TEN TOWERS FOR THE TWIN TOWERS

I had to laugh when I got an email blast last week from a design magazine with the subject line “Koolhaas Comes Home, Completes Holland’s Largest Building." That kind of big, dumb pride in big, dumb buildings is antithetical to what Rem Koolhaas and his Amsterdam-based office OMA stood for. If OMA have designed buildings recently, like the CCTV Tower in Shanghai, that seem big and dumb, it’s because their programs and sites (and clients) demanded it.

The email refers to De Rotterdam, the multi-use complex OMA just completed in that city. It’s big, with over 1.7 million square feet of new commercial space. (By comparison, each of the Twin Towers contained 3.8 million square foot of office space.) But it’s not dumb. Rather than a single super-high volume, the structure has been imagined as ten smaller volumes, bundled together, staggered in their heights above the ground and footprints on the ground. These towers touch one another only cautiously, strategically, at certain corners, so that they’re tied together structurally, and so that inhabitants can move between them. But each tower maintains its own volume, with windows along all of its open sides. This arrangement makes for a building that is both massive and porous, with light, air and views rushing through it. It’s a fine contemporary office building.

But when I look at photos of De Rotterdam what I see more than anything else is a tribute to the Twin Towers, though the project was not intended as such. Each of its small towers is, like each of the Twin Towers, a square in plan. Their full-height runs of window frame and window glass resemble the signature black-and-white striped skin of the Twin Towers. And they have a similar starkness as the Twin Towers; their shapes are so restrained that they remain platonic.

The new building looks terribly handsome on the port in Rotterdam, but I think it would sit just as comfortably at the World Trade Center site in downtown Manhattan. To include a structure like this in the new complex there – a big but not super-big building whose forms echo and reinvent those of the Twin Towers – would be a gorgeous response to their destruction. De Rotterdam is like the Twin Towers but slighter, shattered, shifted, dancing. It’s quietly heroic.

Photograph courtesy OMA © Michel van de Kar

January 21, 2014 by Nalina Moses

Architecture doesn’t need words; it stands on its own. So when I saw the title of the current architecture show at MoMA posted outside the gallery, 9 + 1 Ways of Being Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design, I wanted to turn around and leave. It sounded more like a PhD dissertation than a show, and promised little delight.

The exhibit, culled from artifacts in the musem's permanent collection, is text heavy, like an exploded book. Most of what’s on display describes speculative constructions and consists of drawings, collages, posters and pamphlets. But those things on display – those actual, tactile, three-dimensional objects – are enchanting. There’s a facade panel from the Ricola headquarters by Herzog & de Meuron, printed with the image of a single wildflower, that magically fuses elegance with kitsch. And there are models that bring projects to life in a way that renderings and photographs simply cannot. Foremost among these is a foot-high, laser-cut, clear acrylic massing model for a proposal to rebuild the World Trade Center by United Architects. It’s a group of narrow towers, in staggered heights, that are becoming gently tangled up in one another. Someone I know, a poet, says that the Twin Towers were lovers. This model makes this notion that buildings harbor desire perfectly real.

World Trade Center Proposal, 2002, United Architects.

December 21, 2012 by Nalina Moses

At a private talk earlier this week, I heard an executive who had led one of the public agencies that’s rebuilding the World Trade Center site praise the “non-monumentality” of the current plans. He spoke proudly of his own role in changing the tenor of the project from one of high-design fervor, inspired by architect Daniel Libeskind’s original site plan, to a more pragmatic one, which is chiefly concerned with completing construction. He listed some key decisions that the city had made with his guidance that tempered artistic ambition and made it possible to move things forward, including fast-tracking construction of the National 9/11 Memorial and simplifying the design of Santiago Calatrava’s new transit station by adding columns inside the main hall.

He was a persuasive, intelligent man, but as he spoke my insides churned. We can’t afford to be sentimental about rebuilding at this site, and we don’t need to build the world’s tallest building here to show them, but can’t we try to do something great? This is an important site at the heart of the city’s historical and financial districts that’s giving us the opportunity to build a new neighborhood all at once. Oftentimes, and especially in architecture, what we want to be great ends up going all wrong. But why are we starting out by doing something that’s deliberately less than great? Libeskind’s vision for the site would have been complex to execute, but it had been selected by both city leaders and the general public. One of Calatrava’s signature soaring, rib-cage structures might not be appropriate for this site, but why did the city commission one from him and then lampoon it by sticking columns inside? I remember the rogue scheme Donald Trump presented to the press, shortly after Libeskind’s plan had been chosen, to rebuild both original towers one story higher. As I sat listening to this other, powerful city player praise non-monumentality, the Donald’s outsized ambitions for the site site seemed perfectly sane.

September 21, 2012 by Nalina Moses

How long does it take a new building to settle into a city? Frank Gehry’s condominium tower at 8 Spruce Street, which is called, ridiculously, New York by Gehry, has been open for about a year and I believe it’s done just that. I was suspicious at first. It’s a starchitect-designed property with units that rent from 6K to 18K. It’s just a few blocks east of the World Trade Center site, where the first tower there is just now, sluggishly, taking shape. And at a time when austerity is the buzzword, in architecture and everything else, it’s dressed in gleaming, flame-shaped stainless steel panels.

But the tower looks smashing when seen from City Hall, where it’s a fine, assertive presence among low-lying blocks. And when seen from Brooklyn Heights it brightens the skyline, catching and throwing daylight surprisingly. It’s taller and slimmer than the glassy Wall Street towers behind it but doesn’t draw too much attention to itself. I’ve heard the building badmouthed by architects, architecture critics, and laymen, who all observe that only two of its sides are covered in the sculpted panels, and that it’s all a bit too much. In its unapologetic glamor and fine metal ornament, the tower reminds me of the Empire State Building. Gehry was able to adapt his very personal language of twisted, spinning shards into a system of mass construction, which is no mean feat, and to shape a building with a unique image. 88 Spruce is a much needed super-tall building downtown. Since 9/11 I’ve missed the Twin Towers badly; they were a continual, peripheral presence, marking the way downtown. Each time I pass a ten-for-a-dollar postcard rack I look for updated shots of the skyline. It’s not long before Gehry’s tower finds their way into them, and into the mythology of the city.

February 27, 2012 by Nalina Moses