final selection is expected in early October, Mr. Rampe said, and will be made by the institutions themselves: the Joyce Theater International Dance Center and the Signature Theater Center, for a 250,000-to-300,000-square-foot performing arts complex next to the Freedom Tower, and the Drawing Center and the International Freedom Center, for a 250,000-to-275,000-square-foot museum complex across Fulton Street.
''It's going to be a very difficult process because we have tremendous architects in both of those lists to choose from,'' Mr. Rampe said. ''And the one thing we know for certain is that these are going to be amazing buildings once they're designed and constructed,'' which should be by 2009. The teams were instructed not to begin designing yet but to wait for interviews that are to begin next week.
Two selection panels chose the firms for the lists from among 60 proposals that the development corporation had received by its Sept. 1 deadline. Well-known names on the short lists were Shigeru Ban, Gehry Partners, Rem Koolhaas OMA, Enrique Norten of TEN Arquitectos, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, Polshek Partnership Architects, Moshe Safdie & Associates, Rafael Viñoly Architects and Tod Williams Billie Tsien & Associates.
Among the firms that are not yet household names in New York -- but certainly could be with such a commission -- was Snohetta, the Norwegian firm responsible for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the new library of Alexandria, Egypt.
''I thought it was a good list,'' said Fredric M. Bell, executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, which organized the conference, ''Learning from Lower Manhattan,'' at which Mr. Rampe made his announcement. Mr. Bell added, ''I don't know the long list, so I don't know who was left off.''
Impressive as the lists are, the prospect of more architects descending on a 14.6-acre site where at least eight architects are already working raises the question of whether the final trade center redevelopment will be -- or should be -- a harmonious ensemble, a vibrant mix or a dissonant jumble of architectural styles.
''I don't believe it's a place for the baroque expression of personality or for techno-virtuosity,'' said James Stewart Polshek of the Polshek Partnership in Manhattan, one of two firms that made both short lists.
Mr. Polshek said the architects faced the complicated challenge of trying to design buildings that expressed, distinctly and unambiguously, the identities of their cultural occupants while serving ''a larger population that's interested in the sanctity of the site.''
Mr. Safdie, whose firm in Somerville, Mass., was also on both short lists, said, ''There are so many agendas here to be fulfilled.''
''To me,'' he said, ''it's going to be a delicate balance between cohabiting effectively -- almost, I'd say, with respect to what's around it -- and at the same time making a strong statement.'' Also, he said, by the very nature of the compact site, both museum and theater complexes, which are typically horizontal, will have to be vertically organized.
Because the Joyce and Signature companies will be choosing one architect and the Freedom Center and Drawing Center will be choosing the other, it is theoretically possible that Mr. Polshek or Mr. Safdie could end up as the designer of both buildings.
Studio Daniel Libeskind, which is the master planner of the trade center site but has yet to actually design one of the buildings there, was placed on the short list for the theaters but not the museums, even though Mr. Libeskind's reputation when he arrived on the New York scene two years ago turned largely on the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
''We move on,'' said his wife, Nina Libeskind, chief operating officer of the architectural practice. ''There are other things in life that are very exciting. The performing arts short list is something we're delighted to be participating in.''
Ms. Libeskind noted that the firm is also now working on the Performing Arts Center at Grand Canal Square in Dublin. ''This is something new for us,'' she said, ''and it's something we're very excited by, and it expands our repertoire.''
The lists are also notable because they bring back two architects to the site -- Mr. Ban and Mr. Viñoly -- who were runners-up last year to Studio Daniel Libeskind in the selection of a master planner. In 2003, they were allied in a team called Think, which proposed the World Cultural Center: two open latticework towers in which different architects would have designed a memorial, an interpretive museum, a performing arts center, a conference center and an amphitheater.
This year, Mr. Ban appears in partnership with Frei Otto on the short list for the museums. Mr. Viñoly, whose office is in Lower Manhattan and who recently completed the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, is on the short list for the theaters.
''It's a great opportunity and something that certainly brings me back to the excitement of the whole process,'' Mr. Viñoly said yesterday. ''It's a spectacular chance. It's a kind of ingredient that could not only propel the success of the site as a whole but also the success of the whole neighborhood, the whole region.''
Mr. Hardy, of H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, is on the list for the performing arts center. His previous firm, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, renovated the former Elgin Theater at Eighth Avenue and 19th Street for use by the Joyce Theater. He is working with Mr. Norten, a juror in the memorial competition who is designing the Visual and Performing Arts Library of the Brooklyn Public Library.
Asked yesterday whether he and Mr. Norten had begun their design, Mr. Hardy said cheerfully, ''Good God, no,'' explaining that the finalists had been instructed not to produce any drawings and renderings. But he did say of the underlying planning principles: ''It should all fit together. That's what cities do.''
''We don't need a Lincoln Center,'' he added. ''We already have one.''
The finalists, Mr. Rampe said, were chosen by the development corporation and cultural institutions, working with a group of advisers: Alexander Cooper of the architectural firm Cooper, Robertson & Partners; Agnes Gund, former president of the Museum of Modern Art; Kate D. Levin, commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; Joseph V. Melillo, the executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Charles A. Shorter Jr., a trustee of the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Anne Van Ingen of the New York State Council on the Arts.
- selma 9-29-2004 10:53 pm [add a comment]
"He gave me the patronising look reserved for the village idiot," he notes on another occasion, describing it as "weird to inhabit David Childs's universe, where everybody knew his or her prescribed place ... Childs wasn't interested in what we were working on; he was proceeding with plans for the building he had proposed to Larry Silverstein many months before."
- bill 10-01-2004 6:50 pm [add a comment]
"Libeskind's febrile imagination rooted in this baroque sense of place. "Trust the Invisible," he writes. "That's what my father taught me." Confronting trauma and memory, the architect tunes in to what he calls the void—"the presence of an overwhelming emptiness created when a community is wiped out, or individual freedom is stamped out; when the continuity of life is so brutally disrupted that the structure of life is forever torqued and transformed." In The Shining, little Danny peers into the void of memory. That's what "shining" is. It's the furious conjuring otherwise called architecture."
- bill 10-20-2004 7:30 pm [add a comment]