Political building blocks
How avant-garde intellectual Daniel Libeskind learned to exist in the real world

Houston Chronicle
 
Daniel Libeskind has been an architect his entire life, but he didn't finish a building until he was 52.

The reason was simple: He was too intellectual. His designs were avant-garde, futuristic and infused with references to history, music and literature. They made no concessions to anyone.

Then something changed. His first building, the emotionally charged Jewish Department of the Berlin Museum, was finished in 1999. From there, he went on to the highest-profile, most political job in architecture: designing for the site of the World Trade Center.

Today, the 59-year-old Libeskind has eight completed architectural projects to his credit, and dozens more in planning and construction in places as disparate as Sri Lanka, Israel and Covington, Ky.

Was the world finally ready for Daniel Libeskind? Or was he finally ready for the world?

Libeskind looks like an American's idea of a European architect. He is small and wears all black all the time, but he's best known for his glasses: square, black frames that scream "intellectual" before his intellect has a chance to speak.

Libeskind has never taken the conventional route to anything, it seems: He was an internationally renowned musician by the time he was a preteen, but as an accordionist he was a prodigy. (His parents, both Holocaust survivors, worried that if they bought him a piano he would be targeted by anti-Semites. It was postwar Poland; their concern was justified.)
 
He met his wife, Nina, at a summer camp for children of Holocaust survivors and married her in 1969. They have three children, and Nina holds complete executive control over Studio Daniel Libeskind. Throughout his 2004 memoir Breaking Ground, Libeskind routinely uses the word "genius" to describe his wife; he also calls her "my love, my inspiration, my confidante, my partner." Nina, by many accounts, is the man behind the curtain to Daniel's Oz. She shares her husband's cropped gray hair and small stature. Together, they look like a topper for a futuristic wedding cake.

Libeskind entered architecture through its intellectual side door. After studying at Cooper Union, he turned down entry-level jobs at two prestigious firms, fearing that he would be allowed only to mimic the work of his superiors.

He worked as a theoretician, holding teaching positions in London, Toronto, Kentucky and Michigan. (He still teaches regularly; he was unavailable to comment for this article because he was teaching in St. Gallen, Switzerland.)

He moved to Milan, Italy, in 1985 and founded Architecture Intermedium, an alternative architecture school, and continued to produce highly conceptual drawings, most of which explored the connection between architecture and music, literature and other creative realms. The series had erudite titles like Micromegas and Chamberworks: Architectural Meditations of the Themes of Heraclitus. "I had been more interested in ideas and abstract concepts than in the utilitarian aspect of the field," he later explained.

COVERING GROUND
• What: Daniel Libeskind speaks on his memoir Breaking Ground as part of the Jewish Book & Arts Fair. The conversation is led by Lars Lerup, dean of Rice University's school of architecture.
• When: 8 tonight

• Where: Jewish Community Center, 5601 S. Braeswood

• Tickets: $12. Go to www.jcchouston.org or call 713-551-7255

 
He won one competition in 1987 for housing in West Berlin, but the project was scrapped by Germany's ever-changing government. In 1989, he was still in Milan when he received a letter from the German government. They had invited him and more than a hundred other architects to enter a competition to build what would become the Jewish Museum Berlin. To Libeskind, the letter felt like "a personal message, a challenge of enormous dimension."

He proposed a massive, zinc-encased zigzag that evokes a broken Star of David. An inaccessible "void" in the middle of the museum represents the empty space millions of deaths left.

Many of the other competing designs were highly buildable but not nearly as complex and visionary as Libeskind's. The design, like all of his work, was highly conceptual, but for the first time it strayed just enough into the realm of the practical to win over the jury. He won the competition.

The project was fraught with emotion for Germany, for the still-split Berlin, and for Libeskind himself, who as a form of residual protest spoke mostly Yiddish the entire 14 years he lived in the country.

Around the time he won, he was about to move his family to Los Angeles, where he'd accepted a position as a senior scholar at the Getty Center. Nina recognized, however, that they would have to stay in Berlin if the building were to ever be completed.

The museum took 10 years to finish and at one point was canceled by the upper house of Germany's parliament. Libeskind was offered what might be called a consolation building in a nearby square, but he persisted.

Years later, as he accepted the German Architecture Prize for the museum, he described the ordeal. "The cultivation of naivet•, the feeling that one should remain a beginner worthy of entering the 'cloud of the unknown,' is what motivated me to continue this work across the vicissitudes of the past 10 years: six governments, five name changes, four Museum directors, three window companies, two sides of a wall, one unification and zero regret."

Cultivated naivet•: It's what took Libeskind so far with the World Trade Center. But it didn't take him far enough.

The initial idea behind the World Trade Center project was grand, of course: Reconstruction in the face of unthinkable tragedy. But a flurry of voices, many still raw with grief, couldn't reach accord on how to begin. Then in late 2003, Libeskind appeared. Small, smiling and clad in familiar artist's black, he spoke grandly of arriving as an immigrant in New York at the age of 13, of his shared grief and his bold vision. In his lapel was an American flag pin.

"Daniel Libeskind emerged with rhetorical flourish, both verbal and architectural," remembers Robery Ivy, editor of Architectural Record. "He managed to persuade, through his passionate, articulate discourse and his drawings, which captured something raw and essential."

