Last Tuesday the New York New Visions committee held another presentation/listening session to a rather profound silence — from the media, even as the room was packed with design professionals, interested observers, and generally angry and frustrated citizens of many stripes.
The evening featured presentations from the new head of the LMDC, Stefan Pryor, and Steven Plate, a long-time employee of the PANYNJ who is currently in charge of capital projects (if my notes are accurate). Each had a PowerPoint presentation to accompany the talk. In keeping with the tenor of the evening, each was light on details, rich with accolades, appreciation and praises for all the talented people and hard work. It seemed at times like the talking points and style had been developed by Karl Rove, and the awkward non-answers were as painful to witness as the pathetic stylings of Scott McLellan. Mr. Plate fared best, with more to report, and perhaps a greater level of comfort with addressing rooms full of capable and engaged opponents of bureaucracy — including the last questioner who asked Mr. Plate to comment on the irony that the PANYNJ is not required to submit (and hadn’t, until the Times reported it) plans for any part of the site to the City of New York, even though the city is obliged to provide fire protection. Mr. Pryor, well, I think everyone just felt sorry for him. Kevin Rampe did a bang up job of constructing the chairship of the LMDC as a free-fire zone of duplicity, insiderism and bureaucratic intransigence, leaving Mr. Pryor holding a tattered and overweighted bag. As much as I don’t envy his position, he did nothing in his presentation to garner much empathy, compounding a perhaps excusable bumbling manner with an inelegant command of information and tendency to show the worst of all meeting management skills: not recognizing when being conciliatory forced him to make statements that were clearly unsupportable by actual or planned policy. This is the ultimate legacy of the Bush administration, writ small: keep nodding, claim you work hard, and repeat the question back as answer, and in two hours you get to go home. Dispatching this team to the Center for Archtecture would have been an insulting travesty if I weren’t confident that we saw the best and the brightest that the WTC planning process could produce. There were a couple items mentioned that may or may not be news; I’ve been more or less willfully ignoring downtown, so I’ll report it all as if it were news. Apologies to those more interested readers who find it retread: The theme of the evening was interconnection, meaning that the discussion would attempt to address the infrastructure and planning elements more than discrete structures (which meant everyone got to pretend the Freedom Tower didn’t exist). Consequently, this meant focus on the Memorial and PATH station, which, due to their complex program and siting, are the central components to review. Unfortunately we saw nothing in detail that explicated how they actually come together. Whereas fairly detailed information was revealed on the forms themselves, none was given regarding entrances, exits, where things join or how. Though there was a good bit of time devoted to the Memorial discussion, so much of it was old news or simply lacking detail, I took no notes. They tested a mockup of waterfall, which was widely reported weeks ago. Snohetta was given a bit of a door prize in being invited to design the entrance to the Memorial on the western edge of the site (no images of the structure, or even how it works with the Memorial). The plans for the PATH station shown included details on the ‘West Street Concourse’ (a subterranean connection to Battery Park City), which abuts the upper edge of the footprint of the North Tower, but there wasn’t any indication of the vertical relationship. It will have a ribbed ceiling that mirrors the structural system of the ‘Oculus’ and feature retail along, presumably, the north wall. The other (non-platform) concourses also run hard up against the memorial complex, but interconnections were not indicated, nor discussed. A new — to me — and rather disturbing detail was revealed: due to security concerns, the perimeter of the PATH station will be solid concrete up to ten feet (though this number was disputed by Mr. Plate). So the two projects that have cleared design development and security review both will be completely opaque at street level. Which is perhaps good, since it was also noted that streetscape improvements are currently unfunded. Though this sounds like a bureaucratic squabble (the PANYNJ calls it unfunded — when queried about the potential issue, Mr. Pryor said it ‘would be funded’ and Mr. Plate immediately asked if that was a commitment of money, and it seemed at that point like this was well-trod ground), it still made many audience members clearly unsettled. Mr. Plate was also exceptionally dodgy (if such relative measures were possible in the midst of this equivocation-rich display) about the status of