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  Rebuilding at Ground Zero: The Pit and the Planner

Rebuilding at Ground Zero The Pit and the Planner

By Alexander Osang

New York's Ground Zero has been in a state of limbo for five years. Models have been built, competing plans submitted, webs of intrigue spun. But even after being forced to make numerous concessions to commercial interests, lead architect Daniel Libeskind still remains confident about the city's efforts to rebuild.

Larry Silverstein has come to the World Trade Center site to reopen Number 7, which collapsed like a dead horse on the morning of September 11, 2001. It was the last building to fall that fateful day and the first to rise from the ashes. Silverstein has had it rebuilt: 52 stories tall, the New York sky reflects in its glass façade. But however long you stare at it and dwell on the events of 9/11, it's nothing but another high-rise. Just another building, after all.

And why? Number 7 World Trade Center is situated right next to the heart of Ground Zero: nothing has yet emerged from the void where the Twin Towers once stood. There are many explanations for the emptiness. A confused profusion of news reports, models, plans, and architects' names that have been floated over the past five years. The debates on office space, memorials - and the nature of immortality. Then there are the grand expectations, the vain architects, the powerhungry politicians, and the profit-seeking real estate agents. Not least, there's the developer who looks like a character from a Dick Tracy cartoon. Larry Silverstein's hair is dyed orange. He seems to have no neck, and he always comes packaged in a double-breasted pinstripe suit with flamboyant lapels. He's the type of man who always seems to be selling something. Today, it's the building behind him.

Larry Silverstein takes the initiative. He beckons "Ronan" to step forward. Irish rent-a-tenor Ronan Tynan performed at Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's third wedding and ex-President George Bush's 80th birthday party. Today he's singing the national anthem. When Ronan has finished, Larry Silverstein thanks a few old friends - politicians, developers, his wife, and a handful of architects. He mentions Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki. But not Daniel Libeskind.

That's odd. Libeskind is the "master planner" in charge of construction at Ground Zero. "Master planner" may sound vague, but surely it merits a mention.

Some three-and-a-half years ago, Daniel Libeskind seemed to have clinched the international architecture competition for the world's best-known building site. On a sunny day in December 2002, he stood in the Winter Garden on the edge of the pit and presented his plans. Libeskind appeared to connect on many levels - emotional, historic and patriotic. He seemed sharp and eager, a harbinger of hope to both the families of victims and the real estate agents of Manhattan. His sky had no limits. Daniel Libeskind was the world's most famous architect.

In front of hundreds of television cameras, he related how, as a boy, he had arrived by ship in Manhattan. He described his youth in the Bronx. Delivered with a hint of an eastern European accent, his words were fluent and forceful. He all but danced around his model. At its center stood a long vertical splinter emerging from a rising spiral defined by the peaks of smaller buildings. The main tower was to echo the shape of the Statue of Liberty - with a garden on its roof. There would be a waterfall, a museum, airy streets and trees in abundance. Libeskind spoke of the Wedge of Light, a plaza that would shine free of shadows for one-and-a-half hours on September 11 every year - the time between the first jetliner ramming the World Trade Center and the moment the second tower caved in. He spoke of a Park of Heroes, of gravel crunching underfoot in the underground level, of life, of recollection, and of mourning.

The American flag hung behind him. The tower was to be 1,776 feet high - commemorating 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence. One could imagine little Daniel in the 1960s, running to the railings of the ocean liner, eager for his first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty.

By comparison, the other architects presenting their models for Ground Zero seemed like technocrats. Among them were the most vaunted architects on earth, but ultimately they too were just architects. They mumbled and stumbled and never really got to the point.

Daniel Libeskind was the man of the hour. He won the competition, closed down his Berlin office and moved to New York. He had claimed the world's biggest architecture prize - in his hometown, no less. He was the master planner, the maestro.

