While public discourse is normal, Paul Goldberger says the plan for the World Trade Center site and memorial has veered off track, encumbered by power and politics. The author of “Up From Zero: Politics, Architecture and the Rebuilding of New York” ( Random House ) and the architecture critic for the New Yorker magazine, Goldberger spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Jessica Bennett about the function of memorials and great memorials of the past. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: What would you say are the most important things to keep in mind when thinking about a memorial of this size and scope?
Paul Goldberger: In my book I address the questions of how we move from the emotions that surrounded 9/11, the emotions of commonality, of common response to tragedy, to some kind of architectural response. There’s the dilemma of whether we can or cannot find a common language, but even beyond that, the question of how much can architecture do and how much can it not do.
What can architecture achieve in a successful memorial?
I think a successful memorial allows a wide range of people who have different experiences, different sensibilities and different temperaments to feel a common sense of awe and a common emotion as they look back at an event. It’s partly a teaching tool but partly also an emotional catalyst … It’s a balance between commemoration and renewal, or between the awesome and the everyday. The things that acknowledge the enormous emotional power of this site but also the ordinary things that are part of daily life that you want to restore there. That’s a very difficult balance to achieve.
What’s gone through your mind while watching the development of this memorial over the past five years?
It’s actually been sad, because I watched this go from a lot of optimism and hope that we’d be able to produce something that really reflected the profound emotions that everyone felt in the months after 9/11, to watching it gradually become much more business as usual.
Why do you mean by business as usual?
We’ve seen a whole bunch of rather traditional conflicts between people pushing for their own self-interests. Obviously money is a big part of it, [as well as] the conflict between business and a more public and commemorative function of the site, different philosophies, different attitudes and there’s been no clear sense of coming together, which was what everyone hoped for and genuinely expected after 9/11.
Why do you think that’s happened?
[This project has become] incredibly complicated because it involves everything from the political, cultural, the emotional, the financial, and all these things kind of crash into each other like bumper cars at an amusement park.
What is your major criticism of the project?
There’s a flaw in the underlying master plan, which is that it’s based on mainly building office space and ignores the fact that lower Manhattan has been evolving in recent years to become a different kind of neighborhood, a neighborhood really dominated increasingly by housing, cultural facilities [and] restaurants—really a mixed-use neighborhood. This is a plan to put back the office space that was destroyed on 9/11, but that in fact should not be the priority.
What about the design of the memorial itself?
Well, there’s barely a design. The original master plan has been all but forgotten, even though it’s technically still there. The design of the memorial has many good qualities but it’s also being significantly changed and altered and compromised by a whole lot of conflicts.
Are there just too many cooks in the kitchen?
That’s a big part of it.
Which memorials have succeeded, in your opinion?
The one that’s really done that, I think, is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington [designed by Maya Lin]. It was a brilliant design that magnificently balanced the abstraction of the design itself, that beautiful V that was cut into the earth, and the reality of the names on the wall. So you had both a powerful architectural experience by this space that she created very subtly by that cut into the earth, and the concrete experience of the names, and the sense that as you walked through it, you gradually saw the vastness of the losses and the tragedy. And the individual names had meaning to the family and friends of those who died, but for others there was the sense of the wholeness of the names, which was so powerful, and it worked on all levels.
It’s interesting you mention the layout of the victims’ names, because that’s been one of the biggest controversies in New York.
I think the fact that it’s been such a controversy underscores the way in which we’ve begun to think that the whole purpose of a memorial is just to make the families of those who died feel better. And in fact, with all due respect to them, that’s not the most important point—that’s not the reason the memorial exists. We’ve begun to focus much more today on memorials with names, whereas once the memorial was to the event itself, and the enormity of the event itself, not just to the individuals … I think it’s always important to keep the broader goal of a memorial in mind.
There’s been a great deal of criticism over the amount of time it has taken New York City to get this memorial off the ground. Is this typical of a place so close to the tragedy?
They certainly had difficulty in Oklahoma City, which is one analogy. That took a long time. I think it is difficult today because we have a very difficult time having a sense of common values and common architectural language but also social values … We [also] have a much, much bigger job than any other city. It’s not just a memorial; it’s part of 16 acres like no other 16 acres anywhere. It’s where everything happened, and it’s also in the heart of the greatest city in the country. And we have the conflict between renewing the city and memorializing. So it’s not comparable to the memorial challenge of any other place or any other city.
How does the healing process play into all of this? Is there an emotional process to memorializing that’s not just the physical structure?
Sure there is, and one of the important parts of it is time. I don’t think these decisions can be made quickly, and some of the problem is that we’ve also been trying to rush ourselves because we don’t understand that much of the grieving process is a process of time, and much of the learning process is a process of time. We won’t entirely know what to do until a lot of time has passed, and the instincts that many people had after 9/11 may not have been right.
Should they have waited?
Yes, I think they should have. Of course now since the process has been so full of conflict we’ve ended up taking a lot of time anyway.
