Posts Tagged New York
Tall orders: the best film skyscrapers – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 26, 2012
Hollywood is drawn to multi-storey architecture like … well, like a colossal prehistoric gorilla is drawn to multi-storey architecture. From the caped crusader posing on rooftops in The Dark Knight to Phillipe Petit's death-defying walk between the twin towers in Man on Wire, here's a selection of the greatest movie moments involving everyone's favourite phallic symbol
Ground Zero 9/11 memorial flows with mournful splendour
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 15, 2011
A first look at New York's 'footprint fountains', set to open on the site of the World Trade Centre on the 10th anniversary of the attacks, reveals an impressive – if exhausting – spectacle
How big should a memorial be? The fathomless horror of the first world war is remembered by the compact Cenotaph, but also by the aggregate of many cemeteries and monuments across Europe. The London Blitz has almost nothing. Maya Lin's memorial to the American casualties in Vietnam, in Washington DC (widely agreed to be one of the most eloquent and moving memorials of modern times) is – for its impact – relatively small.
In the case of September 11 2001, the answer is Very Big Indeed. The official memorial, now unveiled to the press in advance of the 10th anniversary of the attacks, has at its centre two of the largest fountains, or rather cascades, ever seen. Each occupies the exact footprint of one of the Twin Towers destroyed in the attacks and, as each tower was big, each cascade is a cuboid Niagara, an inverted eruption, falling 30 feet to a flat basin, and then another 30 feet through a smaller square hole in the centre.
Around the rim of each is a long bronze strip perforated with the names of victims: of the 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, of the hijack of Flight 93, which crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, and of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre. The names, after years of agonising, are grouped by the location of each victim at the time of the attacks, modified by "adjacency requests" whereby relatives could ask for individual names to be by others to whom they were close.
The fountains stand in an eight-acre paved plaza, filled with 415 trees: they are all the same size, which required an exceptional effort of selecting and nurturing. The intention of the whole ensemble, say the architects Michael Arad and Peter Walker, is to make a place of both death and life – where victims can be properly remembered, but where office workers can come to eat their sandwiches. Underneath the plaza will be a large museum of the events, which is still under construction, and all around are rising office towers that will replace the 10m square feet of floor space that used to be on the site.
The cascades are simplified versions of Arad's original idea. He wanted the names to be at a lower level, reachable by walking behind the screens of falling water, but this proved too expensive and complex. What is there now impresses with its size, and makes reasonable decisions about the materials of commemoration – water, stone, trees, bronze – and how they might be deployed.
But memory should include detail as well as majesty, and it has to be said the memorial lacks intimacy. Usually, fountains – however big – allow you to dabble in them and sit at their edge. Here you can only gawp. You get the feeling that no one quite realised how big the cascades would be until it was too late, while the footprints of the towers might have been as potent if formed by a clearing in the trees, or by less drastic pools.
Walker is proud of the way his plaza catches rainwater to irrigate the trees. But this admirable detail seems a touch redundant next to the profligate gushing in its midst. The plan is that admission fees to the museum will help pay to keep the waters churning. It is unthinkable that they should stop, so – by whatever means and at whatever cost in money and energy – they will keep going for ever. It is impressive to contemplate this prospect, but also exhausting.
9/11 Ground Zero: why has its rebirth turned sour?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 30, 2011
Ten years on from the 9/11 attacks, the project to rebuild New York's World Trade Centre site is still riven by political and professional infighting
This 11 September, exactly 10 years after the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre fell, politicians and relatives of the victims will gather in a grove of 415 trees planted on the event's charged ground. Two huge cascades of water, each occupying the square footprint of one of towers, will start churning, ceaselessly, forever. Inscribed in a bronze strip surrounding the cascades will be the names of those killed in the 9/11 attacks, including those at the Pentagon and on United flight 93, which crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, as this is the national 9/11 memorial, not just New York's.
The memorial will be ready, just, although it will be accessible only by advance booking for another two years. It could not miss this deadline. Despite billions of public dollars, thousands of ideas for memorials and rebuilding, a shared public desire to honour the event and speeches by governors and mayors about the urgent need to get things done, perhaps a third of all the reconstruction that will happen here has so far taken place.
Work on 7 World Trade Centre, a relatively plain tower at the edge of the site, was completed in 2006. Otherwise, the grove and the fountains stand among pits, canyons, cranes and rising frames, a Bosch landscape of machines and mud, of digging down and piling up, as skyscrapers, a train station, a museum and 550,000 sq ft of retail space take shape.
