Results tagged “davisbrodybond”

If you want to be thoroughly depressed by the rebuilding process at Ground Zero in a matter of pages, versus a matter of years, Gothamist highly recommends reading New York magazine's cover story about the WTC Memorial and its architect, Michael Arad. It's an exclusive interview where Arad spill his guts about the process, but also gets worked over as one of the many egos in cast of a million egos and billion interests. Arad seems to have clashed with all the important players - original WTC redesign architect Daniel Libeskind, the firm Davis Brody Bond which is the associate architect, the LMDC, "partner" Peter Walker (who designed the landscaping elements for the memorial), you name it. For instance:

Arad immediately started behaving as if he had a powerful public mandate, which didn’t exactly put him in the right frame of mind to negotiate with Libeskind about fitting the memorial into the master plan. Libeskind, for his part, was enraged that Arad’s design had won. It effectively obliterated his original design for the memorial, which called for the area to remain a sunken pit with an open lawn at the bottom. “I will fight this!” he yelled during his first meeting about it with the LMDC. “I am the people’s architect!”

Additionally, The architecture firm Davis Brody Bond was appointed to help with work on Michael Arad and Peter Walker's Reflecting Absence Memorial. WTC memorial jury chairman Vartan Gregorian said, "They would not do anything, in my opinion, to scuttle the vision of Arad and Walker, and they also know the ways of New York and how things are done," and the Times notes that two members of DBB's design team are black, whereas all the designers involved with the WTC rebuild so far have been white. Davis Brody Bond projects around the city, besides the Harvard Club and NYPL expansions mentioned in the papers, include the NYU dorm on East 14th (between 3rd and 4th Avenues), the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, and that ugly Union Square Building, Zeckendorf Towers.