Results tagged “michaelarad”

       

Nearly six years ago, in November 2003, a design called Reflecting Absence, by NYC Housing Authority architect Michael Arad, was selected as one of the finalists for the World Trade Center Memorial. His design featured two pools in the footprints of the WTC's towers, with waterfalls cascading down their sides, and in January 2004, the design, revised with landscape designer Peter Walker, was chosen as the winning design. Today, the Port Authority says the Memorial is slated to open on September 11, 2011, in time for the tenth anniversary. We spoke to Arad, now a partner at Handel Architects, for a few minutes yesterday and asked about the long road the project has taken.

New York City was amply represented during last night's National Design Awards at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

The NY Times takes a careful, detailed look at the rising Museum of Arts and Design building at 2 Columbus Circle more than two years after preservationists failed to stop plans to radically alter the 1964 Edward Durell Stone building.

Officials announced that victims names will be arranged at the World Trade Center Memorial, instead of being placed randomly. WTC Memorial designer Michael Arad's original plan was for a random listing of victims. From his winning submission:

The names of the deceased will be arranged in no particular order around the pools. After carefully considering different arrangements, I have found that any arrangement that tries to impose meaning through physical adjacency will cause grief and anguish to people who might be excluded from that process, furthering the sense of loss that they are already suffering.

Continue reading "Names Will Be Organized on World Trade Center Memorial "

WTC leasholder Larry Silverstein and the Port Authority are suing comapnies for withholding funds which are keeping them from starting work on the World Trade Center. Naturally, in surance companies don't want to pay out, but to prevent the building of something as symbolic as the new World Trade Center sounds like a PR disater. And the construction union members rallied in support of the lawsuit - one carpenter told NY1, "The question everywhere I go is, ‘What's going on with Ground Zero?’ It's gotten to the point where it's embarrassing that there isn't any progress." And that goes for all New Yorkers, too. Does that mean the cornerstone was moved too soon?

Ever since one contractor estimated it would cost $1 billion to build the World Trade Center Memorial, it's been a downhill process at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Actually, it was probably downhill from earlier than that, but the $1 billion price tag helped prompt cover stories about the memorial mess, create more teams to figure out a solution, and lead to the resignation of the WTC Memorial Foundation president. Anyway, the WTC Memorial's builder, Frank Sciame, presented new memorial designs Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki. Note that it's the builder presenting cost-cutting options - not the deisgners, though Sciame did meet with them, including original WTC Memorial designer Michael Arad, to develop ideas. Some of Sciame's options for cost-cutting include eliminating the waterfalls, displaying the victims' names aboveground, not around the pools, and removing one of two underground entrance ramps. Bloomberg and Pataki do want to keep the waterfalls, but it sounds like the the names will go aboveground - which would quiet criticism from victims' families who have wanted them aboveground all along.

If there's something politicians know how to do, it's to convene a committee! The NY Times focuses on how everyone wants new plans to bring the WTC Memorial budget down - there's that much agreement. But the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has one committee working on it...and Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg created another committee to work on ideas! Double the thinking, infinite times the resentment! The LMDC team includes the builder Bovis, whose $1 billion estimate of the memorial caused a lot of the agita that prompted these committees, while the Pataki-Bloomberg team, "Memorial and Master Plan Design Commitee," has memorial designers and architects, Michael Arad, Peter Walker, and Max Bond, plus WTC "master planner" Daniel Libeskind and rival builder Frank Sciame. At any rate, the LMDC committee is planning on having a couple of new ideas by next week. Hmm, maybe the LMDC can time a new memorial design by July, which is about three years after the WTC memorial competition ended.

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!”

Almost two years ago, Governor George Pataki helped to lay the 20-ton, Adirondack granite cornerstone for the Freedom Tower. And it wasn't until just this past month that the financial bickering between Larry Silverstein and the Port Authority were finally sorted out so construction could begin in earnest.

NY1 will have live coverage of the ceremony; they have also been examining what the status of the rebuilding is, lingering health issues, how WTC Memorial designer Michael Arad feels the weight of responsibility and much more. The NY Times also has their section on "Rebuilding Lower Manhattan", in addition to recent stories about the after effects of September 11; yesterday's story about different companies' and organizations' decisions about keeping an image of the World Trade Center did resonate with us, as we wonder about some storefronts and vans that still have the Twin Towers standing in their logo's sklyines. Also, check out the NY Times' A Nation Challenged section, which includes Portraits of Grief - profiles of victims.

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.