Critique

By Robert Campbell, FAIA

A critic is supposed to stimulate a
dialogue, not be one. So wrote the
great Clement Greenberg.
I seem to be one of only a
few critics around who isn’t crazy
about the new Museum of Modern
Art in New York. Maybe I’ll change
my tune after a few more visits—
Greenberg reversed his judgments
sometimes, and it’s greatly to his
credit—and if I do, I’ll perform a
mea culpa. But for now ….
It isn’t that MoMA’s bad. There’s
nothing bad about it. It’s just that it
isn’t good enough. It’s elegant, but it
lacks life and imagination, and those
are qualities we used to associate
with Modernism.
New museums often open with
a blizzard of hype. It’s hard for critics
not to be caught up in the excitement.
Years ago, that happened
with I.M. Pei’s East Building for the
National Gallery in Washington,
D.C. More recently, it happened with
Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern
in London. I didn’t like either of
them at the time, and I still don’t.
And I think a consensus opinion,
over the years, has borne me out.
I say this despite the AIA’s recent
Twenty-five Year Award to the East
Building. I recall when the East
Building opened, the architect Jean
Paul Carlhian, who founded the AIA’s
Committee on Design, said: “It is an
airline terminal.” It was and it is, with
most of the art crammed into residual
spaces around the edges of a
Robert Campbell is the architecture
critic of The Boston Globe and
received the 2004 Award of Honor
from the Boston Society of Architects.
vast, self-regarding, nearly empty
concourse.
Anyway, here are my problems
with MoMA:
There isn’t any architecture.
The design architect, Yoshio
Taniguchi, was quoted more than
once as saying that if MoMA gave
him enough money, he could
make the architecture disappear.
Unfortunately, he’s succeeded.
Most of the museum consists of an
endless rabbit warren of more or
less identical white-walled galleries
with track-lit ceilings. Every attempt
is made to remove any sense of the
presence of architecture. A typical
gallery wall, for example, appears
not to touch the ceiling, the floor, or
the adjacent walls. Instead, all surfaces
are divided from one another
by a thin recessed shadow line. The
effect is to make the wall appear to
be floating, without substance. It
looks not like a wall, but like a white
projection screen. The paintings
on it, as a result, begin to feel like
projected images. You are in the
placeless, timeless world of the slide
lecture. Because the wall doesn’t
feel real, neither does the artwork.
You begin to feel unreal yourself.
Architecture has failed to create a
place that either the paintings or
you yourself can inhabit with a
sense of presence.
MoMA argues that it was trying
to avoid creating a “destination
building,” like Frank Gehry’s Bilbao,
the kind of building that can upstage
its contents. “It’s all about the art,”
one curator told me. But this is a
false dichotomy. The choice is not
between no architecture and too
much architecture. What’s wanted
is the right amount of architecture.
Many museums—to cite a few, the
Kimbell and Mellon by Louis Kahn;
the Maeght and Miro by Josep Lluis
Sert; the De Menil, Beyeler, and
Nasher by Renzo Piano; the Bregenz
by Peter Zumthor; the Pulitzer by
Tadao Ando; the Dia:Beacon by
Robert Irwin and OpenOffice—all
find ways to articulate space clearly
enough to give the artworks a place
within which to exist. And they all
do it without overwhelming the art.
Lost in space
Besides the walls, a similar game
is often played with the floor.
Sculptures, chairs, or other objects
stand on white platforms that seem
to float above the floor like rafts or
ice floes. Like the projection-screen