"It is very New York," is what everyone connected with the project says, by which they mean that everyone has an opinion and an interest, which must face down the opinions and interests of others. Much of the past decade has been spent in arguing, in law courts, in the media, at public and private meetings. Relatives of victims had different views from one another, and from people living near the Ground Zero site, who did not want their neighbourhood to become a shrine to catastrophe. One of the residents' leaders was told she would "burn in hell". Construction became political: protestors against slow progress carried placards saying: "Don't forget 9/11. Delay means defeat." There was rage and defiance, a desire to stick it back to the terrorists, which made it very likely that large towers would be put back on the site.
In the years following 9/11, the event was honoured by a carnival of pretention and viciousness, as architects felt compelled – as there can be narcissism in healing – to put themselves at the centre of the stage cleared by the attacks. "We're going to crush his nuts," said one of another, while others preened and posed and drivelled about the fusion "of military and urban space" or new towers that would "kiss and touch and become one". They employed black propaganda, old boys' networks, emotional posturing and shameless spinning. At stake was the greatest commission in the world, the chance to shape 16 acres of Manhattan property that were also the site of the most momentous event of the 21st century thus far. It was not just about the memorial but about the towers, station and museum that would go on the site as well.
After a false start or two, several architects were asked to take part in an "innovative design study", a process that was not supposed to have any winners. Then a winner was chosen, a group called Think, a decision overturned the next day by George Pataki, the governor of New York State, who chose Daniel Libeskind instead.
Libeskind's design studies were then called a masterplan, even though there had not been the time or money to work them out as fully as a masterplan would normally be. They then acquired the status, at least for some politicians, of designs for individual buildings, which they were not either. What were essentially sketches were treated as blueprints for multibillion-dollar structures.
Libeskind is the Polish-born son of Holocaust survivors, and designer of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, who, as a teenager, had arrived in New York, in the time-honoured way of immigrants, by boat. He was well placed to speak of freedom, hope, conflict and tragedy. His proposals, in which fractured geometric forms rose into a triumphant spiral said to echo the Statue of Liberty's torch, soaked the site in symbols. Its pinnacle would be the tallest building in the world – 1,776ft high in honour of the date of the American Declaration of Independence – which Pataki would name the Freedom Tower.
Nor was Libeskind afraid, though no Republican, to borrow the Bushite warping of language that followed 9/11: "Freedom" to mean "America", "heroes" to mean "victims". He called his project "Memory Foundations" and said it represented "life victorious". Libeskind is intelligent – when he received news of his win he was reading God, Death, and Time by the talmudist Emmanuel Levinas – but he can sound remarkably simplistic when he wants to.
There was a snag. "That idiot," as one of his rivals puts it, uncharitably, "he forgot that most American of things – the contract." There were in fact other architects engaged to work on the site, the giant, business-friendly practice Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. SOM had been hired by Larry Silverstein, the developer who bought a long lease on the towers in the summer of 2001, a few weeks before they fell, and they were still his architects. His lease required him to put back all 10 million sq ft of the office space destroyed, so his views mattered. According to Janno Lieber of the Silverstein Corporation: "Larry said to Libeskind, 'Congratulations, this is a phenomenal plan. You've managed to accommodate everyone. But – no disrespect – I'd like my architects to design the individual buildings.'"
The main man at SOM was David Childs, now aged 70, prominent for decades in American architecture but never adulated like its more glamorous stars. His style is courteous but ruthless, that of one used to getting his own way. The project was also personal for him, as it was for many. A member of SOM's staff was killed in the attacks and Childs and his team had all too good a view from their Wall Street offices, a few blocks away. "There was a young man with tears streaming down his face," recalls Childs. "He said, 'Will they fall?' I said, 'No.'"
Pataki pushed Libeskind for a while but, according to Childs, Silverstein needed architects with experience of large buildings, such as SOM. Libeskind wanted to design the Freedom Tower, the most conspicuous element of his plan, but found himself put in a junior partnership with SOM ("We're a team organisation but we needed 51% of the vote," is how Childs describes it). Then he became an increasingly marginal figure as Childs redesigned the tower as he wanted it.
The outcome of the Childs/Libeskind showdown is now the most prominent object in the place that in the 1960s was named the World Trade Centre, became Ground Zero in 2001 and now – to lighten its load of significance – is called the World Trade Centre again. The rising tower, its slick skin chasing its steel-and-concrete frame up to the sky, is already taller than anything in Britain but still far from its final height. Libeskind wanted a dynamic, asymmetrical shape but the tower will now be a symmetrical obelisk, in emulation of the Washington Monument in Washington DC. Childs calls it "iconic and simple".