His master plan for Ground Zero beat out six other designs in a highly publicized competition sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.

Libeskind envisioned a collection of towers, the grandest of which would feature an asymmetrical spire rising to 1,776 feet, which he said echoed the Statue of Liberty's torch. At its feet were the preserved footprints of the Twin Towers and the exposed "slurry wall," the massive concrete dam that holds back the Hudson River.

He envisioned buildings for both commerce and culture, as well as a memorial and a public park. The finishing touch was a "wedge of light" that the sun would create through the buildings over the public space every year on Sept. 11 between 8:46 a.m., when the first plane hit, and 10:28 a.m., when the second tower fell.

The buildings Libeskind proposed were unmistakably his own. Just as Frank Gehry is known for wavy, bulbous forms, Libeskind is known for angles and edges. Much of his work evokes broken glass, cubes of ice, crystalline forms in silvery tones.

His plan was widely lauded, and his name and image broadcast around the world. He appeared on Larry King Live and Oprah, promoting his design the way Hollywood stars promote movies. Cultivated naivet• or not, he realized that salesmanship is an architect's lifeblood. In his memoir, noting how architects depend on developers for money, he goes so far as to call his profession a form of prostitution.

So it was no surprise that the site's owner, Larry Silverstein, who is paying for the reconstruction, wanted to hire his own architect, David Childs, to build the tower. Enter New York Gov. George Pataki, who insisted Libeskind and Childs work together. Enter New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the nascent LMDC and a host of community organizations. In short, enter bureaucracy.

Childs was known as a rational, more traditional guy who did what the client wanted -- in short, as the polar opposite of Libeskind. In August 2003, Ivy wrote an open letter in Architectural Record to Childs and Libeskind. "We saw the reluctant look in your eyes as you accepted the inevitable and embraced in the photo op. We could tell it in your smiles: A forced marriage is never an easy one."

In Breaking Ground, Libeskind titles a whole chapter "Forced Marriage," and in it he stars as the neglected wife. Libeskind makes his disdain for the Silverstein/Childs team clear. He writes that it "hurts to look up at" Childs' dark, glass Time Warner Center towers on New York's Columbus Circle. Of Silverstein, he says, "To judge from 7 World Trade Center, Silverstein is not a man who cares much about how things look."

Childs' 7 World Trade Center has risen, but otherwise the WTC site remains empty. Representatives at Silverstein's office and Childs' firm, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP say the tower's design, at least, will not be changed anymore. Others, including New Yorker's Goldberger and most recently Bloomberg, have suggested that the site include mostly housing instead. Much has been made of the fact that 7 World Trade Center has no tenants yet, which some argue is a sign of low demand. But Silverstein's company has not yet begun to advertise the building. More time is needed before the project can be declared a failure.

The final version of Freedom Tower, designed almost entirely by Childs, does not look like a Libeskind building. It is too simple. It twists, so that its face is a series of eight tall triangles rather than four rectangles, but from afar it looks like another standard, boxlike tower.

Goldberger calls the envisioned tower "a bunker, not an office building." Ivy calls it "fortresslike."

Only traces of Libeskind's ideas remain. A recent press release from Skidmore, Owings awkwardly explains that "a mast containing an antenna for the MTVA, being designed by a collaboration of architects, artists, lighting designers and engineers, and secured by a system of cables, rises from a circular support ring, similar to the Statue of Liberty's torch, to a height of 1776'." Although it's the height that Libeskind wanted, the antenna looks like any other: centered, not asymmetrical.

The "wedge of light," the exposed footprints and the slurry wall feature are "absolutely retained," according to Nina.

Still, "Libeskind has been marginalized for quite a while," explains Paul Goldberger, the New Yorker's architecture critic, who has written extensively on the subject. "His master plan is such in name, not reality. If everything does go back to start all over again, it will be through no fault of his own, the political forces have been huge and powerful."

At this point, it's looking less and less likely that Libeskind will have a building at the site.

It is easy to villainize both Childs and Silverstein, to see Libeskind as the visionary artist David to their cold, corporate Goliath. But consider that only six weeks after he'd bought a 99-year lease to the World Trade Center in a $3.2 billion deal, Silverstein was left with smoldering, bloody ruins. And Childs is one of the most prolific and successful architects of his time.

Goldberger perhaps got to the conflict's root best when he said, "Do you ask Matisse and Dali to collaborate on painting a picture together? No, because they're such different kinds of artists that they could respect each other's work, perhaps, but not try to combine it."

Studio Daniel Libeskind consists of a sleek, well-lit floor 19 stories above the streets of lower Manhattan. Its hallways are lined with photos of projects past, present and future. It is quiet; there is a good deal of work going on. There are about 50 good-looking young architects there in the New York office with their iPods on, adrift among hundreds of models, sketches and plans.

There is a conference room for the inevitable meetings, but Libeskind does not have an office. When he's there, he moves from table to table and project to project. "There's very little hierarchy," Nina says. "Daniel is involved in every single project with an enormous amount of passion."

On an adjacent wall hangs a large, rectangular mass that looks like a sculpture; it would look at home in any museum alongside, say, a Picasso or a Léger. It turns out it is a building, part of the "City Edge" project Libeskind worked on in Berlin. No building of Childs' would look right on a wall; this perhaps best sums up their different creative approaches.