walls,
the floes remove the objects
from the world and the viewer and
make them a kind of disembodied
media experience.
There’s no parti. There’s
nothing wrong with white-walled
galleries up to a point. It’s fine to
step off the sidewalk in Chelsea or
57th Street, wander through three
or four gallery rooms, and return to
the street, the trees, and the cars.
Something happens, though, when
you multiply those few rooms into
a few dozen. The change becomes
not merely one of quantity, but also
one of quality. At that point, you
need a new and bolder architectural
idea to generate order. It’s
lacking at MoMA. The only attempt
to create a center that can magnetize
the galleries into some kind
of perceptible whole is a multistory
atrium that begins at the second
level and stops short of the roof.
Holes are cut into the sides of theatrium, so that you can sometimes
overlook it from a gallery. It’s a
sort of miniature, rectangular
Guggenheim. It’s wholly inadequate
as a parti idea. It’s insufficient to
orient you in a museum that at
times feels like a trackless waste
of white tundra. The museum’s
curators and architects have taken
the old MoMA and multiplied it
sideways and upward, without
feeling the need to for an organizing
concept.
The air-to-art ratio is too
high. The volume of empty air is
enormous in places like the entry
lobby, the atrium, and the secondfloor
and top-floor galleries. As a
result, artworks intended to confront
or absorb you with their bold size
and scale—Pollocks, Miros, Kellys,
Monets, and others—now find
themselves in spaces that are tailored
to fit them. In proportion to the
space they occupy, these big paint

The elegant Long Residence embodies Cutler

By Victoria Medgyesi

If architect James Cutler, FAIA, had his way, Orcas Island would be
nothing but blue and green—at least as seen from the air.
Cruising by helicopter over one of the most serene spots in the
Pacific Northwest’s San Juan Island chain, he managed to get his
message across despite the ear-splitting noise. “Look,” he shouted, as we
passed over a recently completed project. “Isn’t that great? You can barely
see the place at all.”
Honoring geographic conditions, responding to the integrity of
natural materials, and staying true to a romantic vision have long formed
the philosophic backbone of Cutler Anderson Architects. The firm’s
ability to translate that philosophy into sophisticated expressions of individuality
was what brought one couple to Cutler’s door.
Their site was steep but buildable, lush with second-growth
forest, and in possession of a sweeping view that overlooked a wide saltwater
channel and nearby Shaw Island. Just as fortuitous, says Cutler, was
the couple’s playful, experimental streak, which he shares. It was this set
of particulars and the relatively simple programmatic desires of the
client—a serious kitchen, truly private spaces, room for family gatherings—
that shaped the design of the vacation retreat.
Responding to the steep, wooded site, Cutler supported the
house on 18 sets of peeled-wood tripods engineered to provide enough
lateral stability to dispense with conventional shear elements. The tripods
were attached to western red cedar log beams by concealed steel plates
and bolts. Each was then visually punched through the floor and
extended down to a steel connection at the footing. A system of rafters
graduated in size relative to span resists the pull of gravity.
Cutler wrapped the building’s system of wooden bones in an
exterior skin of glass, aluminum, and cedar shingle. He then topped the

LIKE GOLDSWORTHY’S SCULPTURE,
CUTLER’S WORK MAKES A STRONG
STATEMENT ABOUT NATURE AND STRUCTURE.

shell with a layer of two-by-six spacers that support a large overhanging
metal roof and create an insulated cavity below it. Given the clients’
emphasis on privacy, the shed roof serves to visually insulate the structure
from the road above.
Each room in the 2,035-square-foot house opens to the expansive
cedar terrace through a set of 8-by-6-foot, custom sliding doors,
providing multifaceted views to all the interior spaces. A corridor running
the full length of the uphill side of the house provides access to all
of the rooms—the main living area, bedroom suite, guest room, and
two full baths.
Visitors to the house get their first peek of the building’s distinctive
wood tripods through low-to-the-ground windows along the
uphill entry side. The structural elements reach their full 15-foot-high
glory along the glass curtain wall facing the view. As was Cutler’s intention,
the tripods refer to the trees on the other side of the glass—an
idea inspired by Scottish sculptor Andy Goldsworthy’s installations
involving fallen trees.
Cutler credits his contractor, Lowell Alford, for executing an
unorthodox design that combines sophisticated engineering with
ancient materials. Alford even harvested the logs from land owned by
his father and hired a team of high school students to peel the logs prior
to off-site assembly.
Like Goldsworthy’s sculpture, Cutler’s work makes a strong
statement about nature and structure. It’s a soft/hard balance echoed in
the muted beech-wood floors, the whitewashed pine walls, and the clean
lines of the custom wood furniture and cabinetry, much of which was
designed by Cutler himself.