The Freedom Tower, now renamed 1 World Trade Centre, looks assertive and confident, like the towers of corporate America anywhere, but it has contradictions. It is unsure if it is a symbol or a piece of commercial real estate. Childs refers to the Washington Monument but also cites the importance of "market realities", among other things, as a reason for discarding Libeskind. Yet its size is grandiose and its security measures elaborate, for obvious reasons, which make it expensive in a location that is not New York's hottest commercial spot. It does not obviously respect market realities. At least, it did not convince Silverstein, who refused to build it, meaning that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the public body that owns the freehold, decided to put its own funds into putting up the tower, with uncertain prospects of an early, sufficient return on its investment.
The tower is the pinnacle of Childs's career, as it would be of any architect's, yet he is openly contemptuous of what might seem an important design feature, its height. This, achieved with the help of a large steel stick, retains the magic number specified by Libeskind: "1,776 feet, whatever that's worth," says Childs. "Nobody's going to count the feet."
The rebuilding of Ground Zero is an immense public building project, consuming billions of public dollars, pushed by mayors and governors, of a scale that would impress an old-fashioned socialist despot. Yet it is also a commercial development by the Silverstein Corporation. Its most important guiding document is Silverstein's lease agreement of summer 2001 and its requirement, blind to the imminent attacks and the emotional charge they would bring, that any destroyed accommodation should be put back. It meant that, whatever else happened, there would be very large office blocks on the site.None of the powerful people involved with the site since then has been able or willing to change this requirement.
At the same time, it was impossible for anything built there not to be a symbol, given what had happened and given the geometric potency of the Twin Towers. Their architect, Minoru Yamasaki, dreamed, with hopelessly misplaced optimism, that they would become "a representation of man's belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the co-operation of men, and through co-operation, his ability to find greatness". The fearful symmetries of their downfall, and the contrast between the perfection of their forms and the chaos of their collapse, ensured that architecture and construction were enmeshed in the event.
Hence the contradictions. Is it a symbol? Is it an office block? It is both.
What are most clearly symbols are the two square cascades of the memorial, which lie in front of the tower in an eight-acre plaza containing the grove of 415 trees. The memorial is by Michael Arad, the architect who won a design competition held in 2003-4, beating 5,200 entrants. He was 34 at the time, unknown and inexperienced, and has realised the work in partnership with the well-established landscape architect Peter Walker.
Arad was living in Lower Manhattan at the time of the attacks and, like many, "was very affected by what I saw and felt compelled to do something about it". He recalls the place as a "ghost town" after 9/11, but with people instinctively gathering at night in public places such as Washington Square. From this, he learned that "public spaces are the glue that binds society together".
Almost immediately, Arad started imagining a memorial, spending "a lot of time and effort drawing and sketching and modelling". He came up with two squares set in the Hudson River, "with the surface of water torn open, by voids that will never fill". Then the competition was announced and he adapted his idea to the location at Ground Zero. At the same time, inspired by his discovery of the power of public space, he wanted them set in a large, flat, open plaza. He called his plan "Reflecting Absence" and won.
For Walker, the main problem was maintaining the flatness and openness of the plaza, which was essential to Arad's design, without making it bare and arid. The most important part of the answer is the trees, selected and nurtured, with great difficulty, so that they are all the same size.
Both Walker and Arad had to fight the many pressures to put unwanted stuff in the empty space, such as skylights for the train station or 17 air vents 20ft high. "How can you make something flat with 17 vents in it?" says Walker, who needed Pataki's help to sort out that one. They had to find the right kind of seating: park benches seemed inappropriate but so did oblong slabs that "looked as if they might have a dead person underneath"; so the slabs had to be given dimensions that made them look less tomb-like.
They had to make the cascades work, with the help of a mock-up in Toronto, and Walker still sounds a caution. "We've made them as well as we know how, but they're mechanical and usually mechanical things only last 30-40 years." Somehow, the money will have to be found to pump the water round for ever and ever. You get the impression Walker would not have gone for fountains if it had been up to him.
Arad wanted the names of the victims to be inscribed near the bottom of the cascades, with visitors descending to them behind the screen of falling water. Cost and security issues made this prohibitive and the names will now be around the cascades' upper rim, at the level of the plaza.
Even this simpler presentation took years to resolve, not least because of the question of the order in which the names, which include the six people who died in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre, would be arranged. Should they be alphabetical? Should they be random? Eventually it was agreed that names should be arranged by groupings of place – who was in which tower, on the ground, in which plane or in the Pentagon. However, relatives were invited to make "meaningful adjacency requests", of which 1,200 were received, whereby they could ask for particular names to be together.
Arad's and Walker's other concern was, as it was for most who have touched this site since 2001, the balance of remembrance and renewal. "A lot of people," says Arad, "thought it had to be either a living park or a cemetery and a forever dismal place." The combination of the fountains and the canopy of trees is intended to house both death and life, both acts of pilgrimage and lunchtime sandwich eating by office workers. "You walk through trees," says Walker, "and suddenly these waterfalls open up underneath you. Then you turn around and you're in a forest, which is a symbol of life."
