Architects Named for Ground Zero Cultural Buildings

[BigMac]

New York Times
October 12, 2004

Architects Named for Ground Zero Cultural Building

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


Architect Frank Gehry has been chosen to design the performing arts center at the World Trade Center site.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Renowned architect Frank Gehry will design the performing arts center at the World Trade Center site and the Norwegian firm Snohetta will design the museum complex, redevelopment officials announced Tuesday.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. announced the selection of the architects and said schematic designs for the cultural buildings would be completed in early 2005.

"These dynamic architects will design fitting homes for the world class cultural institutions which will be located at the World Trade Center site," Gov. George Pataki said in a statement.

The development corporation earlier this year announced the selection of the Joyce International Dance Center, the Signature Theatre, the Freedom Center and the Drawing Center to take up residence at ground zero after more than 100 arts groups applied for space there.

"Selecting the architect was a privilege and a tremendous responsibility," said Linda Shelton, executive director of The Joyce Theater Foundation Inc. "We are thrilled to be working with Frank Gehry, one of the most renowned architects in the world."

Catherine de Zegher, director of the Drawing Center, and George Negroponte, the center's president, said, "The Drawing Center is thrilled by the selection of Snohetta as the architect for the museum complex at the World Trade Center site. ... The stunningly beautiful architecture of this young Norwegian firm will have a natural fluency with the memorial and the surrounding buildings."

Gehry is best known for designing the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

Snohetta is an Oslo-based architecture, landscape architecture, and interior design company. It is known for its completion of the Alexandria Library in Egypt, the Norwegian Embassy in Berlin, and the soon-to-be-completed New National Opera in Oslo.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

[Izeklah]

That means we now have a total of ELEVEN architects working on the new WTC!

How many architects worked on the original WTC? Two.

Guess which WTC design is better.

Silverstein is simply hiring a bunch of architects with flashy names to make his reincarnated BBB design look better... Back when Silverstein proposed 50-story buildings, he made a comment that the low height could be hidden behind the smoke and mirrors of "world-class architects." That's exactly what's happening now.

I don't like Caesar Pelli's architecture, but he was right on the money when he said that "too many hands were stirring the pot" of the new WTC.

[New Jack City]

Oh my.

Gehry's style is so twisted (no pun intended), I wonder how all this architecture will co-exist. On one hand you could be like, wow, we got Calatrava on one side, Gehry on the other, Libeskind, Childs, Foster, Maki Nouvel, but on the other it's like, how will all these contrasting visions come together to form a unified complex?

Can it? I'm not too sure, but I'm leaning towards I don't think so.

[7 World Trade]

11 architects=really high chance of clash between architecture and site planning...

the problem, like what Jack suggested, is that the future wtc is in the danger of being a totally chaotic design. you got constructionists vs. deconstructionists, radical vs. stoic, optimistic vs. pessimistic, creative vs. banal, old vs. new, etc. i hope at the end the complex won't end up as one huge confusing mass of mumbo jumbo.

but what the heck, the rebuilding process is already screwed up beyond repair. the only way to get a wtc that the general population want is to start over with the plan of rebuilding of the twin towers as the top priority, and then work from there...

seriously, only architects that really appreciate the beauty and importance of the twins should have the say in the rebuilding designs. any other architects, no matter how good, would only wind up screwing up the rebuilding process in favor of city government and corporate interests.

[BigMac]

New York Times
October 13, 2004

Gehry Is Selected as Architect of Ground Zero Theater Center

By ROBIN POGREBIN


Frank Gehry had long hesitated to accept a project at the World Trade Center site.

Frank Gehry, admired for his voluptuous buildings of undulating titanium and steel, is to be the architect of a new performing arts center at ground zero, his first major cultural project in Manhattan, the development corporation in charge of rebuilding the site said yesterday.

The selection of Mr. Gehry for the arts center - which is to include the Joyce Theater and the Signature Theater - brings to Lower Manhattan a celebrity architect who has been notably absent from perhaps the most closely watched architectural site in the world.

"I have stayed away from ground zero," he said yesterday by telephone from Los Angeles. "It just felt like, 'I'm not in New York, it's so emotional.' "

A little-known Norwegian firm, Snohetta, whose most prominent building is a new library in Alexandria, Egypt, was chosen for the other major cultural building at the World Trade Center site. That structure is to house the International Freedom Center, which will focus on human rights, and the Drawing Center, which will exhibit historical and contemporary drawings.

Mr. Gehry said that designing a building for dance and theater was what attracted him to the project, and that he had no interest in designing any of the commercial space at the site. Nor did he enter the competition for the memorial to those who died when the World Trade Center was destroyed.

Still, Mr. Gehry said, he has always had grand ideas for ground zero. "I thought they should build a five- to six-acre covered space with gardens," he said. "It could be used by the Philharmonic, by theater - a cultural park that had the ability to be quiet and contemplative and to be used for public events."

While the performing arts center is considerably more modest - 250,000 to 300,000 square feet - Mr. Gehry said he was excited about its potential. "It's a complicated project because it is a small footprint that is vertical," he said. "You will have to put theater on top of theater."

Mr. Gehry and Snohetta - a relatively young firm named for a Norwegian mountain peak - are to submit their schematic designs in February, including a conceptual site plan, preliminary building plans, sections and elevations.

Each of the cultural buildings was originally expected to cost $200 million to $300 million, but those involved said a more specific price tag for the projects had yet to be fixed. Also unclear is who will be responsible for the fund-raising.