ING ARCHITECTUREAND ART BUILDat Prairie View A&M in Texas

At first,we were afraid to ask the brick what it wanted to be,” says
Michael Rotondi, FAIA, of his design for the Architecture and
Art Building at Texas’s Prairie View A&M University.“What if it
still wanted to be an arch? But then the answer came: It wanted
to dance.” So, Rotondi; his partner, Clark Stevens, AIA; and their firm, Roto,
experimented with the material, creating a sheathing, with great rhythmic
pleats and gaping flaps, that billows like a huge, windblown garment.
Brick was a given, mandated by the campus planning guidelines.
But Rotondi, a seasoned educator,who had headed the Southern California
Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) for a decade, saw this requirement—and
the entire project—as an opportunity to challenge the conventions of materials
and spark the imaginations of architecture students.
In interviewing for the commission, Rotondi told Ikhlas Sabouni,
Prairie View’s dean of architecture, that he was ready to “download 30 years
of experience as an architect and educator.”He proposed not only to review
the curriculum, but also teach the students, as part of the design process.
With the search committee’s approval, Sabouni soon signed on, dedicated,
as she puts it, to finding “an architect of national renown, who’d create a
laboratory for design, a beautiful structure that students could learn from.”
Just as Rotondi had been eager to embrace Native American culture
when he built at Sinte Gleska University, on South Dakota’s Rosebud
Reservation [record, November 1999, page 84], he hoped to gain an
understanding of Prairie View’s culture. Historically, this 130-year-old
branch of Texas A&M University, sited 45 miles northwest of Houston, has
had a predominantly African-American student body. In 2000, the school
won a $190 million Office for Civil Rights settlement to compensate for
long-term denial of adequate financial resources. The university allocated
the funds for four new structures for the following disciplines: architecture
(which shared a building with engineering), nursing, juvenile justice, and
electrical engineering. In addition to the architecture school, with its 225
undergraduate and graduate students, Roto’s $20 million, 108,000-squarefoot
building would house construction-science and community-development
programs, as well as the Community Urban Rural Enhancement
Service and the Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture,
with its focus on African-American contributions to the state.
Rotondi began interacting with the students through nonarchitectural,
almost meditative exercises aimed, he says, at “heightening
awareness, concentration, and focus,”while opening windows to their subcultures.
After getting his pupils to savor and describe the textures and
unfolding flavors of “a fresh food item that a grandmother would prepare,”
he asked them to bring in a favorite piece of music. They diagrammed what
they heard on 6-foot-long pages, tracing melodic lines and rhythmic structures,
and relating the drawings back to the body’s movement through space.
“From gospel and rhythm and blues to bluegrass, all the music had roots in
East or West Africa,” the architect says.“So, right there, in those incremental
rhythms and long melody lines, we found our building’s ordering system.”
Though Rotondi considered various partis, he settled on a long
configuration with a central space and linear arrangement of studios—a
diagram that had proved successful in SCI-Arc’s latest incarnation. Prairie
View initially offered him a site buried at the back of the campus, but
Rotondi convinced the university president (a man committed to architecture
as an educational tool) to place the building as a gateway to the school.
As realized (in conjunction with HKS), the three-story, 450-footlong,
concrete-framed structure presents its most eclectic face on its south,
or entry, side.Here, a curving shell of brick wraps the cultural center, at the
building’s west end, while a brise-soleil of painted, perforated steel veils