Newspaper critics are being kept at a distance from the memorial for now, but it is possible to see from surrounding buildings that each fountain is vast. As each of each square's four sides is more than 200ft, and there are two squares, the total length of falling water is nearly a third of a mile. Each cascade drops 30ft, before dropping another 30ft down a smaller square hole in the centre, down to the level of the bedrock under the site.
But they are not the end of the remembering. Beneath the plaza, a museum is being built, with 100,000 sq ft of exhibition space. Exhibits will include crushed cars and fire trucks, twisted metal from the old towers and photographs and remembrances of victims. Within the museum's vast spaces it will be possible to see the slurry wall, the rough concrete that kept out the waters of the Hudson river, allowing the Twin Towers to be built. Never intended to be seen, it was revealed after they fell.
Above the pavement of the plaza can be seen the entrance pavilion to the museum, a tilting shard by the Norwegian practice Snøhetta. To one side is rising Tower Four, designed by the Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki. Work is also proceeding on Tower Three, by the British practice Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners. Next to it will be a transport interchange, linking the subways and trains, designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. Tower Two, by Foster and Partners and taller than the Empire State Building, is on hold for now. A proposed performing arts centre by Frank Gehry remains a distant prospect. On the other hand, Ground Zero's great unknown monument, 550,000 sq ft of retail, is on track.
These buildings are the constructional response of New York to 9/11, primed with some of the $20bn of federal money that the New York senators Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer won from Congress in the wake of the attacks. Most are far from complete. Tower One, the former Freedom Tower, is due to be finished in 2014. Calatrava's station is scheduled for 2014, the museum for 2012. Most are prodigiously expensive: the Freedom Tower costs more than $3bn, and the museum and memorial combined $700m. The station, originally budgeted at $2.2bn, is reputed to be heading towards $4bn.
All the buildings have what the Silverstein Corporation calls "significant" architects. It is an interesting adjective, as significance has always been the big issue at the World Trade Centre. Yamasaki wanted significance for his towers, that of world peace. Al-Qaida saw them differently. Since 9/11, all the argument and anguish has been about the ways in which construction can express and honour the significance of the event. Yet the way in which Foster or Calatrava are "significant" is different. Here, the word means "well known, successful and highly regarded". Its meaning is hollowed out; its relation to the significance of the site is approximate.
Libeskind's promise was significance. It can be debated how successfully his ideas would have achieved it but what is clear is that the Pritzker-winning architects – Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Maki – hired by Silverstein for the other towers, have not been inclined to defer to Libeskind's vision. The towers will ascend in a vague, stiff, spiral, roughly in accordance with Libeskind's wishes, but each is a singular assertive object rather than a figure in a great unified gesture. Until such time as the Foster tower is completed, which could yet be a decade from now, it remains to be seen how plain is the resemblance of the group to Lady Liberty's torch or how many people will care if it is.
Others of Libeskind's ideas have fallen away. He had wanted the memorial plaza to be sunk but Arad and Walker raised it back to street level. He envisaged a "wedge of light" where sunshine would fall, each 11 September, between the times when the first plane hit the North Tower and the second tower to fall – also the North Tower – collapsed. The extravagant roof of Calatrava's station compromises this idea, whose effectiveness had already been questioned. Calatrava, using the greeting card triteness that has infected many in this project, said his roof would be like a dove released from the hands of a child. In reality, like much of his work, it is mostly about Santiago Calatrava. He has designed similar-looking roofs elsewhere, without a dove pretext in sight.
Libeskind is nothing if not optimistic and despite past rages at Childs is now serene. "The fundamental ideas are exactly there," he says. He may sound almost like Saddam Hussein's PR man, Comical Ali, proclaiming victory as the US army could be seen entering Baghdad behind him, but he can at least list ideas of his that are still there, such as the 1,776ft of the tower, the open space containing the memorial, the exposure of the slurry wall and the idea that retail should be spread about the site rather than placed in a single underground zone.
Libeskind says his experience at Ground Zero "reaffirms [his] belief in democracy, which is as difficult as it can be worthwhile". The place is indeed a product of New York's version of democracy, in which no one has the ability to assume complete control, not even the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, the man widely credited for ensuring that the project has got as far as it has. The site becomes a jostle of competing interests, in which a combination of money, power and loud voices, tempered to a degree by public opinion, tends to win.
The jostle of buildings reflects this jostle of power. They do not connect or cohere, except in a very general way. There is a reluctance to engage with the specific or the small-scale. The memorial is one thing, the museum another, the station and former Freedom Tower others again.