The office reveals a relentless surge to the future. So much of the publicity surrounding Libeskind has to do with the World Trade Center project, but his office instantly reminds that this is only one project of many. Prominently displayed was the vast, jagged Wohl Center at Bar-Ilan University, Libeskind's first project in Israel, which opened last weekend. Within a year, his extension to the Denver Art Museum, which looks like a massive heap of ice cubes, will open. All over the walls of the studio are photographs of ongoing projects in Seoul, Dublin, Toronto, Hong Kong, Boston and beyond.

One of the most marked changes in recent years -- and one of the reasons Libeskind could now be called "mainstream" -- is that he's doing fewer cultural buildings and more for housing and retail. Asked whether her husband's work has grown mainstream, Nina says, "Daniel decided a year ago that he wanted to become involved in straightforward commercial projects, and that brought him into the mainstream. 'Mainstream' has nothing to do with his actual designs."

This is true; Libeskind's structures, even the most commercial ones, remain aggressively futuristic and avant-garde. Gehry's buildings have been called "functional sculpture"; Libeskind's similarly sprout like wildflowers amid the neat rows surrounding them.

The question for most theoreticians is whether he's "dumbed down" his intellectual prowess to gain popular favor -- basically, whether he's sold out. Goldberger, who once called the modern-day Libeskind "user-friendly," says, "I think it's compromised his position within academic architectural circles."

"There are very few people who have successfully established a reputation in narrow, intellectual circles and successfully leapt into the popular realm," Goldberger says. "The jury is still out on whether Libeskind is able to do it."

"Has Libeskind gone mainstream?" Ivy posits. "If you suggest that any theoretician who realized built work is mainstream, then yes. We are seeing Daniel Libeskind at work all over the world, in shopping malls in Switzerland, at museums in Dallas. How much of his expressive architecture the world is willing to accept is another matter."

The World Trade Center has the potential to trip up Libeskind in the midst of his leap from the obscure to the mainstream; some would say it already has. "The problems at Ground Zero, while not of his making, have been very damaging nonetheless," Goldberger says. But he sees redemption for Libeskind. "I think the opening in Denver will be very significant," he says. "It's a pure Libeskind building done without politics for a client very positive about it, so we'll see. That could do a lot to restore what was lost."

In Breaking Ground, Libeskind writes that his bookshelves "are filled with architectural books of winning competition designs that have never seen the light of day. In fact," he continues, "ninety-nine percent of the winners never make it past the planning stages."

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/ae/art/3437896

REOPEN911 Comes to New York
 
Date: Thurs. November 10th
Time: 7:30 pm (doors open at 7:00)
Location: St. Marks Church, 2nd Avenue & 10th Street
 
Jimmy Walters, founder of Reopen911.org, who has been living in Europe for the past few years will be here in person. He is the philanthropist who has invested millions of his own money in full page newspaper ads exposing the official lies of 9/11 in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and Newsweek. He is the man behind the campaign that has placed 30 second commercials on several cable TV stations showing the collapsing buildings at the World Trade Center and a computer-generated image of the plane that hit the Pentagon. He will give a presentation covering many issues including the following:
 
Media silence surrounding 9/11
The need for legal action by lobbying NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer and NYC District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to act on the formal legal complaints that have been submitted
EPA White House lies about the air quality in the aftermath of the attacks (see http://reopen911.org/dyingforlies.htm)
Mike Bloomberg's role in obstructing a true investigation
His experience of the 9/11 Truth Movement in Europe
His offer of $ 1 Million to anyone who can submit a full detailed mathematical analysis proving that explosives were not used to destroy the WTC Complex and Building 7 (see http://reopen911.org/Contest.htm)
His planning of "The New Pearl Harbor" event coming up in Tampa on Dec. 7th
Jimmy commissioned a Zogby poll last summer that showed 49% of New Yorkers feel the government had foreknowledge and consciously failed to act, and 66 percent want the 9/11 investigation reopened.

He is also the founder and president of the Walden Three Project, which promotes the development of sustainable cities.

Accompanying Jimmy will be Willie Rodriguez, the last person to survive the collapse of the towers. He has an amazing story (see below). Willie will describe hearing explosives prior to the collapse and his fruitless attempts to make this known to the 9/11 Commission, The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), as well as the FBI. He is living proof that our government and corporate media actively suppressed what really happened that day.

On September 11, 2001, and for approximately nineteen years prior thereto, Rodriguez was employed as a maintenance worker at the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York, New York.

On 9/11, Rodriguez single-handedly rescued fifteen (15) persons from the WTC, and as Rodriguez was the only person at the site with the master key to the North Tower stairwells, he bravely led firefighters up the stairwell, unlocking doors as they ascended, thereby aiding in the successful evacuation of unknown hundreds of those who survived. Rodriguez, at great risk to his own life, re-entered the Towers three times after the first, North Tower impact at about 8:46 A.M., and is believed to be the last person to exit the North Tower alive, surviving the building's collapse by diving beneath a fire truck. After receiving medical attention at the WTC site for his injuries, Rodriguez spent the rest of 9/11 aiding as a volunteer in the rescue efforts, and at dawn the following morning, was back at Ground Zero continuing his heroic efforts.

We are very fortunate to have Jimmy and Willie available for this event. We hope you'll attend and ask you to spread the word. We need to keep the momentum building for 9/11 truth in New York!