But just a year later at Federal Hall, when the veil was lifted from the final blueprints, when Daniel Libeskind stood in the crowd of other architects and politicians, he might have been the retiree who gets invited to the office party out of pity. New York State Governor George Pataki and the new mayor, Michael Bloomberg, held speeches. They exchanged rhetorical pats on the back and found special words of praise for a young architect named Michael Arad, who was now to lead the design team for the Ground Zero memorial site.

Libeskind sat silent in the second row, absorbed in thought, lost in his own world. His name did not fall once on that occasion.

There was no more talk of crunching gravel, of waterfalls or heroic parks. Someone had discovered that the Wedge of Light would not work as conceived by Libeskind: the Millennium Hilton was blocking the sun. To make matters worse, New York architect David Childs wanted to redesign the centerpiece of Libeskind's vision, the Freedom Tower. Childs objected to both its shape and its symbolic size.

The master plan seemed to be disintegrating. New York was less tractable than Berlin. The city had returned to business as usual. Libeskind could continue to style himself the master planner, but in the Big Apple, titles are cheap.

The opposition mounted. Larry Silverstein, the World Trade Center's powerful leaseholder, craved more office space. Childs too wanted to leave his stamp on the world's tallest building. Herbert Muschamp, the city's leading architecture critic, found Libeskind's plans kitschy. Talkshow host Bill Maher flashed a picture of the excited little man with the odd, angular glasses and quipped: "He just split up with Elton John." The tabloid New York Post reprinted the most grotesque passages from a collection of erotic poems that Libeskind once penned. And the New York Times was preparing an article headlined "The incredible shrinking Daniel Libeskind."

At home or an interloper?

Haven't New Yorkers always regarded him as an interloper?

"I don't know. Strangely, many New Yorkers considered me a German, although I grew up in the Bronx," says Libeskind, looking out at the dismal November sky through the narrow windows of Berlin's Jewish Museum, where he is staying 24 hours on his never-ending odyssey around the world. He has spent three of the last eight days in aircraft: sixty hours in total. Yesterday he was in Korea, where he is giving Hyundai's headquarters a facelift. Before that in Toronto, San Francisco and India - where he gave a talk in his capacity as the U.S. cultural ambassador for architecture. Tomorrow it's back to New York. "And perhaps they're right. I did come from Germany. This building here was my admission ticket. I haven't really made any real marks anywhere like other architects have. I've lived a nomad's life. People often have no idea where I come from," he says with a chuckle.

Daniel Libeskind wouldn't lie down. He hired the lawyer who was the prototype for the attorney in Tom Wolfe's novel Bonfire of the Vanities. He abandoned his office in a Berlin factory and settled into a studio on Rector Street near Ground Zero. He told the New York Post: "When the politicians and architects and investors are long gone, I'll still be in my office on Rector Street, making sure that every building on this site is dedicated to a very special moment in our history. Looking at Ground Zero and supervising the implementation of my master plan." And while critics were picking his master plan apart bit by bit, Libeskind was peddling his vision, roaming the country like a traveling salesman.

He spoke at schools and architectural conferences, at synagogues and universities. On one cold winter night at the start of 2004, he ventured to a lecture hall of a community college on Long Island. The situation was at its most critical back then. He had fallen out completely with David Childs, and was suing Larry Silverstein. There were reports that he was not even attending most of the planning sessions. But on Long Island, Libeskind leapt onto the stage with the energy of his premiere at the Winter Garden - and championed his ideas as if championing life itself. He flashed up one slide after another - bolts of lightning illuminating his plans and their symbolism. The Wedge of Light, the Slurry Wall that keeps the Hudson River at bay, the axis from the Statue of Liberty to the Freedom Tower. Libeskind certainly wasn't shrinking; he was actually growing again.

A member of the audience asked: "How much of what we saw tonight will actually be built this way?"

"Architecture is a profession that requires a lot of compromises," Libeskind said. Then he spoke for another half-hour about love, light, hope and faith, before sliding into a black limousine with his wife and being whisked back to Manhattan. The next morning he jetted off again.