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Book Review: 'Up from Zero' by Paul Goldberger

Manhattan's World Trade Center consisted of two towers, four smaller buildings and a 47-story high-rise. The towers became known as a symbol of New York, and were prominently featured on every postcard of the Manhattan skyline.

Manhattan's World Trade Center, designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, was completed in 1973. It consisted of two towers, four smaller buildings and a 47-story high-rise. The towers were the tallest buildings in the world for a whole year, until the Sears Tower in Chicago surpassed them. The towers became known as a symbol of New York, and were prominently featured on every postcard of the Manhattan skyline. 50,000 people worked there, from all over the world.

Then came September 11, 2001, when life, not only in the United States but around the world, changed forever. In a well-coordinated attack, terrorists hijacked passenger planes and crashed two of them into the towers. In the aftermath, all seven buildings in the complex were destroyed and almost 3,000 people died. What was once a thriving center of life became a site of desolation - Ground Zero.

Paul Goldberger writes:
"There is no instruction manual to tell a city what to do when its tallest buildings are suddenly gone, and there is a void in its heart. There is no road map to lead its officials and its citizens along the route of renewal, no guidebook to help them figure out whether renewal, in fact, is what they even want. When the twin towers of the World Trade Center - the two tallest skyscrapers in New York and each the second tallest in the United States - were destroyed on September 11, 2001, there was not only no precedent for dealing with the enormity of the loss, there was no system for figuring out what should happen next:

Should the towers be put back?
Should they be replaced by a triumphant substitute or by a sober memorial?
Or both?
Or would it be better if nothing at all were built where these buildings had been?
Who should be empowered to decide all of this, and by what means?
Should it be done right away, with the wounds raw, or in a few years, when people would feel different about this piece of land?
And who should pay for it?"

Author Paul Goldberger is intimately acquainted with the city of Manhattan, having spent more than 25 years at The New York Times, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for his architectural criticism, and he's been the architectural critic for the New Yorker magazine for the last seven years.

He's also intimately acquainted with the architectural world, and the world of big business, and the world of politics, all of which was on display in the weeks and months following the aftermath of the attack, and brings us into that world in this well-written chronicle.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, under the chairmanship of John C. Whitehead, was created by Governor George Pataki to supervise the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. They released their ideas for the site the summer of 2002, but the designs were not well received by the public. So the corporation decided to make it a design competition open to all architects. Each design was to include "office and commercial space, facilities for cultural events, public areas, and a memorial to the victims of the September 11 attacks."

Up From Zero is a fascinating chronicle, not only of the genuinely sincere efforts to create a fitting memorial to the victims of 9/11, but also of the inevitable human flaws, foibles and politicking that worked behind the scenes, as big business and insurance companies debated who should have to pay for the land and the rebuilding, as architects did battle among themselves over whose design was best, to the families of all of the victims who each desired something different as a tribute to their loved ones.

As Goldberger puts it at the end:
"The disappointment of Ground Zero is in part a failure of time. If the original architecture of the World Trade Center demonstrated a great fallacy of America in the 1960s - the fallacy of size, the beliefs that bigger was always better and that American might and power could solve any problem - the planning process since September 11 demonstrates the fallacy of America in the 1990s and beyond, which is the fallacy speed, the belief that faster is always better.

Faster is not better when you are trying to get beyond tragedy, because it denies the reality of mourning and of human nature, which is that psychological wounds take as much, if not more, time to heal than physical wounds and that you cannot rebuild a city successfully when you do not know entirely what you want it to be and when the wounds are still fairly raw.

We have demonstrated many things in the in the rebuilding process, but patience is not one of them. We rushed into it, desperate to renew, as if building quickly would prove to the terrorists that our culture was strong and able and still on top of the world. But the pressure to build quickly was also, in part, a pressure to avoid rethinking the site from the beginning and to consider what alternative uses might, in the long run, serve the city better."

Table of Contents
1) Architecture Takes the Stage
2) Rockefeller's Vision: The Original World Trade Center
3) Reclaiming the Skyline: The Decision to Rebuild
4) The Future of Memory: Finding Common Ground for Money and Culture
5) Listening to the City: What Matters and Who Decides?
6) Fitting It All On Sixteen Acres
7) Boldness and Vision: The Public Demands More
8) The Innovative Design Study
9) Making Things Better: The City Responds to the Designs
10) Architecture as Democracy: Building A Consensus
11) Libeskind and THINK: Design Gets Personal
12) The Marriage of Politics and Building
13) An Unnatural Hybrid: The Collaboration of Childs and Libeskind
14) The Memorial Competition
15) Reflecting Absence
16) Commerce and Culture at Ground Zero
Epilogue: The Limits of Architecture
Sources and Acknowledgments
Index