Sponsored by NY911Truth.org

Proposed Fresh Kills Park Angers 9/11 Families
Victims' Loved Ones Do Not Want Anything Built On Human Remains
 
(CBS) STATEN ISLAND If not for a few tell-tale signs, the vista of fall foliage at Fresh Kills landfill might not be identified for what it once was: the world's largest municipal garbage dump.

City planners, who have begun conducting public tours of Fresh Kills, say its 2,200 acres will become the largest city park built in more than a century.

"This is a done deal," Bill Woods, the city's Director of Waterfront Planning, said Saturday. "The city has put the money in the budget now, $100 million, which is enough to get a major start on the first phase of construction."

But the future of the Fresh Kills park may not be as clear as the current November skies.

The landfill was closed in 2001, but after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, what was left of the World Trade Center was brought to the west mound of the landfill, where it was sifted through for human remains. No remains were found for nearly 1,200 victims, prompting family members to say as long as any material from Ground Zero remains at the west mound, the area is akin to a cemetery.

Diane and Kurt Horning lost their son, Matthew, on 9/11. The Hornings have joined with other victims' families in filing a federal lawsuit aimed at forcing the city to remove the siftings from the World Trade Center to a more appropriate location.

"No matter what kind of parkland they put on top of this west mound, it will always have garbage below it, and that is unacceptable," Diane Horning said.

"It is a garbage dump," Kurt Horning added. "It is against the law in the state of New York to leave human remains in a garbage dump, which is what they have done."

The Hornings say pictures they took of the west mound, where only family members are given access, show the area littered with trash.

"You can see the size of the chunks of metal, blistered, rusted metal that are just sitting around," Kurt Horning said. "This is what the terrain looks like. ... There’s nothing respectful, they are not treating it with respect."

Park planners, however, insist the west mound will be treated appropriately, and have a memorial.

"We’re being very careful and considerate to honor both those families who lost lives and also the rescue efforts by a number of city employees that worked diligently after the event," said Len Garcia Duran, director of the Staten Island office of the Department of City Planning.

Regardless of the city's plans, Diane Horning said the only proper thing to do is to be more respectful of those who lost their lives on 9/11.

"Staten Island has waited a very long time for this dump to be closed," Diane Horning said. "They deserve open space and parkland, and we really hope that they will get it, but they cannot leave our loved ones there."

http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_309194243.html

Memorialist Sy Cohen dies
By KHURRAM SAEED
THE JOURNAL NEWS

Cohen, 74, died Thursday.

"His legacy lies in cemeteries, on plaques and on the monuments all over Rockland County," Cohen's son, Alan, said yesterday.

The funeral will at 2 p.m. tomorrow at Hellman Memorial Chapels at 15 State St. in Spring Valley. He will be buried in the Ramapo Knights of Pythias cemetery on Brick Church Road in Monsey.

Cohen owned Jewish Memorials of Rockland and served thousands of families in Rockland, Westchester, New York City, Long Island and New Jersey.

"At a time of loss, people were just very comfortable with him," said Steven Dranow, president of Hellman Memorial Chapels and a close friend of Cohen's since 1983.

Dranow said Cohen's cultural and religious sensitivity made him a popular choice among local Jews. Cohen knew, for example, that Russians liked to put pictures on their gravestones, and some families who lost loved ones in the Holocaust wanted that remembered on their gravestones.

Jewish Memorials was based in the funeral home, and Dranow and his wife, Jamie, came to look at Cohen as a father figure.

Cohen invited them into his home, took them to temple and had them over for holidays, said Jamie Dranow, who is now running Cohen's business and works as funeral director at Hellman.

"I remember him as a caring individual," she said. "He gave of himself with every family."

Alan Cohen, who lives in Queens, said his father also played a major role in designing or refurbishing memorials that dotted Rockland's landscape.

They include Ramapo's granite memorial to the 20 town residents killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, at the Herb Reisman Sports Complex in Eugene Levy Memorial Park on Route 45; Ramapo's Veterans Memorial Pavilion at Eugene Levy Park; the veterans memorial plaque at Middletown Road and Route 59 in Nanuet; and the World War II memorial and monument in front of the old county courthouse.

"It was an honor for him to do it," Alan Cohen said.

Sy Cohen served in the U.S. Army for two years in the 1950s and received an honorable discharge to take care of his ill father.

He lived in Rockland for more than 40 years and helped found the Pomona Jewish Center, which has since merged with the Montebello Jewish Center.

In addition to his son, Alan, Cohen is survived by his wife of almost 50 years, Sandy, a daughter, Susan Mann, and three grandchildren.

The family is in the process of creating Cohen's headstone. It will include a gibberish phrase that he said to his children each night before they went to bed. It will read, in part, "Hatchcala matchcala poo poo poo, winta dinta I love you."

http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dl...1050308/1019/NEWS03

World Trade Center gets manager: URS
S.F engineering firm to oversee construction
David R. Baker, Chronicle Staff Writer
 
San Francisco engineering company URS Corp. will oversee perhaps the most visible and politically sensitive construction job in the United States -- building the new World Trade Center.

A joint venture between URS and Parsons Brinckerhoff will serve as construction manager on the project, which will include five towers, a transportation hub and a memorial to those who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the original center. The New York Times reported the company's involvement Friday.

