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June 30, 2005Freedom Tower: “Littered with trees”UPDATE: In fairness to the NY Times, their editorial - which is favorable toward the new building design - is much more even-handed and less antagonistic than Ouroussoff’s piece, and it can be read here. *** I can name a number of sniffing leftists who could have written Nicolai Ouroussoff ’s absurd critique of the newly designed Freedom Tower, but only the New York Times (presenting its talking points memo to the rest of the world via the International Herald Tribune) could have published it. Sounding like he’s wandering through a class-C art gallery in Queens while holding a glass of the wrong white as far away from his wrinkled nose and pursed lips as he possibly can, Ouroussoff’s disdain for the structure is wrapped up in his politics and his pretensions. “…the project is a monument to a society that has turned its back on any notion of cultural openness.” Let me just say that most New Yorkers, outside of Ouroussoff’s elitist little enclave would, at precisely this point in his article, curl a lip and say “blow it out your ear, buddy.” They know, as I know, that Ouroussoff’s idea of “cultural openness” begins with the notion that anything American or Western is kitsch and ends with the idea that the nation simply cannot apologize enough to the world for being what it is: the only place Ouroussoff and his friends would ever really want to live, despite their huffing and shudders. If my good grandmother were alive today she’d say this: “cultural openness, my ass, when was the last time you crossed paths with someone who made $35,000 a year and wasn’t there to fix or install something for your comfort?” Sigh. I miss Granny. For better or worse, it will be seen by the world as a chilling expression of how the United States is reshaping its identity in a post Sept. 11 context. Actually…for better or worse, only this man and his friends would find this building a “chilling expression of how the US is reshaping, etc”…MOST people will find it a chilling expression of how terrorism, allowed to flourish for several decades throughout the world, has stolen from us our right to a little wonder and a bit of awe as it demands the supersafe structure. Chelsea Clinton was not the only one to lose the last of her innocences on 9/11. The rest of us can’t look at a skyscraper or the contrail of a soaring airplane with the same sense of glee and enjoyment as we did a decade ago. In a world where people living on an autopilot of hate do not care who they kill or what they destroy, a skyscraper is less a marvel than a target, and a contrail is just a line in the sky. In its earlier incarnation, for example, the tower’s eastern wall formed a narrow pedestrian alley that became a key entry to the memorial site, leading directly between the proposed Freedom Center complex and the Memorial’s north pool. The alleyway, which was flanked on its other side by the Frank Gehry-designed performing arts center, was fraught with tension; it is now a formless park littered with trees. I have no idea if Ouroussoff is gay or not, and it is completely irrelevent to me if he is. Gay or straight, this man is SUCH a drama queen. I don’t know how he can breathe with all this clutching and gasping. Okay, if you were waiting for it (I know I was) here it is: THE OBLIGATORY NAZI IMPLICATION: But if this is a potentially fascinating work of architecture, it is, sadly, fascinating in the way that Albert Speer’s architectural nightmares were fascinating - as expressions of the values of a particular time and era. The Freedom Tower embodies, in its way, a world shaped by fear. The Freedom Tower does not “embody…a world shaped by fear.” It embodies a world shaped by unfettered terrorism and responds to the fact that within that world are entirely too many people who weep for the terrorists and wring their hands over how daintily they are handled. Frankly, Mr. Ouroussoff, the Tower embodies the precautions necessary in the world today because of people like you. And now, the obligatory reference to “empire.” What the tower evokes, by comparison, are ancient obelisks, blown up to a preposterous scale and clad in heavy sheaths of reinforced glass - an ideal symbol for an empire enthralled with its own power, and unaware that it is fading. Does Ouroussoff know what “empire” means? If he is suggesting that the US is or longs to be an Empire, he is simply a fool. If he believes that America is “fading,” he is more than a fool, he is so completely insulated from reality that one must pity him. America is fading in comparison to whom, Mr. Ouroussoff? Compared to France, which is being Islamicized at an alarming pace? Compared to Germany, which is economically stagnant? Compared to Italy which is setting up Muslim encampments outside of Rome and Florence as we speak? Compared to Russia which is dying? I suppose if you spend your life shuttling between Soho and the Hamptons, thence to Martha’s Vineyard, thence to the great European cities, and never converse with anyone who thinks differently from you, you could convince yourself of anything, though. Absurdly, if the Freedom Tower were reduced by a dozen or so stories and renamed, it would probably no longer be considered such a prime target. Finally, something about which we can agree. Change the name of the thing. It announces to terrorists: Don’t attack here - we’re ready for you. Go next door. Or, you