Up from Zero (eBook)

Paul Goldberger (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2004 | 1. Auflage
288 Seiten
Random House Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-1-58836-422-7 (ISBN)

Infos

In Up from Zero, Paul Goldberger, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the inside story of the quest to rebuild one of the most important symbolic sites in the world, the sixteen acres where the towers of the former World Trade Center stood. A story of power, politics, architecture, community, and culture, Up from Zero takes us inside the controversial struggle to create and build one of the most challenging urban-design projects in history.

What should replace the fallen towers? Who had the courage and vision to rise to the task of rebuilding? Who had the right, finally, to decide? The struggle began soon after September 11, 2001, as titanic egos took sides, made demands, and jockeyed for power. Lawyers, developers, grieving families, local residents, politicians, artists, and architects all had fierce needs, radically different ideas, strong emotions, and boundless determination. How could conflicting interests be resolved? After hundreds of hours of often rancorous meetings, the first sets of plans were finally revealed in the summer of 2002--and the results were staggeringly disappointing.

Yet, as Goldberger shows, the rebuilding process recovered and began to flourish. Rather than degenerating into turf wars, it evolved in ways that no one could have predicted. From the decision to reintegrate the site into the dense fabric of lower Manhattan, to the choice of Daniel Libeskind as master planner, to the appointment of a memorial jury, the process has been marked by moments of bold vision, effective community activism, and personal instinct, punctuating the often contentious politics of public participation.
Up from Zero takes in the full sweep of this tremendous effort. Goldberger presents a drama of creative minds at work, solving seemingly insurmountable clashes of taste, interests, and ideas. With unique access to the players and the process, and with a sophisticated understanding of architecture and its impact on people and on the social and cultural life of a city, Paul Goldberger here chronicles the courage, the sacrifices, and the burning passions at the heart of one of the greatest efforts of urban revitalization in modern times.

Textauszug

Architecture Takes the Stage The Winter Garden is a 200-foot-long, 125-foot-high glass-enclosed room in the middle of the World Financial Center, a cluster of high-rise office buildings and shops in Lower Manhattan, across the street from the site where the World Trade Center once stood. It had been severely damaged in the terrorist attack that destroyed the trade center on September 11, 2001, and when it was restored the following year its reopening was taken as a welcome symbol of the renewal of the area. The Winter Garden is one of the few large, indoor public rooms that Lower Manhattan has. It is not a typical public space for New York. It has a dozen palm trees, a grand, formal staircase, and a view to the Hudson River. Most of the time, it functions like an indoor version of a public square, where visitors and shoppers and office workers mill around under the architect Cesar Pelli's spectacular arched glass ceiling or sit reading newspapers and sipping coffee on metal benches. On the morning of Wednesday, December 18, 2002, the Winter Garden was closed to the public. The benches were organized into rows, and a few hundred folding chairs had been added to them in an attempt to make the space function in the manner of an auditorium. A makeshift stage was set up at the west end, and temporary partitions and large video screens were placed in front of the glass wall that normally offers a view toward the river. Platforms for video cameras had been squeezed in and around the palm trees, and there was a lectern, plus lots of microphones and bright television lights. All of the seats were filled, and those that were not occupied by politicians, civic leaders, and architects were taken by journalists from newspapers, magazines, and television stations around the world. At about ten o'clock, a distinguished-looking eighty-year-old man with white hair stepped to the podium. His name was John C. Whitehead, and he had been, at various times in his career, chairman of the investment-banking firm Goldman Sachs, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and deputy secretary of state of the United States. Here, he was speaking in his latest role, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which had been established in the fall of 2001 by the governor of New York, George Pataki, to oversee reconstruction of the trade-center site. The LMDC had gotten off to an uncertain start, and it had been through a particularly bruising period the previous summer, when it had unveiled a set of preliminary studies for the site that were universally panned by the public as dreary and unimaginative. The fiasco had a positive effect, however: it stimulated the LMDC to become more ambitious and to think of the rebuilding less as a commercial venture and more as a symbolic act, as a chance to show vision. By the middle of August, the agency had settled on a plan to revive its reputation. It issued a call to architects from around the world to submit their qualifications to craft a design for the site, in the hope of enticing some of the leading architects of the world. Nine hundred architects responded, from every continent except Antarctica. Many of them joined forces to create special partnerships for this project, so the LMDC actually had 406 teams to evaluate. The LMDC spent several weeks reviewing the submissions with the help of a panel of advisers and winnowed the pack down to seven teams, eliminating not only hundreds of unknowns but several of the most prominent architects in the world, including Robert A. M. Stern, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Santiago Calatrava, Eric Owen Moss, and Bernard Tschumi. At the end of September, a...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.9.2004
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Wirtschaftsrecht
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Architektur
• ISBN-10: 1-58836-422-4 / 1588364224
• ISBN-13: 978-1-58836-422-7 / 9781588364227