URS has taken on massive projects before. It has repaired communications systems in Iraq and airlifted emergency supplies to victims of Hurricane Katrina. It also helped federal officials manage cleanup efforts at ground zero after the first World Trade Center's towers collapsed.

At times, URS has been known as much for its political connections as its engineering expertise. Richard Blum, husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, was both an investor and a board member of the firm.

But in a separate development Friday, Blum announced that he is leaving URS after 30 years on its board. Last week, Blum sold off his remaining stake in the firm -- more than 3 million shares.

Parsons Brinckerhoff also has a long record of major engineering projects, although one has drawn sharp criticism. The company is part of a joint venture with San Francisco's Bechtel Corp. building Boston's Big Dig highway tunnel system, which has started to spring leaks.

Details of the World Trade Center contract's value and duration were not available late Friday.

The scope, however, is significant. After years of public debate about how to rebuild the center, the designs now call for a "Freedom Tower" dominating the site, four other towers nearby and a transit hub linking New York's subway system with commuter trains and ferries.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?.../05/BUGNBFJG581.DTL

Ground Zero Small Business Group Protests Imminent Displacement by MTA

By DAVID LOMBINO - Staff Reporter of the Sun
 
A group of downtown small businesses that managed to survive after September 11, 2001, are now seeking to survive their impending displacement by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Fulton Street Transit Center and the powers of eminent domain.

Members of the Ground Zero Small Business Association, comprising 140 businesses and 700 workers, said yesterday at City Hall that the MTA's offer to recoup the costs of relocation and improvements made to their work spaces does not constitute a fair deal.

http://www.nysun.com/article/22555

More heat than light from Deutsche meeting demonstrators

By David Stanke


The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. recently sponsored an event on Oct. 24 to explain the removal of the infamous and contaminated Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty St. Unfortunately, the meeting became a platform for grandstanding and press baiting. Behind the commotion and smoke screen, no compelling issues surfaced. The information session was destroyed for those who, like me, simply wanted information. Once again, the L.M.D.C. was held hostage by extreme positions, at the cost of the community’s greatest concern as stated in a recent Community Board 1 resolution: real progress at building the World Trade Center.


To the credit of Community Board 1, various environmental groups and experts, and the L.M.D.C., the removal of Deutsche looks like it will be far safer for everyone involved. We are all indebted to the watchdog groups who have forced the L.M.D.C. to address very real environmental concerns. But, after months of intense discussions, it is time to stop fighting and move ahead. The L.M.D.C. has significantly enhanced the original take down procedures (compared to the earlier L.M.D.C. plans of December 2004, May 2005, and June 2005). The Environmental Protection Agency found the Sept. 7 final plans acceptable.


The stated cause for the debate was the format for the October 24 meeting. The issue became free speech rather than environmental safety. The L.M.D.C. proposed taking individual questions to experts directly at small tables. This format allows a resident to get information quickly and discreetly without standing in front of a crowd. C.B. 1 and others preferred a format with an open microphone with all questions answered publicly. This open-mic forum favors experts who want to voice objections in a public forum. It also allows a disruptive individuals to derail the event with or without cause.


The ultimate issue is: “Will the removal of 130 Liberty be safe for surrounding residents, workers, and pedestrians?” I live a half block away from 130 Liberty, and I do not believe that the risks from contamination or construction is substantial. I have not heard a specific and convincing statement to the contrary. To be clear, the contamination in the building can be harmful to humans. I spent three years after 9/11 dealing with decontamination of our similarly affected condo building. In the course of arranging two fully contained, partial deconstruction and decontamination projects with extensive air monitoring, I spoke with numerous environmental cleaning experts as well as with officials with the City Dept. of Environmental Protection. Cleaning procedures are specifically designed to eliminate the release of dust into the environment. Deconstruction only begins after decontamination has been completed.


 There is a strong program to monitor air quality conditions for the construction workers and at monitoring sites around 130 Liberty Street. The outdoor results are available for anyone to inspect at http://www.renewnyc. com/plan_des_dev/130Liberty/air_monitoring.asp. Aside from contamination, the primary dangers are construction related. Construction happens all over the city without requiring special emergency procedures. It is the job of the city Office of Emergency Management to respond to all public emergencies, evacuate people from dangerous areas, and communicate issues to the public. O.E.M. is supposed to respond to terrorist attacks, including bio-chemical attacks and bombings. We don’t need a redundant plan by the L.M.D.C. We need to know that O.E.M. is aware of the situation and ready to respond to any emergency.


If I am wrong on any of these assumptions, I would welcome an expert opinion written to local papers. If I am missing some obvious risk factor, please let us all know — enlighten us in a calm, rational manner.


The L.M.D.C. has made and is committed to continue monthly presentations to C.B. 1. There is no stifling of free speech and no suppression of truth apparent here. What happened on October 24th is the calculated loss of civility meant to damage the L.M.D.C. with very little benefit to anyone.


Rosa Parks demonstrated that great injustices can be exposed with simple, determined statements of position. On Oct. 24, people showed up at the meeting with tape on their mouths and signs in their hands, turning directly to the cameras with cool and practiced precision. I don’t believe that most were from our community. I suspect that the righteousness of their cause is not as dramatic as their actions.