silly man, it says to terrorists, “STOP flying planes into buildings! Give it up, already and do something constructive.” I might say the same to Mr. Ouroussoff and the rest of the endlessly hectoring, carping and complaining folks at the NY Times. On a slightly different issue, but in the same vein, James Lileks has some thoughts on the art world and Ground Zero. Quick! Someone draw a falling body in a tank of urine. Quick! Commission a large mural showing a chimp-footed George W. Bush having relations with a hook-nose forelocked camel who’s eating a Palestinian baby. Get one of those artists who do “installations” to feed Jell-O into a fan to simulate the rain of body parts. Float a Macy’s Parade-sized balloon of Michael Moore in the plaza. Anything. Please, just don’t make it another solemn monument to a grave day. Since many believe the government planned Sept. 11, perhaps the museum could blow itself up twice daily like Old Faithful. You’ll want to read it all. His last paragraphs are very sobering. UPDATE: Ann Althouse, typically thoughtful and insightful, feels I am very hard, perhaps too hard, on Nicolai Ouroussoff and the New York Times, and on re-reading it, I think she may be right. (I WAS cranky after being awoken with ear pain when I wrote it, but still, no excuses, this post was a bit too much.) She makes some very good points that I didn’t really want to be generous about - that yes, we do need people to keep up the fight for esthetic values, and that the changes to the tower did warrant comment. I’ll more than grant Ms. Althouse that. I think I am simply so fed up with the tone of snorting disdain coming from the direction of the NY Times, at this point, that I simply have lost any impulse to generosity. If I was hard, well, I think Mr. Ouroussoff was, too. Althouse concedes that some parts of his piece are grating. I’m tired of being grated. Art in architecture is lovely - the twin towers were, in my opinion, ugly and never approached the loveliness of the Chrysler Building or even the Empire State Building - but by the same token, this new tower is being built in a new age, and - like it or not - architecture and art must be pinned down to realities when human lives are at risk. Anyway, I have edited the text to be a little less combative than it was at 4AM. That said - upon reflection, I think I am politics-ed out for the day. For the week, maybe. http://theanchoressonline.com/2005/06/30/freedom-twr-littered-with-trees/trackback/ 26 Responses to “Freedom Tower: “Littered with trees”” |
June 30th, 2005 at 6:13 am
Beautiful, Anchoress, just beautiful. I dare the NY Slimes to print your rebuttal!
June 30th, 2005 at 8:07 am
Fortunately, leftist critics like Ouroussoff have no influence in the world of real people. I think that even most academics and NYT readers don’t believe any of this crap–they’re just acting in a mental play within a play, filling the role of enlightened intellectual as written for them by the usual sterile suspects.
Great review. I’m sorry you toned it down–the article is beneath contempt and needs to be exposed as such.
June 30th, 2005 at 8:49 am
On the whole, I think you were spot on and not in any way too hard on Ouroussoff. Like many others he completely misses the primary nature of the building itself…it is an OFFICE BUILDING. Which is why I believe that many people (including just about every New Yorker I know) detested the previous design….yes, there should be a monument. THAT is where the focus should be with regards to letting design ideas flourish. To the actual ‘tower’ (build them back! Both of them, I say!), that is where form must work hand in hand with function. Ouroussoff seems to be just too wrapped up in the symbolism of a building to understand that the true symbolism will be when ‘ground zero’ is no longer known by that name, but once again as the World Trade Center, and people once again set foot on that ground for the purpose of working, and living, instead of mourning…..
June 30th, 2005 at 9:39 am
I thought you were absolutely correct. I think that the trend in media is to criticize anyone who is hard on the poor senstitive dears who make a living comparing the US to the Nazis and the Roman Empire.
June 30th, 2005 at 10:37 am
Pretty good summation of the article. If anything, you weren’t hard enough on the last paragraph of the article.
Also, if the author bothered to check out a few other icons of the New York skyline, he’d have noted that both the Empire State Building and Chrysler buildings are obelisks!
June 30th, 2005 at 11:22 am
Too Much Whine
The Anchoress says this guy can’t be mocked enough. I’m inclined to agree….
June 30th, 2005 at 11:33 am
I thought that all the mockery was fine except for the part where you called him a “drama queen” — his description at that point just didn’t seem so dramatic, though they were evocative of two arrangement’s aesthetic effects. The real question remain, can the old and new arrangements be fairly said to have those effects on a reasonably developed architectural sensibility? I remember decades ago, the NYT’s Janet Maslin writing movie reviews that sounded so intelligent and well reasoned. I saw a movie that she had reviewed, and it turned out that she got some basic mundane but crucial facts about the movie wrong. She had written an intelligent and well reasoned review of a non-existent movie. I wondered whether she even saw it — or just filled in the blanks of a personally devised form.