Cortlandt Street, which until the recently released sketches of the retail component, was always expected to be remade into a surface street. It seemed that at least the funding for the street design is in place, and some consideration was given, but this information came from an aside, and certainly no information or images were given. So if one were being pessimistic (not an unfair conclusion given the tenor of the proceedings), it is possible to assume that so far the development progress goes something like this: architects are given a very vague program, but a command to create showpiece baubles for promotion, then the security people and families gang up on security issues and propriety, respectively, and the program is finally resolved while the design undergoes a transformation leading to impenetrable sheathing from the ground up to an unspecified but daunting height, all while the space between these structures is receiving no design consideration, schematic or security planning, and who or when the streets will get built is completely unknown. This describes a failure, yes, I am forced to say is once again somehow more extreme and profoundly abysmal (I really need to get a new thesaurus if I am going to continue writing about this topic) than the last time this issue was visited. The LMDC could go a long way to prove this is an overheated claim by releasing any street-level renderings of the interstitial spaces. Moving on to other even more nebulous program elements, the Performing Arts Center is in ‘schematic development’ but primarily at the ground level (where infrastructure interconnections to the immediately adjacent buildings, all of which will start construction this quarter, are going to need to be resolved). No information about building design was given (though a roomful of overeducated architects were given a four minute lesson on Gehry’s performing arts experience — maybe that’s in his contract). Excepting the already announced $50 million commitment from the LMDC, no status was given about the fundraising requirements being placed on the two arts groups expected to take residence there, nor was there any discussion of any potential or existing legal relationships (building ownership, etc.) struck or pending. The words ‘Freedom Center’ were not uttered, a notable oversight, considering that my best understanding of the site is the main entrance of which is about two hundred feet to the west, and like to share considerable amounts of subterranean space for infrastructure support. The first question was the one I intended to ask, and the response was succinct and immediate. The PANYNJ still expects to construct 10MM square feet of building, though Mr. Plate hewed a genial path of conciliation about what it might actually comprise (residential, commercial or hotel) — a ‘we will build whatever they tell us’ the they being only vaguely defined. Still pending are the ‘commercial design guidelines’ which, if I understood the discussion correctly, will guide the architectural development of all the buildings on the site. Rick Bell of the AIA asked if there was a delivery date (since ‘two months from now’ has been the standard answer for two years), but none was offered. It was also noted that the only structures that would seem to lag enough to actually be affected by the guidelines (Towers 3, 4 and 5), but the comment that this effort would seem to be moot was brushed aside. A query about how the process was evolving also was poorly addressed. There was no confirmation that any architects were participating, and if there we a logical place for Libeskind to be active, it would be here. So, to recap, in a discussion about integration and interconnection, we were told that the guidelines that would address the aesthetic development overall are still in development (as they have been for several years), that the monies to design and build the site portions that will actually form the interconnections have not been allocated, no details were given about how the various elements would come together, either conceptually or even at the mundane level of entrance and exit, that one street remapping initially announced is likely to be undone, and the security plans to protect all the people who will eventually come to the site will not be released for several months, after the three major site components are under construction. Have I missed anything? It’s hard to say, since the people ostensibly in charge seem to have missed all of it.
Every breath you take.
Today Gawker launched a fairly unimpressive upgrade to their ‘Gawker Stalker’ feature (which is people sending in their celebrity sightings, the more salubrious details the better, which are posted same day), adding a mapping function, and encouraging people to submit information as quickly as possible (though the posting is moderated, so the timeliness may be lacking). I say unimpressive a little petulantly because, like every undermotivated, arch, aging hipster, I had a better idea for this a long time ago.
