Sixteen Acres
Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A no-holds-barred look at the collision of interests behind the ambitious attempt to raise a new national icon at Ground Zero
When we stand in downtown Manhattan in the future and look up and ask, "Why?"--Why is it so strange, so rude, so striving, so right, so wrong?--we will have Sixteen Acres to give us the answers. Tracing the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site from graveyard to playground for high design, insurgent critic Philip Nobel strips away the hyperbole to reveal the secret life of the century's most charged building project.
Providing a tally of deceptions and betrayals, a look at the meaning of events beyond the pieties of the moment, and a running bestiary of the main players--developers and bureaucrats, star architects and amateur fantasists, politicians and the well-spun press--Nobel's book bares the crucial moments as factions and institutions converge to create a noisy new culture at Ground Zero.
Tragic and comic by turns, full of low dealings and high dudgeon, Sixteen Acres takes us behind the scenes at a site in search of its sanctity, exposing the reconstruction as the flawed product of a complicated city: driven by money, hamstrung by politics, burdened by the wounds it is somehow supposed to heal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Almost from the moment the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 9/11, Americans, and especially New Yorkers, began to dream of how the site would be rebuilt. As Nobel relates, one recovery worker imagined a series of five buildings arrayed like a hand giving terrorists the finger. More established architects toned down the anger, but it was a given that their plans for a new World Trade Center would contain a message about the old. Nobel, an architectural columnist for Metropolis, guides readers through early redevelopment plans and the design competition that made Daniel Libeskind famous even among people who know nothing of architecture. Nobel also examines the bitter infighting that followed the selection of his proposal. On its own terms, this is a dramatic and compelling story, and Nobel's insights into the competitive nature of top-level architecture are particularly valuable. But his passionate opinions about the deficiencies of most modern architects (no longer able to "make buildings speak... to create symbols for a culture with no common code") can be distracting. A more serious flaw, however, is the lack of illustrations, of Libeskind's design and those of the other finalists. Nobel's prose, even at its most descriptive, can go only so far toward shaping readers' vision of the proposed buildings. 2 maps not seen by PW.