June 30th, 2005 at 11:35 am
I don’t live in New York so I don’t have much of an opinion about the new tower. A friend of mine told me about your website so I thoughtr I would check it out. I was a little surprisrd by your New York Times bashing. I usually get some of my news there and have found it to have more balance then say, the Wahington Times. At least the NYT offer’s opposing views to their own.
June 30th, 2005 at 11:47 am
Lyle, are you talking about the same NYT that happens to omit basic facts about the real estate market in New York because it has its own real estate holdings? The same Times that continues to oppose development downtown because it might be better than the headquarters that it built in Midtown (via an eminent domain proceeding eerily similar to that which was argued in the Kelo decision)?
Or the fact that it doesn’t consider the genocides in Africa (Sudan, Zimbabwe) to be newsworthy and it took an op-ed writer to publish photos from the Sudan genocide, not one of its crack reports!
The Times is bashed early, and often, because it deserves the bashing.
June 30th, 2005 at 12:09 pm
Is #8 drunk?
“I was a little surprisrd by your New York Times bashing. I usually get some of my news there….”
That is funny!!!!
June 30th, 2005 at 12:09 pm
I don’t think you were too hard at all. Mr. O, sounds like a jackass… not unlike many jackasses in the field of the design and their groupie-like critics and wards. Their fascination with design charlattans like Liebskind, Gehry, and Koolhaus is to be expected, but no more valid as the pop effection for Micahel Jackson.
Gehry is an Architectural pervert, stroking his own ego more than he adds to the continuum of place. Not surprising that Mr. O mentions his work in praise. Liebskind is a fascinating visionary who preens before old-world consensus with expressions of shock similar to a privileged teen sporting lip rings, tatoos, and a mohawk.
Speer is a tragedy of Architectural history. Given a different time and nation, he would have been considered one of the Masters of Architecture. He’s allegiance with evil may diminish his legacy, but it does not discount his talent for profound expressions of cultural honesty. The folks at S.O.M. extend from similar traditions, and can be trusted to maintain the quality for which they have come to be respected in the design community… not as popstars, but as the artisans of the artifacts that convey the meaning and virtue of a culture through time.
June 30th, 2005 at 12:53 pm
I wonder if he would call Central Park a “formless park littered with trees”?
June 30th, 2005 at 12:55 pm
I don’t know, call me a spoil sport, but this whole exercise is a little like cutting off your nose to spite your face. We should not let our zeal to crush the enemy blind us to the facts that:
(1) the proposed structure is incredibly UGLY and lacking in any aesthetic value,
(2) the structure may as well have a big target symbol painted on the side, because it will encourage the enemy to hit it again, and, like those that continue to build coastal homes in high-risk natural disaster areas, the rest of the country should not have to incur the burden of these avoidable financial losses,
(3) the original towers, and all sky-towers for that matter, were and are bad ideas because, at some point in time, the buildings will have to come down, whether by enemy attack or the natural age of the structure, and there is absolutely no way to do so safely, and
(4) it is rather unseemly to be erecting office buildings on the graves of 3,000 people. You know, here in Arlington, Virginia, we have some prime real estate on the river between Rosslyn and the Pentagon. Erecting this “Freedom Tower” seems to me to be a bit like erecting office buildings on the hallowed ground of Arlington Cemetery.
There are more important things than business and commerce! The ground should remain essentially empty, with nothing more than appropriate landscaping and a true memorial to the lives and deaths of so many. At most, if they are going to erect a functioning building there, it should be a museum dedicated to the war on terror.
June 30th, 2005 at 1:07 pm
Maybe Cemetery Ridge, Little Round Top, Bloody Lane, the Cornfield, or Marye’s Heights are more appropriate analogies than General Lee’s former estate at Arlington, but you get the point.
June 30th, 2005 at 1:12 pm
I have long held the contention the WTC site should remain a festering sore until we can actually agree on what freedom means to us and of the true nature of 9/11. Building something there now would ultimately be a pessimistic gesture, and would be seen by further generations as a piece of crap.
We are at the very beginning of a long and difficult fight; we should concentrate our energy on winning that fight instead of contemplating the meaning of our first defeat. Building any sort of memorial now would be like *starting* the Washington Monument in 1863 or building the USS Arizona Memorial in 1943.
We need to agree upon who we are before we can build any memorials to who we are. The phoenix needs to be re-born before it can fly.
June 30th, 2005 at 2:22 pm
“For better or worse, it will be seen by the world as a chilling expression of how the United States is reshaping its identity in a post Sept. 11 context.”