I understand why the L.M.D.C. tried to structure a meeting that could not be hijacked. But there is no way to control a public meeting. They should have structured it with open Q and A after the table sessions, giving anyone with an agenda the chance to air it. The task of the L.M.D.C. is to hear public comment, address real issues, and balance differing objectives. My on-going concern with the L.M.D.C. is not that they fail to listen. Too often, they listen too well and over-commit to rash demands made by minority interests at great cost to the public good. Community Board 1 would better serve our community by actively pushing the L.M.D.C. to move forward on big issues rather than taking principled stands on areas of little importance.

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_130/moreheatthanlight.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/04/nyregion/04rebuild.html

Without Fanfare, Building of New Trade Center Starts

By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Published: November 4, 2005

When are they ever going to start building the new World Trade Center?

Yesterday.

Thirty-nine years after the first concrete was poured into the first trench for the first telephone vault for the first trade center, carpenters built a 168-foot-long wooden trough in a gentle S curve through the south tower footprint at ground zero. From this sinuous sprout, Santiago Calatrava's PATH terminal and transportation hub will emerge.

"Don't laugh; it's a milestone day," said Charles A. Gargano, vice chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the trade center site and is building the $2.21 billion terminal over the next four years.

Until now, milestones at ground zero have tended to be ceremonial.

There was not a hint of ceremony yesterday. Prince Charles and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, were nowhere to be seen in the 70-foot-deep pit. The Freedom Tower cornerstone of July 4, 2004, sat hidden under a blue plywood box.

But anyone looking out from a PATH train screeching around the corner into the temporary World Trade Center station would have seen a crew from the Beaver Concrete Construction Company of Brooklyn.

"They're finally doing something with this big hole," said Anthony Martelli, one of the workers, standing inside the newly completed trough. "It's about time."

It was Mr. Martelli's first day back at ground zero since early 2002, after a six-month tour cleaning up debris and pulling out pieces of steel. Yesterday, he was building again - he and Paul Klein and Frank De Guida and Robert Manella and Tonino Sacino.

Starting at 7 a.m., they built a trough 18 inches high and 6 feet 3 inches wide out of thick wood planks. Cagelike frames of steel reinforcing bars, or rebar, will be set into the trough beginning today. Then concrete will be poured over the rebar.

That will form the footing of a seven-foot-high concrete retaining wall. The wall will hold about four feet of fill, on top of which ballast will be laid for a temporary PATH track, No. 6, alongside the future Platform D, the fourth and westernmost platform.

Currently, there are five tracks among three platforms, two of which occupy a corner of the south tower footprint, as they did in the original station. Platform D would take up more space in the south footprint and a tiny bit of the north footprint.

Once Platform D and Track No. 6 are usable, in early 2007, other tracks can be taken out of service temporarily to allow construction of the permanent terminal while commuters are traveling through the tubes to and from New Jersey.

The construction manager is a joint venture of Parsons Brinckerhoff, which counts the first New York City subway line among its earliest achievements, and the URS Corporation. A general contractor is to be chosen in the next few months.

Icanda was the contractor in 1966 when the first concrete was poured, at West and Cortlandt Streets. John M. Kyle, the chief engineer of the Port Authority, threw in a silver dollar, a 100-lire coin from Italy, a 5-franc coin from France and a British penny.

Asked about the absence of fanfare yesterday, Anthony R. Coscia, the chairman of the Port Authority, said: "I think people have become so jaded by the inordinate amount of ceremonies that have occurred at that site - disproportionate to what's actually happened - that I didn't want to add to that. This is about actually building."

There is a potential snag, however. A lawsuit filed last month by the Coalition of 9/11 Families seeks to halt the project on the ground that it violates a federal law requiring that historic sites not be used for transportation projects unless there are no feasible or prudent alternatives.

Anthony Gardner, one of the plaintiffs, whose brother was killed on 9/11, said the authority had never justified the need for Platform D.

"Our focus has always been to ensure the maximum preservation and access to the remains of the footprints for the American people and future visitors to the site," Mr. Gardner said yesterday.

The Port Authority and the Federal Transit Administration have yet to answer the complaint, he said. A spokesman for the authority said it would not discuss pending litigation.

But Steven Plate, deputy director of the priority capital programs department, did talk about the authority's sense of stewardship as he inspected the site, pointing out that the tower footprints had been covered by polyethylene liners and 12 inches of stone fill to protect them during construction. "We're very committed, personally and professionally, to preserving the site," he said. "Eighty-four of our own perished here.

"I don't want to sound melodramatic, but there is no monopoly on caring for the site. This is the Port Authority's home."

http://www.jsonline.com/enter/books/nov05/367984.asp

Daniel Libeskind 'Takes Five'

Struggle over ground zero is life in microcosm, architect says

Posted: Nov. 3, 2005

Daniel Libeskind may be the only big-name architect whose office answering machine plays Frank Sinatra belting out "New York, New York." But that upbeat anthem contrasts sharply with the political turmoil surrounding reconstruction of the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan, where Libeskind's master plan and his design for a soaring Freedom Tower have undergone major alterations. Libeskind, the Polish-born son of Holocaust survivors, will be in Milwaukee Monday to give a speech and sign copies of his 2004 book, "Breaking Ground." The 59-year-old architect talked by phone from his Manhattan studio with urban landscape writer Whitney Gould.