Tom A. Bernstein, who created the idea of the Freedom Center, said he expected to raise most of it. "The lion's share of the fund-raising will be on us," he said.

Mr. Gehry said that he had been asked by the development corporation to make appearances to help the fund-raising, and that he had agreed, as did Snohetta.

At the performing arts center, the Joyce International Center for Dance will be a 900- to 1,000-seat theater, distinct from the Joyce's current sites in Chelsea and SoHo. The Signature Theater Center, which on West 42nd Street has devoted each season to a single playwright, plans a three-theater complex. The arts institutions themselves selected the architects, together with the development corporation, the Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts and other consultants.

Mr. Gehry said he was well aware that the trade center site has been fertile ground for conflicts among developers and architects. But he said he believed he could work with the others who are already in the mix.

"I'm excited about Santiago's building," he said of Santiago Calatrava's transportation hub, and added, "Michael Arad and Peter Walker's memorial, I'm pretty comfortable with that."

As for David M. Childs, the architect whose Freedom Tower practically abuts the performing arts center, Mr. Gehry said, "David and I are reasonably good friends."

For now, the rebuilding plan calls for the loading docks for Mr. Childs's Freedom Tower to be situated in the performing arts building. Asked whether he felt comfortable with that, Mr. Gehry said he had not been aware of it. "I don't know what I've got myself into yet," he said.

Linda Shelton, the executive director of the Joyce, said that Mr. Gehry's self-confidence was part of what gave her confidence in him. "It's a tough place to work in because of all the buildings that are around it," she said. "And I just felt that he could hold his own."

Mr. Gehry was raised in Canada, but he said his father was born in Hell's Kitchen in New York. Looking out over ground zero recently from the development corporation's offices, Mr. Gehry said the emotional impact of the site overwhelmed him. "The fact that I couldn't contain tears the other day means this is much more loaded for all of us than we really understood," he said.

The other cultural building is to be 250,000 to 275,000 square feet. Aside from the new Egyptian library, Biblioteca Alexandrina, Snohetta has designed the Norwegian Embassy in Berlin, the almost completed National Opera in Oslo and the Turner Contemporary Museum in Margate, England. This will be the firm's first project in the United States.

"To have some of the spirit of Norway come to ground zero is a big deal," Mr. Bernstein said. "It sets the tone for what we want to develop."

Craig Dykers, a partner at Snohetta, said the project would be a challenge in that it is the only building to be situated directly on the memorial itself. "It should be a building that is open and clear and has a relationship to the memorial that is respectful, but is also lively," he said.

Mr. Gehry said that he had not submitted a proposal for the Freedom Center, but that he would have had it been an art museum. "That wasn't interesting to me," he said.

His other cultural projects include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.; and the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, an outdoor music stage in Millennium Park in Chicago.

He is to design the proposed Nets basketball arena in Brooklyn, and, with Hugh Hardy, a theater next to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Mr. Gehry also designed a New York headquarters, currently under construction, for the Internet- and television-shopping magnate Barry Diller in Chelsea, and he said he was doing studies for a luxury high-rise across from Pace University.

The ground zero project would seem to be a major accomplishment for Mr. Gehry, but he said, "I don't covet jobs; I don't go after things."

Mr. Gehry was to have designed a $950 million downtown branch of the Guggenheim Museum on the East River, a project abandoned because of finances. He designed a possible glass enclosure for Lincoln Center's fountain plaza, which was ultimately rejected by the Metropolitan Opera and Beverly Sills, then Lincoln Center's chairwoman.

Mr. Gehry's firm and Snohetta were among 68 architectural firms that submitted their proposals in August. They were chosen from a short list that included Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Polshek Partnership Architects and Rafael Viñoly Architects.

Mr. Gehry said that he met with the performing arts companies and members of the selection panel on Sept. 27, that they in turn visited Disney Hall and his offices on Oct. 1, and that he flew to New York City on Sunday to meet with John C. Whitehead, the chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

Mr. Gehry said he had not yet come up with any concrete structural ideas. "I don't like doing those sketches," he said, adding, "they're so trivial because you haven't had the chance to work with the client."

Mr. Dykers of Snohetta had slightly more of a conception of what his building - on the northeast corner of Fulton and Greenwich Streets - should look like: "Simple, very unassuming and perhaps unimposing. But we would also like it to be memorable and to provide an identity for that corner.

"It should be a building that doesn't distract from the memorial," he said. "A building that is almost invisible."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[New Jack City]

I was browsing Libeskind's website and saw this rendering which says it's of the performing arts center, I guess this is Libeskind's proposal that wasn't selected...

[7 World Trade]

thank God it's not selected. we've seen enough rubble architecture from libeskind already. besides, there's no point bringing back "rubble" to the wtc site after we already cleared them off by mid 2002.

[Vlad the Great]

I'm not hot for a "cultural center" at the WTC. Nor am I a fan for a bunch of trees there but the idea to preserve the footprints is alright.

I think that if there's going to be a theatre or something on the site, they should fit it into one of the other towers, not create a separate building for it. Then again that's only my two cents.

"It should be a building that doesn't distract from the memorial," he said. "A building that is almost invisible."- That's exactly how I feel about it. And putting it in a tower would literally do that.

[Ellatur]

what are they gonna put in that cultural center?

[LeCom]

Originally Posted by savethewtc

I was browsing Libeskind's website and saw this rendering which says it's of the performing arts center, I guess this is Libeskind's proposal that wasn't selected...

Thank God it was not selected! Libeskind's stuff freaks me out. It always looks like broken shards not removed during the cleanup.