In the face of rising opposition to Ground Zero, LMDC is quietly moving up plans to finalize Memorial plans by mid-July according to The New York Times. Given the opposition and new found interest in Michael Arad this could signal the end of the Freedom Center.
The Times said:
The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is quietly pushing to wrap up plans for the memorial by mid-July. But after two and a half years of tinkering, the city is likely to end up with a memorial geared to tourists with short attention spans rather than to the serious contemplation of human loss.
The sense of urgency was further underscored by a small item in the Bradenton Herald about designer Michael Arad having to cancel a June 22 appearance at G. WIZ in Sarasota because he was unexpectedly called back to New York.
It’s of course too early to say but this could well signal a return to Arad’s original concept in which there were no buildings on the obvious block for the Memorial.
The proposed International Freedom Center which was to dominate the memorial block has been greeting by nearly universal condemnation because of its fuzzy mission which does not focus on 911 and because it comes within a tree of two walls of the memorial.
The Times gave a scathing review to the whole memorial plan on June 19 noting that LMDC has tinkered with the plan so much that it has ruined it.
The original design, by the young and inexperienced architect Michael Arad, was notable for its simplicity: a vast, barren plaza pierced by two gigantic voids, whose reflecting pools were meant to evoke the absent twin towers. But, working under the apparent assumption that more is better, the development corporation brought in the architecture firm Davis Brody Bond and the landscape architect Peter Walker to contribute to the design, a decision that led to more than a few catfights.
Bit by bit, the scheme gradually ballooned to include an underground memorial center occupying more than 100,000 square feet, a memorial hall, a family room and a room for remains of the dead.
Some of this bloat is understandable, if utterly misguided. The designers have essentially been asked to create both a memorial and a grave site - a public monument and a location for private mourning. To that end, the architects have created a private room for the victims’ families next to a public “contemplation room.” They are also now acceding to requests for a private entrance to the memorial so families can avoid the hordes of tourists.
But however considerate the planners’ intentions, the memorial is increasingly swaddled in banal sentimentality.
We have always reported that LMDC has never at any point in the process trusted its own plan and design yet has continued to work to the original mistake rather than getting it right to begin with. The Daniel Libeskind master plan is now virtually gone. His plan called for the memorial to be buried 30 feet under buildings. It staged its memorial contest — billed as the biggest architecture contest in history — to that specification.
Michael Arad’s design threw out the master plan and took up the entire block. LMDC forced him to place the buildings back in.
We never liked Arad’s decision to totally eliminate any historical context. We think the site would be best served as the battlefield it was. Everything would flow smoother had LMDC adopted that philosophy from the start.
None the less, if LMDC had selected the Arad design they should have shown faith in it. But they have teamed several architects to assist.
The Times which initially had been enthusiastic about the Arad design is now cool to the original design.
The problems begin above ground. In Mr. Arad’s original design, the plaza was a barren, windswept space out of an Antonioni film - a cliché of modern alienation. (Think Monica Vitti running alone across an empty piazza in skirt and high heels.)
But The Times notes the problems could have been fixed if LMDC had not interfered so much.
At the outset, Mr. Arad had something similar in mind. In his original design, a pair of ramps set at the edges of the voids led down into the galleries, where visitors would loop around the reflecting pools before climbing back up to earth. Although the plan lacked the remarkable clarity of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, it held promise. And in a more decent world, Mr. Arad would have been encouraged to explore his concept more deeply and sensitively.
Instead, the incessant fiddling - most of it by the development corporation and its hired hands at Davis Brody - drained the design of any vitality it might have had. The trip below ground is now painfully direct: visitors will descend via a single 400-foot-long ramp set between the two voids. And the once-discreet central hallway through which visitors would have filed has swollen to the point where it risks dominating the entire underground experience. From here, a second ramp leads back up to ground level.
These new ramps, which both double back because of their length, are likely to feel claustrophobic. Worse, their central placement will allow visitors to file in and out quickly and avoid the stroll around the memorial pools altogether, undermining Mr. Arad’s original intent. To me, the approach brings to mind the drive-through funeral parlors that became briefly popular in the Midwest a decade or so ago, in which mourners could pay their respects through a video screen from the sealed wombs of their cars. Both cater to a culture of distraction, which prefers its emotional experiences carefully sanitized.
The Times has other issues but concludes:
It may be silly to expect such clarity in a memorial to Sept. 11, still such a raw memory. The Holocaust memorial was commissioned a half-century after the end of World War II; the Vietnam Memorial was dedicated almost a decade after American troops returned home.
But unless the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation strips away some of the visual patter at ground zero, it will be impossible to engage anyone there, dead or living. What the memorial requires is an eloquent silence - a silence that would offer collective solace rather a field of distractions
http://911memorials.org/archives/2005/06/19/return-to-original-arad-design-and-demise-of-the-freedom-center-at-ground-zero/
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