I say it’s about time. The one thing that I found in the years leading up to Sept 11, 2001, was a disdain from the rest of the world, and an idea that the US was an idiot clown holding money bags to pass out to the rest of the world. We have the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world. We have the best and most modern military in the world, but until GW Bush, we didn’t have the will to use them. The biggest sixgun in the world is no deterrent if your enemy doesn’t believe you will pull the trigger. GW Bush pulled the trigger and dropped the hammer on Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
For better, the US is reshaping it’s identity back to the world superpower who won World War II. And what we’re telling the world is: “If you are our friend, you can’t have a better friend. If you are our enemy, you can’t have a worse enemy”.
June 30th, 2005 at 2:25 pm
You destroy it and we build it back–better, taller, stronger! Everytime!
Or, let the Left continue to run the show, after the takeover that no one approved—I suggest a two-mile deep “Hole of Despair”, ringed with a three-foot high stainless steel railing. Maybe wailing sounds coming from the depths….
Your choice!
June 30th, 2005 at 3:19 pm
Lyle, are you talking about the same NYT that happens to omit basic facts about the real estate market in New York because it has its own real estate holdings? The same Times that continues to oppose development downtown because it might be better than the headquarters that it built in Midtown (via an eminent domain proceeding eerily similar to that which was argued in the Kelo decision)?
Or the fact that it doesn’t consider the genocides in Africa (Sudan, Zimbabwe) to be newsworthy and it took an op-ed writer to publish photos from the Sudan genocide, not one of its crack reports!
_____________________
No. I’m talkling about the Times as one of many sources that I get information from. The one place I don’t go to is television. A conservative friend told me about this blog so I checked it out. I guess I’m always taken back by people who talk about the so called “main stream media” liberal bias, when I see the same thing in the conservative media which is evey bit as powerful. People like to point out how the main stream media doesn’t cover the good news in Iraq. I thought that is what conservatives had FOX news for, to tell them the truth as to what is going on.
____________
The Times is bashed early, and often, because it deserves the bashing.
______
No more than all the rest of them.
Lyle
June 30th, 2005 at 4:29 pm
Freedom Tower
Not surprisingly, the New York Times architecture critic and Reason’s Hit and Run differ on their opinions regarding the new Freedom Tower to be constructed on the WTC site. Here’s the Times’ Nicolai Ouroussoff: The darkness at ground zero just
June 30th, 2005 at 4:55 pm
How does a building show “cultural openness”? Typical artsy fartsy doublespeak.
Mr. O and Ms. Dargis, co-wingnut and NYT film critic, worked for the LAT once upon a time. Glad to see they have been kicked upstairs.
June 30th, 2005 at 8:55 pm
Self-indulgent cultural snobbery? No,
The venerable Western tradition of accusing Western civilization for the world’s ills has a long history, going back to the Greeks…
June 30th, 2005 at 11:25 pm
I want the Twin Towers back!
Stronger built, with missiles at the top.
The “Freedom Tower” is a poor substitute.
July 1st, 2005 at 12:22 am
20 Stories of Fear at Ground Zero
http://911memorials.org/?p=237
July 1st, 2005 at 1:42 pm
I am not a fan of the new design nor of the critique by Ourosoff. A single building, even one as significant as this (or whatever ends up being built) chould not, I think be made to stand for a whole society. It is a functional structure and sculptural form and can be assessed as such, but much of the rest of criticism seems to be projection on the part of the authors which I take to be, in part, Anchoress’ point.
That said, what prompts me to write is, really, is the cheap shot about Chelsea Clinton necessary, especially equating it with the impact attacks on the WTC and Pentagon? It strikes me as the flip side of that for which Anchoress is upbraiding Orousoff and the NYT.
July 1st, 2005 at 2:34 pm
When you give the interviews you make yourself fair game…Spot on reference!
July 1st, 2005 at 3:43 pm
It wasn’t a cheap shot at Chelsea at all - I was merely quoting her. She said (writing in - either Vanity Fair orTalk magazine, I can’t remember) that on 9/11 she didn’t realize how many more innocences she still had to lose. I was struck by the line because I thought it was right.
You will have to explain to me how that is a “cheap shot” at Chelsea (about whom you will find no cheap shots on my blog - I am grown up enough to know that simply because I do not like her mother much doesn’t give me license to take cheap shots and I wonder if you routinely go to left sites and chide them for the TRUE cheap shots they take at the Bush twins).
All I did was tag on to a thought she had and acknowledge that yes, we as a country found we had more innocences to lose.
Why don’t you ask if it WAS a cheap shot, or for a fuller explanation, if you do not understand, rather than making an accusation?