At the same time, all are driven by a pervading fear that whatever is built to honour 9/11 will not be enough. So everything – waterfall, towers, museum, plaza, station – is huge. Was it really necessary to try to build the tallest building in the world, creating immense security issues in the process, especially now that New York has been thrust out of the tallest-building game by Dubai?
Subtlety, intimacy and complexity are blunted and in a sense the development is untypical New York. In the past decade, the city has acquired a certain lightness and playfulness, represented by the High Line, the phenomenally successful conversion of a railway viaduct into a public park. Or by the never-ending ingenuity with which restaurant menus and cocktails are constructed; or by the glittering, joyful residential skyscraper that Frank Gehry has put up downtown. For better and worse, the city resembles a giant habitable iPad, a delectable grid where gratification can be had at a touch. The World Trade Centre feels ponderous, corporate and old-fashioned by comparison. For a Londoner, it feels like Canary Wharf.
But it will be effective. The magnificent waterfalls and the exhibits in the museum will do their job of assuaging the event. The generalness and abundance will mean that most of the many, many parties who care about the site, from property developers to victims' families and residents, will be satisfied. It will achieve closure but with a looseness that avoids the need to reconcile conflicts that may be irreconcilable. The train station will pump people into the skyscrapers, who will lunch under the trees and shop in the mall.
It will have been a long time coming, and cost an extraordinary amount, but it will be there. And, possibly, given the ways New York does and does not work, no other route was possible but the one by which it got there.
High Line park on disused railway in New York opens second section
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 9, 2011
Elevated freight railway conversion has attracted an estimated $2bn in private money to the Meatpacking District
When the elevated freight railway that runs above the west side of Manhattan was built between 1929 and 1934 it became known as the "lifeline of New York" – a gritty industrial artery carrying carcasses into the literally named Meatpacking district.
Eighty years later this stretch of steel and gravel on stilts has become a lifeline of the city all over again, except this time the carcasses that trundle along it are alive, and human. The second phase of the High Line, the railway turned into a city park, has just opened, doubling its length and quadrupling the joy of this very modern public space.
The full length of the High Line now runs from Gansevoort Street in the south to 30th Street in the north. For a railway that came close to being torn down in 1999 when local businesses – backed by the then mayor Rudy Giuliani – denounced it as a blot on the landscape, it has come to be one of the most resounding examples of a city's rebirth.
The new section, beginning at 20th Street, includes the first stretch of lawn on the High Line. "Grass to lie on in New York city with no animal products to deal with [dogs are not allowed in the park] – are you kidding me?" said local resident Susan Hamburger who was out for her morning jog: "This is an incredible resource away from the city traffic."
Another attraction of the new phase is the "Falcone flyover", a raised portion above the raised railway that allows visitors to look down on green areas landscaped to replicated wooded hillocks. The High Line has been planted with 210 species of trees, shrubs and grasses selected for their native relevance and hardiness.
Already, the two-year-old southern portion is a riot of vegetation in greens and muted purples. The flourishing of the plant life is like a metaphor for what the High Line has done to the neighbourhood as a whole, which has exploded economically since the park opened.
For an investment of just $115m (£70m) to convert the rusty tracks of the railway into an elegant walkway, the city authorities have attracted an estimated $2bn in private money to the neighbourhood.
As far as 28th street the railway is now lined with gleaming structures in polished steel and turquoise green glass as hotels, residential property developers and high-end fashion retailers have piled into the area. The flanks of the park have been dubbed "architects' row" in recognition of the new buildings that have sprung up by internationally-renowned designers such as Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and Neil Denari.
More development is certain to spread north as the economic ripple effect continues. By 30th street the High Line is surrounded by what remains a wasteland of empty warehouses and dusty parking lots, but already the cranes are busy laying the foundations of new buildings.
In 2015 the area will receive a further shot in the arm when the Whitney will open its new lower Manhattan museum at the southern end of the High Line, rounding off an extraordinary transformation from urban decay to post-industrial renovation.
• New York's High Line park - in pictures
High Line park in New York opens second section – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 8, 2011
The disused elevated railway became a park in 2009, with the opening of the second phase doubling the length to one mile
Why Park51 is much more than the ‘mosque at Ground Zero’
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 10, 2010
Rowan Moore talks to Park51's young architect, Michel Abboud, about his controversial project to build a 'Muslim YMCA' near Ground Zero in New York
It's easier to say what the "mosque at Ground Zero" is not, than what it is. It's not a mosque, and it's not at Ground Zero – only nearby. It's not a "clubhouse for terrorists", as some objectors have called it, nor a work of "triumphalist stealth jihad". It does not "loom" over the "hallowed ground" of the 9/11 attacks, which cannot be seen from its site.