Q.So much has changed from what you envisioned for ground zero: Another architect has reworked your design for the Freedom Tower; some cultural institutions have left the site; and people are arguing over what remains. Those of us looking in from the outside have a general impression of high hopes dashed. How do you feel about all of this?

A. There is a lot of controversy, a lot of struggle. But it's not as apocalyptic as you describe it. I think we're making progress. The site is evolving. But things are very close to what was in my master plan. The tower is still related to the Statue of Liberty. And it's still 1,776 feet high, which is symbolically important; it has observation decks at the levels of the old World Trade Center. The underground memorial is in the footprint (of the Trade Center) and provides a memory of the heroes of 9/11. The Wedge of Light is still there. Yes, there are fights. But a plan has to be resilient enough to deal with changes. I think we're on course to deliver something that is memorable and important.

Q.How have you managed to remain so optimistic? A lot of architects would have just thrown up their hands after this sort of experience.

A. You have to be patient You have to know that this is the democratic process, that it's not easy, that there are huge emotions and many stakeholders - the families of the victims, the Port Authority, the mayor, the governor, architects, investors. It's a microcosm of life. You have to be able to navigate and negotiate and deliver a project that is not just the product of conflict. And that's exactly what I'm doing.

Q.From the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which evokes a broken Star of David, to your new Wohl Center in Israel, your own design language is so distinctive - angular and edgy and unpredictable. Could you talk a little about the origins of that vocabulary?

A. It is related to the specifics of each site, and to light, to energy, to memory and to the future. It is based on emotional things, not just on abstract intellectual ideas. Architecture is an art of space; it's not just about a neutral box, and it has to be unique, to have a signature. I compare it to music: You would never get mixed up between which is Brahms and which is Beethoven.

Q. When I think of your buildings, I think more of Stravinsky.

A. (Laughs.) Well, I love Stravinsky.

Q.How far can you take a metaphor, an abstract idea, and avoid having it become too literal?

A. That's a very good question. Architecture is an art of story telling, not just an art of engineered objects. It has to be connected to a cultural place, and layered like a text; it is rich with life. Even the most banal building has a story - and the story tells you it has nothing to say!

Daniel Libeskind will speak at 7 p.m. Monday in the Bradley Pavilion at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, 929 N. Water St. His appearance is co-sponsored by the Jewish Book and Culture Fair and Kahler Slater Architects.

Bringing it home in a big way.


Greenhouse at New Rochelle school to honor Sept. 11 victim's life

By DESIREE GRAND

THE JOURNAL NEWS


NEW ROCHELLE — When Geraldine Davie lost her 23-year-old daughter, Amy O'Doherty, in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, she knew she needed to find some way to honor her daughter's promising life.

Yesterday at the Henry Barnard School, where she taught for 15 years, Davie achieved that dream. Family, friends and local officials dedicated a greenhouse next to the school in Amy's memory. Dozens of children clutched handmade sunflowers and stuck the popsicle stems into the ground in commemoration. In the center of the paper sunflowers, O'Doherty's favorite, was written "Amy's Greenhouse 9/11."

Amy's Greenhouse will be a nature learning environment for the school.

"Amy loved children. I always thought she should have been a teacher," Davie said. "Children and teachers will come here forever and remember Amy."

O'Doherty, who lived in Pelham before moving to New York City, had just gotten her first apartment and had been working as a broker's assistant for Cantor Fitzgerald for 15 months on Sept. 11.

After her death, the family received so many donations that Davie thought about providing computers and books for the school library. But then the idea to do something for the school grew and the family and school officials thought about building an atrium. They settled on a greenhouse because it would allow the children to learn about nature while being a symbol of new life.

Davie and her family said they envision children and teachers planting seeds and going through nature lessons.

"This is a living memory to Amy," said her sister, Maura O'Doherty. "It will stand as a memorial to her life and her love of children. We wanted something that would integrate her passion for life with her love of children."

As children strolled through the greenhouse yesterday, they passed Davie, who was standing by the door to greet them. Each said, "I made a flower for Amy."

Davie beamed. "This is a way to bring good from evil."

http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dl...WS02/511030410/1018

$2.1 MILLION IN UPGRADES FOR SARA D. ROOSEVELT PARK

On November 3, 2005, Lower Manhattan Development Corporation President Stefan Pryor joined Parks & Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe, I.S. 131 Principal Jane Lehrac and local students, for a ribbon cutting at the new Hester & Canal Street Field in Sara D. Roosevelt Park. The park is affectionately known by neighbors, students and the community as "Sara D."

New features include a synthetic turf field and a three-lane track that replaces the park's previous patched asphalt field. The park's Canal and Chrystie Street entrance was also reconstructed, and new paths, benches, lighting and decorative pavement were added. The $2.1 million project, funded by the LMDC, offers the surrounding communities increased park access for recreational opportunities.

In May 2003, Governor George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the LMDC's allocation of $25 million to rejuvenate and create new green spaces throughout Lower Manhattan. Sara D. Roosevelt Park is one of 13 sites receiving funding.