DESERT BROOM LIBRARY in Phoenix as

Whether the result ofWill Bruder setting a new standard for
library design with his 1995 flagship Phoenix Central
Library, the city’s 2001 move to make the Phoenix Public
Library (PPL) a separate city department, or the rainmaking
by Toni Garvey, the city’s dynamo of a head librarian, Phoenix
continues to build libraries that break the mold and redefine the building
type. With the completion of the 15,000-square-foot Desert Broom
Library, in north Phoenix, Richärd+Bauer takes the concept of redefinition
to another level, creating a striking yet harmonious addition to the
desert landscape, clad in weathered steel.
Phoenix, the nation’s sixth-largest city, with a population of
nearly 1.5 million, has given the PPL, with its 14 public libraries, the freedom
and support it needs to create its identity with new services, new
branches, and a new attitude about library design. “Cities can go in one
direction or another with libraries,” says Garvey. “They can go with a
cookie-cutter, or they can create libraries that make a statement.”
Richärd+Bauer had worked on several libraries within Phoenix
and nearby Scottsdale, including a renovation of a Bruder-designed branch.
Its latest project, which includes a park, was a chance for the firm to create
a destination that would qualify for LEED Silver status, sit gently on the
virgin desert landscape of its 45-acre site, and stand out without imposing
on the land. “Communities are erasing the desert,” says principal Jim
Richärd, AIA. “We wanted to build responsibly. Also, in this kind of site,
little cornices don’t mean anything.You need big gestures.”
For Richärd, building in the arid Sonoran Desert meant preserving
the authenticity of what was there. Desert Broom’s site, with its
braided streams, arroyos, and abundance of wild brush and saguaros,
offered a metaphor that gave the project direction. A young saguaro needs
the shade and nutrients provided by an older, stronger tree or shrub, and
the design of the library embraces the metaphor physically—the library’s
25,000-square-foot roof extends 60 feet from the building, to shade visitors
and provide comfortable outdoor spaces—and philosophically.
“Libraries nurture intellectual growth,” says Richärd. “We took that concept
a few steps further.”
The brain nourishment begins before you even get to the front
door of Desert Broom. The building and parking lot are nestled in desert
wilderness, and visitors approach the entrance from the northwest, crossing
over an arroyo on a perforated-metal bridge. Immediately, the right
angles of the building are contradicted by a random pattern of slender, 4-
inch-diameter steel columns that continue throughout the building and

COMMERCIAL AND RESIDENTIAL INTERIOR DECORATION, AND FULL SCOPE OF RE-DESIGN AND FENG SHUI FIRM NOW IN TOWN

Edited by Carly Zander, assoc. news editor

From the Mediterranean, through the Caribbean and the Floridian Atlantic to the South California Pacific, Bringing a Good Mix of Services From Coast to Coast.

SAN DIEGO, Calif. - May 7th 2003 /Send2Press Newswire/ -- Ellypses Corporation announces its relocation from Miami, Florida, to the Southern California market, offering a fresh "scenery effect" approach directly to consumers of the thousands of available units in town.

What makes Ellypses unique, is its staff's global background: from eastern to western Architectural and Interior Design influences, based in studies conducted in Venezia (Italy) and Caracas (Venezuela), its Design reflects styles ranging from the Venetian splendor, the Milanese austerity, the Florentine renaissance, the "white" Mediterranean to the colorful Caribbean and the Floridian tropical ambiance.

According to the San Diego housing information, the County requires each year more than 23,000 residential units to fill the needs created by new jobs. For the year of 2003 the average estimated is 27,000. As a result, the building industry supplies a high volume of housing and commercial units, being a big part of the projects located in Downtown San Diego. In fact, the vertical housing boom is evident as the Downtown skyline reveals towers of residential construction climbing upward on every corner, working hard to create the 4,120 living units right now in progress.

In this context, Ellypses services match perfectly: Full Interior Design, from concept, through timing, budgeting and managing process, to realization; Re-Design, which include "staging" homes for the Real Estate industry or just for a fresh new look; "Decorate-it-yourself", guiding the consumer taste to a harmonic result; "Just married" couples move-in services, organizing his and hers into Theirs; Seasonal Décor and Personal Shopper Services.

Ellypses also offers Studio Art Direction Services, Set Design for TV Productions and Photo Shootings. In addition the staff has an extensive Classical/Architectural Feng Shui knowledge that integrates dynamic energies of the inner world and outer environments, specializing in Land Selection and Site Analysis; Layout Concept; Placement of Furniture and Accessories; Plant Selection; Color Scheme and Water Features.