As to what it is, the explanation is not at first very enlightening. Park51, to use the project's proper name, is "a friendly and accessible platform" that "enriches lower Manhattan in body and spirit, with ecologically conscious design and operation". However, its architect, Michel Abboud, makes things clearer: it is a Muslim version of the YMCA, or the many Jewish community centres in New York. That is, it will have a swimming pool, basketball court, childcare and exhibition facilities, a library, auditorium, restaurant and catering school. As with the Christian and Jewish versions, you won't have to be a believer to use these facilities.
When built, it will be 16 storeys high, and 10% of its floor area will be a "prayer space". It will be large – big enough for 1,500 people – but there will be no minaret, or room for ablutions, or other essential features of a mosque. Its religious elements would be "a matter of interior design", as Abboud puts it, and faiths and groups other than Muslims will be able to pray there. The project now has planning permission and, subject to fundraising, will be completed, at the earliest, in three years' time.
As Abboud tells it, the year's most controversial building project came about almost by chance, through a sequence of reasonable decisions. It started when the developer Soho Properties bought the former Burlington Coat Factory in Park Avenue, lower Manhattan. It considered potential uses, conducted market research, and found that there was a need for "community facilities" in the area. Sharif El-Gamal, a Muslim American who runs Soho Properties, attended the nearby mosque of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who had been working in the area for 30 years.
Together they decided to create what is now Park51. That the project was close to Ground Zero was due to El-Gamal's and Rauf's long connections with the area. But they were conscious of the significance of the place, and it was not unwelcome to them. Rauf has said that it gave an opportunity to make "the opposite statement" to the destruction of the Twin Towers.
Abboud is a young architect on the rise, who "started building projects before I graduated", and now, at 33, runs Soma Architects, a practice with 30 staff and offices in New York, Mexico and Beirut. Its work so far has consisted mostly of smart restaurants and luxury residential projects – nothing approaching the significance of Park51. He is a walking melting pot, albeit of a somewhat privileged kind, a Catholic of French, Lebanese and Mexican origins.
"The difficulty from day one," he tells me with some understatement, "was to satisfy all the different parties: the developers, the religious institution and the average New Yorker." The building had to promote "integration and unity", and be "porous and open to the city" while "maintaining a landmark quality". He was "not going to fall into stereotypical illusions of what Islamic architecture looks like".
He conceived a "self-supporting exoskeleton", a white lattice that holds the building up, creates shade, and defines the character of the interiors. It is inspired by mashrabiyas, the elaborately patterned sunscreens common in Islamic architecture. He is not, he stresses, the first western architect to have this idea: Jean Nouvel's 1988 Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, for one, did something similar. The designs of Abboud's lattice are based on "ancient historical patterns that have a very long story to them", but "some people imagined there were reversed Stars of David included as a provocation to Jews". It was "only a few people, and very far-fetched", but he is still responding by making the traditional patterns "more blurred".
The design is "still evolving, but I expect the finished building to have a similar concept". Abboud claims that "every time the project is presented properly, without the media swirl, people respond positively".
Indeed, the idea of the project was in the public domain for six months, following its announcement in the New York Times a year ago, before anyone made a fuss. It was approved unanimously by the local Community Board in May. Only after that, with the US midterm elections looming, was a political storm whipped around it. Abboud believes that slow progress on the 9/11 memorial, which is now due to be dedicated at next year's 10th anniversary, did not help. "Whether consciously or unconsciously, people feared the centre could be built before the Ground Zero memorial was built."
It probably also doesn't help that the project is nuanced and ambiguous. As a 16-storey building for a Muslim group, located where it is, it is clearly a statement of something, but it is not completely explicit what this something is. As well as a community facility, it is a demonstration of Muslim presence in New York, and that most Muslims are not terrorists.
This clearly should not cause anyone a problem, yet in the febrile atmosphere of modern America, ambiguity makes space for baroque fears. "Let 'em build it, then bomb it – at the busiest time of day," was one of the less charming reactions. Abboud says: "It is very important to understand the healing power of architecture." There is an awful lot of healing still to do.
Michel Abboud will be speaking at Faith in the City 10-11 November at the Architecture Foundation, London
Park51 drawings prove how far ‘Ground Zero mosque’ claims are from truth
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 5, 2010
Plans for $120m project suggest building will be a multifaith community centre, including gym and playground
Judging by the criticism thrown at the Muslim centre planned for downtown Manhattan, you would think developers intended to build an Islamic citadel right on top of Ground Zero with "sponsored by al-Qaida" written on its front.
In fact, the proposed scheme for the much-slated "Ground Zero mosque" is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero – it is a multifaith community centre with an Islamic prayer area, two blocks north of the site where the twin towers once stood. Now, conceptual drawings of the building have been released, revealing a planned structure that is strikingly modern and in keeping with the spirit of New York's most cutting-edge design.