A few years back I remember coming across a report about a kidnapping threat involving Russell Crowe. This may have been big news, but I am not really abreast of the Us Weekly set. Anyhoo, it was reported that he was assigned FBI protection. I remember being somewhat indignant for two reasons: one, the danger was causally related to his professional existence, the benefits of which made him more than able to procure his own protection and, two, he was a foreign national! Let Australia send their version of the FBI out to protect their national treasure. This, of course, was well before we learned that his fighting skills were impressive even when faced with only the limited weapon choice of office equipment. I had a plan to launch a website, Kidnap Russell Crowe! which would be a map/database affair where people could report all their sightings, so if one actually was inclined to do the deed, they could find the information quickly. Figuring I didn’t need any FBI attention myself, I stopped at making the logo (this was also the days before Busted Tees, so I lost out on my Web 1.1 millions). I didn’t feel bad circulating the idea, because the role of the celebrity is a strange one, all signifier, consuming frightening amounts of resources, skewing notions of identity, trickling down into the truly pathetic spectacle of reality shows and dispersing the faulty notion that everyone can be a celebrity in some form. It’s an input/output problem: you make a film that needs 40 million people to pay to see it for you to succeed (and get paid), you have to take some downside, right? I figured the site would simply be a democratic weapon in the fight against mindless hagiography. The organized effort to command the attention of the populace and focus it on someone reciting words someone else has written is substantial, it is mostly unforgiving, and lacks any sense of community. The advent of the celebrity for its own sake — which to be sure, has been around in one guise of another for some time, but has gotten particularly fevered of late — is a logical extension of our obsession with fame. But it is not as simple as the mindless distraction of a comfortable society. It leaks into every corner, where the pursuit of fame becomes its own end, and that pursuit is undertaken with frightening ferocity, and once realized, is leveraged for putative expertise or authority on any range of subjects. The model is grafted onto every profession where there isn’t a hard and fast arbiter of value (say, home runs, but even that is fungible, it seems). Gawker is coy about whether it stands outside, or squarely in the zone of this circle jerk, a stance that was codified when the founders of the last real satiric voice in this city went on to helm Vanity Fair and New York magazines. And since it in and of itself is a vehicle for fame with a low threshold of skill, it is sometimes hard to determine whether the jibes are only the grousing of those not yet in the club of useless celebrity. And it’s a really poor implementation. We should have far more sophisticated tools at this stage. Then again, since they aren’t really fighting the process that much (it is quite the golden goose), it will be up to others to deploy the artillery that might tamp down the desire to be so maniacally promoted. Am I advocating violence here? No. But there must be a point at which where the endless promotion of one’s persona becomes debilitating enough that they retreat. Felix Salmon thinks that setting off down this road sunders some fragile relationship New Yorkers have with celebrity, but he misses the point of that dialectic. New Yorkers ignore celebrities because the notion that deference to someone as superior is an anathema to their own self-involved notion of accomplishment. The question is a little larger than whether or not it’s fair to develop a web site with an RSS feed that tells you when Paris Hilton takes a shit (really, that’s thinking a bit small when you consider GPS and mobile-to-mobile communications technologies). After all, the woman got famous by flashing her cooch at all of us. The question is how we will define space and community, and the fact the every pseudo libertarian trust model built into the various online ‘communites’ (which are increasingly affecting how and when we interact in the ‘real world’) has been either poorly implemented or easily circumvented. When everyone is carrying around a sort of self-stalking tool like Dodgeball on their cell phone, the degradation of interaction in the city will not be manifest in the disappearance of silence or privacy when Lou Reed gets brunch, but rather in the secretive communications that will silently float from phone to phone. Celebrity stalking is a self-regulating process. As long as Paris Hilton is trying to get our attention, people will respond in kind (and really, how long until some down at the heel C-Lister starts sending in fabricated sightings, if it hasn’t already happened?). But we will only hear about Lou Reed’s brunch choices so many times, because not that many people care. Remember, John Hinckley didn’t need the Internet to commit a heinous act. But how we can prevent ‘social networking software’ (a noxious misnomer if there ever was one) from degrading the happenstance, the spontaneous, the yes discomforting interactions this city often requires is an even thornier issue. In the meantime, if we can make it a little less attractive of the Lindsay Lohans of this world to be so thoroughly visible, well, I can’t really see how that is a loss for our local culture.