According to the different services and projects offered, professional fees may vary from $50.00 to $200.00 on an hourly basis. Packaged Services also available on specific project designs.

"Our Designers listen, understand and ultimately create places that exceed Clients expectations, transforming ordinary rooms into magical spaces," said Ellypses Corporation President Sara Ranghi.

About ELLYPSES CORPORATION, Inc. - Beyond the staff professionalism and knowledge, Ellypses, a Design and Real Estate Corporation, was created in Florida in 2001, to bring together 30 years of experience in the many different latitudes, from Venezia to Margarita Island and from the Florida Keys to San Diego, always where the sea is; combining minimal urban design with the costumer's personal taste.

BECK OFFICE FURNITURE ACQUIRES TWO COMPANIES IN MARYLAND AS PART OF THEIR NATIONAL ACQUISITION AND EXPANSION PLAN

BECK OFFICE FURNITURE ACQUIRES TWO COMPANIES IN MARYLAND AS PART OF THEIR NATIONAL ACQUISITION AND EXPANSION PLAN
Edited by Christopher Simmons, senior news editor

Founded in Long Island in 1957, Beck Continues to Expand Space Planning Services and Additional Private Label Brand Showrooms through Acquisitions

NEW YORK, NY - Feb. 3, 2003 /Send2Press Newswire/ -- Beck Office Furniture, Inc. (www.beckofficefurniture.com) today announced the acquisition of American Space Planners of Owings Mill, MD, and Advanced Office Furniture, of Laurel, MD. These locations add substantially to Beck's existing large, fully stocked, New York showrooms in Huntington Station, Mineola, Rockville Centre, Ronkonkoma, and Manhattan, NY.

The former owner of American Space Planners, Wendy Lyons will stay on as manager of the renamed Beck American Space Planners. The former owner of Advanced Office furniture will stay on as manager of the renamed Beck Office Furniture of Maryland.

"These acquisitions give us additional facilities in key customer markets," says company President and CEO, Kenneth Beck, "and are the next step in our national showroom expansion. With the challenged economy, we've been able to make several acquisitions over the past six months, first locally in New York, and now in Maryland."

Concludes Beck, "With our e-commerce web site we already service companies around the country. What separates us from the unsuccessful dot-com companies in the furniture industry is our showrooms. The Internet has helped us identify customer markets in which we should have a brick-and-mortar presence, and we are acquiring or opening showrooms in those key markets."

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Beck Office Furniture, Inc. is the oldest and largest commercial office furniture dealer on Long Island, New York. Joe Beck started Joe Beck Desk Co. in a Manhattan warehouse 50 years ago based on the philosophy: "If you give the customer great value and even better service, you'll have a customer for life."

Beck Office Furniture, Inc. offers its clients the professional expert service normally expected and received by Fortune 500 companies, but tailored to smaller businesses.

Beck has an in-house team of office designers, each holding design degrees who provide complete space planning services. Beck carries both brand names, and private label furniture and office systems manufactured by top companies -- at a fraction of the name brand price, but with equal quality.

The company is privately owned. Corporate headquarters are located at 48 Jericho Turnpike, Mineola, NY 11501, USA.