Oliver Stone starts 9/11 movie
Last Updated Thu, 03 Nov 2005 12:44:05 EST
CBC Arts
 Noted U.S. director Oliver Stone has begun shooting a film about the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Producers spent months meeting with community groups in New York and the families of victims to discuss the as-yet-untitled Paramount film, which has been tentatively scheduled for release Aug. 11, 2006 – a month before the fifth anniversary of the attacks.

"We're not doing the Towering Inferno-Titanic version," co-producer Michael Shamberg told the Associated Press.


CBC INDEPTH: September 11

The film, part of which Stone started shooting in New York last month, stars Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena as John McLoughlin and William J. Jimeno, the two police officers who survived the collapse of the World Trade Center towers and were rescued almost a day later.

After meeting with groups in New York, however, the producers decided to limit shooting in the city and instead film the bulk of the movie on soundstages in Los Angeles.

Though real news footage from the day will appear in the film, it will play on television screens in the background, producers said. The film will not interpret the politics or greater meaning of the attacks.

"We're not doing everyone's story that day," Shamberg said. "We're trusted with the accuracy of the particular story that we're telling."

However, some of those who met with the filmmakers were still concerned about the film and about the interpretation presented by the sometimes controversial director.

Though Stone has tackled a wide range of films (from musical biopic The Doors to football drama Any Given Sunday to historical epic Alexander), he is perhaps best known for several titles focused on politics and social commentary, including J.F.K., Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, Natural Born Killers and Comandante, his documentary about meeting with Cuban President Fidel Castro.

This summer, however, Stone described the 9/11 movie as "an exploration of heroism in our country – but it's international at the same time in its humanity."

Others are also developing films about Sept. 11. Universal Studios is making Flight 93, about the hijacked plane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field, while a film adaptation of the book 102 Minutes and a TV miniseries about the findings of the Sept. 11 commission are in the works.
 
 http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2005..._sept11_051103.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/03/nyregion/03blocks.html

At 9/11 Site, Design and Expense Collide

By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Published: November 3, 2005

BENEATH a veneer of seamlessness, tension is evident between the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation as important - and expensive - construction questions begin to arise.

It is not surprising that fissures would emerge, since it is the corporation's purpose to plan and design the memorial and the adjoining memorial museum, while it is the foundation's purpose to finance, construct and maintain them. In almost every building project of any consequence, design ambitions and cost consciousness eventually collide.

Both Stefan Pryor, the president of the corporation, and Gretchen Dykstra, the president and chief executive of the foundation, play down the idea of conflict.

"I don't think of tension as bad," Ms. Dykstra said yesterday. "Maybe it's creative tension and something better will come from it. We are focused on three things: respect for the memorial, the visitors' experience and cost."

And Mr. Pryor described the design and budgeting process as a conversation between the corporation, a four-year-old subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corporation, and the memorial foundation, a private, nonprofit corporation.

"We have developed a remarkably collaborative approach," he said. "Wherever there are issues, we've managed to resolve them successfully."

They have yet to resolve the issue of the Snohetta building, however. That is the structure designed by the Norwegian firm Snohetta to serve as the home of the Drawing Center, which is now gone from plans for the site, and the International Freedom Center, which is now out of business.

Even before the Drawing Center started searching for new space in July and Gov. George E. Pataki removed the Freedom Center as too controversial in September, questions were raised about the Snohetta building. Would it cost too much to span the column-free underground mezzanine of the PATH terminal directly below? Would construction of the terminal postpone work on the Snohetta building so long that it could not open simultaneously with the memorial?

These questions have regained their currency as the memorial foundation, with $400 million to raise before it reaches its half-billion-dollar goal, looks at all levels of economy: whether, for example, to let the memorial fountains run year-round or whether the memorial's structural framework should be steel or reinforced concrete.

TWO days after Governor Pataki removed the Freedom Center, Mr. Pryor said the corporation remained "committed to the construction of the Snohetta building."

More recently, however, Ms. Dykstra shied away from such an unequivocal declaration. On the "Road to City Hall" show of Oct. 20, Davidson Goldin of NY1 News asked her whether the Snohetta building should be kept or scrapped.

"I think we have to let the process work out and see," she answered.

Pressed further by Mr. Goldin as to whether she meant there was no need for the building, Ms. Dykstra said: "We have to look at the balance between cost and need and program - and most importantly, what does the visitor deserve."

Yesterday, neither she nor Mr. Pryor would, or could, say much more about the fate of the redesign.

"We are engaged in a design process," Mr. Pryor said. "Snohetta is, on a very preliminary basis, examining the alternative possibilities. We don't have even a first draft of outcomes of that process yet."

Some kind of building on the site will almost certainly serve as a visitors' center - the foundation is expecting seven million people a year - with 9/11-related exhibits. "Everyone involved contemplates a complementary but not redundant relationship with the museum," Mr. Pryor said. The building will probably be "substantially smaller" than the 250,000-square-foot version unveiled in May, he said.

The take-back-the-memorial coalition that pushed for the removal of the Freedom Center and the Drawing Center is warily monitoring what it calls "closed-door plans, including whether the Snohetta building will be reconfigured in its currently planned location, whether it will be moved to another part of the quadrant, or even built at all."

In a statement on Oct. 26, the coalition of 15 groups of victims' relatives called for "a memorial which honors the lost, tells the true and inspiring history of that day and conveys a message of hope which survives the survivors. We believe that story would fill several Snohetta buildings."

One is proving tough enough.