Park51, named after its location on the site of an old coat factory in Park Place, would be a sleek 15-storey tower sandwiched between older buildings.
The most vivid element of the renderings, drawn by a New York-based design studio, Soma Architects, is the building's white frontage, which is broken up into a lattice of interlocking geometric shapes. At night, it would be lit up like a glistening honeycomb.
The device is a clear allusion to the intricate arabesque motifs found in Islamic architecture, and is reminiscent of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, which shot the architect Jean Nouvel to fame in the 1980s. But it also pays homage to other religions, with the Jewish Star of David being clearly visible among its patterns.
Contrary to the mass of bad publicity that has been heaped on it in recent weeks, the building is designed to be multifaith and also secular.
Sharif el-Gamal, the developer of the $120m (£76m) project, told Associated Press that nearly a quarter of its space would be devoted to a sports and fitness centre, which, it is hoped, would attract New York residents of any faith and ethnicity for a fee of up to $2,700 a year per family. Another floor would be given over to a playground and childcare area.
In addition, there would be a restaurant and exhibition space, and on the 12th floor a memorial and sanctuary remembering the events of 11 September 2001 that would again be multidenominational.
"I don't think that once this thing gets built, anyone will be picketing," Gamal told AP.
The most controversial aspect of the scheme – its Muslim prayer space, which would occupy two floors in the basement – will not be a mosque at all as the construction of the building does not satisfy the stringent requirements for a sanctified mosque.
Seen from the inside, the renderings show the lattice work casting intricate shadows across the white floors, another allusion to arabesque design with its emphasis on naturally lit interiors.
The drawings are only a vision of how the building might go. An official architect for the project has yet to be appointed, and ground breaking on the construction will not begin for at least three years.
By then, the developer and the charity behind the project, the Cordoba Initiative, hope that the furore will have died down.
Gamal said that he regretted the way things had gone. "I would have done things a lot differently during this process if I understood what we were up against. People have been calling this the 'Ground Zero mosque'. It's not at Ground Zero and it's not a mosque. Our identity has been stolen from us. It has been stolen by extremists."
The attack has been led by Christian evangelical and rightwing political groups, who say Park51 is a "victory mosque", revelling in the glory of 9/11. In the most extreme case, this September, Pastor Terry Jones threatened to burn 200 Qur'ans in protest at the centre.
Could a building be less militantly Islamic?
First illustrations of the 15-storey Park51 development planned to house the Islamic centre reveal a decidedly upbeat and glamorous building, more festive than threatening. These preliminary renderings by Soma, however, should be thought of as what might be rather than what definitely will. An architect has yet to be officially appointed.
Even so, the interiors – a honeycomb structure awash with daylight – look as if they could be uplifting and special. But then, you would expect something glamorous and fresh from Soma, a New York firm founded by the Lebanese-born Michel Abboud, who has recently completed the enjoyably hip Tartinery Nolita brasserie in SoHo.
Equally, at least four floors of Park51 are to be given over to a gym and spa, and only two basement floors to a Muslim prayer hall. With a restaurant, artists' studios and a childcare centre, this $140m building clad in an abstract play of Islamic patterns could hardly be less militantly hardcore. As one young man attending the nearby Sufi al-Farah mosque in lower Manhattan told the New York Times: "Because this is a new country, it revolutionises everything. Food, industry, philosophy and even religion." He might have added: "Islamic architecture, too."
Jonathan Glancey
New York skyscraper to rival Empire State Building
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 26, 2010
City council approves plans for tower only metres shorter than iconic landmark
New York's skyline, already immortalised by King Kong and Woody Allen is set to sprout another skyscraper after the city council approved plans for a tower only 18 metres (60ft) shorter than the Empire State Building.
New York city council yesterday shrugged off objections from the owners of the 102-storey Empire State Building and gave the go-ahead for the construction of 15 Penn Plaza, a 67-storey building proposed by Vornado Realty Trust.
The new skyscraper, described by Vornado as "an outstanding addition to New York's skyline", will be built two blocks away from the Empire State Building, which has stood largely unobstructed in midtown Manhattan since 1931.
Building work on 15 Penn Plaza is unlikely to begin until it finds an anchor tenant.
Malkin Holdings, co-owners of the Empire State Building, said they respected the decision of the council, which approved the construction by a vote of 47-1.
"As the current stewards of the Empire State Building, the most iconic image on the skyline of New York, we thought that 15 Penn Plaza was too close to the Empire State Building for its height and design," said the company president, Anthony Malkin.
New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, had dismissed objections to the building.
"Anybody that builds a building in New York City changes its skyline. We don't have to run around to every other owner and apologise," he told a news conference on Tuesday.
"One guy owns a building and he'd like to have it be the only tall building. I'm sorry, that's not the real world."