Olympic switch: New York rejects Manhattan

Olympic switch: New York rejects Manhattan
stadium, proposes another in Queens
The highly contentious New York
Sports and Convention Center,
proposed for the Far West Side
neighborhood of Manhattan, was
defeated on June 7 as New York
State Assembly Speaker Sheldon
Silver and Senate Majority Leader
Joseph L. Bruno refused to approve
the plan. The vote ended New York
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s multiyear
quest to secure a new stadium,
not only for the New York Jets, but
possibly for the 2012 Olympic
Games. The city’s Olympic bid, however,
was given new hope a few days
later when Bloomberg announced a
new stadium plan in Queens.
The $2.2 billion, 75,000-seat
West Side stadium, which was
being designed for the Jets by New
York–based Kohn Pedersen Fox
(KPF), had recently been replanned
to better fit the scale and character
of the low-rise industrial neighborhood,
including an almost 40 percent
reduction in height, and the addition
of a semitransparent glass facade.
But such efforts came to no avail.
At a press conference on June
7, Silver, who held the deciding vote
on the state’s Public Authorities
Control Board, pointed to several
pressing city issues as reasons for
not supporting the plan. The most
important, perhaps, was his position
that Far West Side development
would have siphoned financial support
from Lower Manhattan, which
is within Silver’s legislative district.
About $1.6 billion of the tab
would have been paid for by the
Jets, including a $250 million payment
to the Metropolitan
Transportation Authority
(MTA) for the West Side
railyard site over which
the stadium was to have
been built. The remaining
$600 million would have
been split by the city and
state as a public subsidy.
“Considering the challenges
already facing the
city and the state of New
York, this plan, at best, is
premature,” said Silver.
Predictably, stadium
supporters such as the
Jets, Bloomberg, and
Governor George Pataki
were outraged. The Jets
pinned much of the
blame on the Cablevision
Corporation, which owns
nearby Madison Square
Garden, which would have
competed with the stadium,
and had bid against the
Jets for the MTA property. Bloomberg
also warned that the stadium’s
defeat might not only cost the city
the Olympics, thousands of jobs, and
significant tax revenue, but might discourage
builders from pursuing other
projects in the city. “One of the great
dangers is that developers are going
to get disheartened and say, ‘I can’t
build anything in New York City
because the politics always get in
the way,’ ” he told reporters on
June 8. Bloomberg is not alone in
bemoaning the wariness of the local
government to fund large-scale projects,
although many support its
ability to veto developers’ plans.
The stadium had been one of
the most controversial building projects
in recent city history, as many
felt it would siphon money from
needed projects, ruin the character
and scale of the neighborhood, break
up connections with the Hudson
River, and bring unmanageable traffic
and crowds into the area on game
days. Supporters felt the project
would not only be a boon to sports
fans, but would help catalyze the
Far West Side, or Hudson Yards
District, which is a 40-square-block
area enclosed by 42nd and 30th
Streets and 8th and 11th Avenues in
Manhattan. The area, which has long
lain dormant, was recently rezoned
to allow significant amounts of commercial
and residential development.
For KPF, which would not
comment, the project’s failure
means the loss of several years of
work. Meanwhile, as the Jets decide
whether to pursue the stadium with
private funds (MTA chairman Peter
Kalikow said on June 9 that if the
team remains interested, the
agency would follow through on the
deal), other area developers are
turning their eyes on the railyards
site, and on the rest of the area.
A second chance in Queens
While the city’s chances to lure the
Olympic games looked bleak after
the West Side stadium defeat, they
improved on June 13 as the city and
the New York Mets announced a plan
to build a new stadium for the Mets in
Flushing, Queens, which could be
converted into an Olympic-size arena
should New York win the games.
The stadium, to open in 2009,
would replace Shea Stadium and
hold 45,000 fans for baseball. It
could be converted into an 80,000-
seat stadium for the Olympics after
the 2011 baseball season. “It wasn’t
our first choice, but it’s an awful good
alternative,” the mayor said. “New
Yorkers aren’t quitters. We don’t just
walk away from our future.”
Mets principal owner Fred
Wilpon told mlb.com, the official Web
site of Major League Baseball, that
the Mets’ new stadium would likely
look similar to Ebbets Field, the longtime
home of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
A plan for such a stadium, by HOK
Sport+Venue+Event, with a brickand-
limestone facade and exposed
steel girders, was first proposed by
the Mets in 1998. The cost of the
stadium, Wilpon said, would likely be
around $600 million, paid for by the
Mets. Construction will begin next
year, regardless of whether the city
wins its Olympic bid. The city and
state plan to provide $180 million to
upgrade supporting infrastructure,
and about $100 million to make the
stadium Olympic-ready, if necessary.
NYC2012, the committee organized
to bring the Olympics to New York,
will contribute $142 million toward
this cost. The 35,000-seat addition
required for the games would be
removed after their conclusion.
Unlike the Manhattan stadium,
there appears to be little political
opposition to the Queens stadium
plan, which would also include press
and broadcast centers, to be built
near the stadium in Willets Point.
New York is competing with London,
Paris, Madrid, and Moscow for the
2012 games. The host city will be
chosen on July 6 in Singapore. S.L.

