10. Vietnam Veterans Memorial - Maya Lin with Cooper-Lecky PartnershipNew Yorkology has a list of the NYC structures in the top 150, and looking at what both the public and architects (they made some pre-selects), the rankings are all over the place. Sure, the Brooklyn Bridge is #20 and the Woolworth Building is #44. But the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue ranks #53, higher than the Flatiron Building (#72). Heck, even the new Hearst Tower ranks ahead of the Flatiron! more ›

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!”

While the purpose of the Times article about selected WTC memorial Reflecting Absence is to explain how landscape architect Peter Walker joined original designer Michael Arad, the real story is about designer and WTC memorial juror Maya Lin. Lin, who designed the Vietnam War Memorial as well as the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, AL, as well as a dreamy Wave Field at University of Michigan, was a supporter of Reflecting Absence. The article also includes her September 2002 idea for a memorial the New York Times magazine commissioned, which bears a "superficial resemblance" to the winning design, mainly the pools where the towers once stood, though reporter David Dunlap stresses that Lin did not commandeer the jury into choosing Reflecting Absence. more ›

The finalists will be on view in the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center. The Times has a piece about the 13 jurors for the WTC Memorial, including designer Maya Lin, Public Art Fund president Susan Freedman, Deputy Mayor Patricia Harris, and architect Enrique Norten. more ›

Tonight, PBS airs a three part series, "Becoming American: The Chinese Experience," which spans the dynamic of Chinese in America from the 1800s to present. I'm definitely going to watch, beause I've always thought of myself as American before being Chinese...when cabbies ask me where I'm from, I tend to say "New Jersey." more ›