David Greenbaum, the project developer for 15 Penn Plaza, told New York city council's zoning committee that the tower's height was determined by the needs of potential tenants – such as financial services firms that need large, uninterrupted floors to accommodate trading activities – as well as the additional space needed for "green" office design.
Vornado said the project would bring transport improvements, including a concourse linking Penn station to subways and commuter trains, new subway entrances and an expanded subway platform.
Penn Plaza will be 363 metres (1,190ft) tall. The Empire State Building's main structure is 381 metres but it has a 62 metre antenna that puts its total height at 443 metres.
Mitchell Moss, a New York University urban policy professor and an informal adviser to the mayor, told the New York Times that the city had long cherished its soaring towers.
"People don't come to New York to visit caves," Moss said. "They want the views, the height, the experience of tall buildings. Skyscrapers allow us to make the best use of a limited amount of land."
The Empire State Building won its place in popular culture in the 1933 film King Kong, when a giant, love-sick ape climbed the skyscraper, Fay Wray clutched in his paw, only to fall to earth in a hail of bullets from a bi-plane.
It was the city's tallest building until the construction of the World Trade Centre in 1970. After the twin towers were destroyed in the September 11 attacks, the Empire State Building again held the title of New York's tallest building, but will lose it when One World Trade Centre is completed.
New York officials sue Christie’s to regain British architect’s drawings
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 12, 2010
City takes out legal action over ownership of Jacob Wrey Mould's landmark designs found in a skip 50 years ago
At some point in the 1950s a craftsman called Buckley was working on a site in lower Manhattan when he came across a stash of papers dumped in a skip. They were a set of architectural drawings in watercolours of plans for city parks including details of fountains, clocks, terraces and other structures.
What probably caught Buckley's eye was the stately nature of the designs and their elaborate colouring. Recognising their innate value, he took a pile of more than 100 of the drawings home and filed them away for safe keeping.
More than 50 years later they have become the subject of a $1m (£640,000) lawsuit lodged at the New York supreme court. The legal action was brought by the city's authorities against the late craftsman's son, Sam Buckley, and Christie's, the auctioneers through whom he tried to sell the drawings.
They were the work of Jacob Wrey Mould, a British architect who came to New York in 1853 to design a Unitarian church in Fourth Avenue and 20th Street. Though the building has long been pulled down, in its day it was quite a sensation with its striped facade of red and cream stone earning it the nickname Church of the Holy Zebra.
Mould, an irascible man who was not much liked but greatly admired, went on to collaborate with Calvert Vaux, co-designer of Central Park. Together they planned the original buildings of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while Mould also had a large hand in Belvedere Castle and the carvings of the Bethesda Terrace, both in Central Park. Later, he was seminal in the creation of other quintessential New York features such as Morningside and Riverside Parks.
Most of the drawings were signed by Mould. They display his love of vibrant colours as a student of the designer and polychrome theorist Owen Jones with whom he designed a room in Buckingham Palace. They include plans for structures that were built, such as Bethesda Fountain, as well as ones that were not – a set of street lamps for Park Avenue, for instance.
Every one was stamped with the badge of the New York Parks Department, for whom Mould worked from 1857 to shortly before his death in 1886.
When Christie's was commissioned by the younger Buckley to sell 86 of the 127 drawings in his late father's possession, the auction house contacted the city authorities for help with valuing the works and to ask whether New York wanted the first chance to buy them.
But the city saw an invaluable historic collection that should never have left its public ownership.
"They are the kind of thing we would never throw away, but for whatever reason they were erroneously discarded or lost," said Gerald Singleton, the lawyer representing the city. "Once we looked at them we realised that the city remains the owner of these drawings."
It has persuaded the New York court to put a preliminary restraining order that prevents Buckley or Christie's from selling any of the drawings.
In return, the city has promised to back off from its legal threats and to attempt to reach a settlement.
"We're confident this will end amicably," Singleton said.
If New York regains the drawings, it has pledged to use them when renovating historic parts of the city.
Lucille Gordon, Mould's biographer, said the documents were also hugely important in the understanding of the architect himself. "He is a piece of our history – his work is scattered all over New York state. Yet so few papers of any kind have been left behind, and any scrap that Mould touched has a value."
Jacob Wrey Mould
Born 1825 in Bloomsbury in London, and educated at King's College School.
Studied under Owen Jones, the so-called master of polychromy, travelling to the Alhambra in Spain.
Took part in the building of Dorchester House on Park Lane and in the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, moving to New York soon afterwards.
Started work with the city's park department in 1857, rising by 1870 to be its architect-in-chief.
Apart from a five-year stint in Lima in Peru from 1874, he spent most of his later life working for the New York parks.
Also renowned as a distinguished pianist and organist.