World Trade Center cultural building designed to float and disappear

World Trade Center cultural building designed to float and disappear
New York State leaders and the
Lower Manhattan Development
Corporation (LMDC) unveiled a
schematic design for the first of
two cultural buildings at the World
Trade Center site on May 19. The
building, designed by Norwegian
firm Snøhetta, will house New York’s
Drawing Center and a new museum
called the International Freedom
Center. Frank Gehry is designing a
performing arts center that would be
located across the street to the north.
The Snøhetta building, which
will sit on the northeast corner of
the Trade Center Memorial’s plaza,
has been designed to minimize
interference with the memorial. In
contrast to the planned 1,776-foot
Freedom Tower, the cultural center
(whose square footage is not yet
determined) would be a low, horizontal
building, with clear sight lines
from Greenwich Street, to its east,
to the memorial on the west. Its
ethereal surface, whose primary
materials were not disclosed, will be
covered with glass prisms.
Snøhetta principal Kjetil Thorsen
explained the “tabletop design” for
the structure, developed with Buro
Happold engineers’ New York office,
whereby the bulk of the building
would be hung from a supporting
structure at its roof. That structure,
in turn, would be supported at its
corners. A processional ramp would
lead visitors up from ground level to
the exhibition and auditorium spaces
above. Thorsen’s Snøhetta partner,
Craig Dykers, said that the architects
worked with the Freedom Center
and Drawing Center in biweekly
workshops over a 90-day period.
The Drawing Center is the only
nonprofit organization in the country
that focuses on the medium of
drawing. The International Freedom
Center will tell “freedom’s story,”
according to its mission statement,
including “a multimedia collage of
some of freedom’s most inspiring
moments, as well as galleries and
temporary exhibits.”
New York’s Mayor Michael
Bloomberg attempted to preempt
criticism from the families of
September 11 victims by compli-
menting “a design that integrates
the memorial, and is respectful of
the buildings around it.” But some
9/11 family members didn’t accept
such reassurances.
Anthony Gardner, chairman of
the World Trade Center United Family
Group, thinks the Freedom Center’s
program is too close to that of the
memorial’s 9/11 museum, and will
upstage the memorial. “The rhetoric
says that the memorial is the centerpiece,
but the reality is it’s an
afterthought. We’re opposed to any
plans to locate a non-memorialrelated
building within the 4-acre
memorial quadrant.” Gardner feels
that if Snøhetta’s building were a
September 11 museum, “that’s a
different story, but our center is relegated
to being underground. I feel
it’s an attempt to sanitize the site,
to make it more attractive for the
office buildings.”
New York’s Governor George
Pataki, who has been under fire for
delays at the World Trade Center
site, announced a timeline for the
cultural center and for other buildings
at the site. He says that new
plans for the Freedom Tower, which
is being redesigned to address
safety concerns, would be presented
at the end of June. This
summer, construction will begin on
the Santiago Calatrava–designed
PATH terminal. Crews will break
ground to build the memorial plaza
itself in 2006, and the cultural center
will break ground in 2007. No
budget has been announced for the
cultural center. Kevin Lerner

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Bendheim Wall Systems and Lamberts bring you LINIT channel
glass, a brilliant solution for creating breathtaking facades that are
impossible to achieve with conventional glass wall applications..
For three generations, Bendheim and Glasfabrik Lamberts, the largest
independently-owned glass factory in Europe, have worked as a team
to deliver outstanding quality and service to North American architects,
builders and glaziers.