The Freedom Tower

My singular fondness for clichés almost found it’s way into The Times, America’s newspaper of record but The Times rescued its own reputation by asking the question, “is imitation the sincerest form of architecture?”
I’m sure I do not have to remind the editors of The Times that the hackneyed phrase they meant to honor is “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” I would have had no problems using it myself, because I think highly of the judicious use of the well places cliché.
So, I’m no stranger to trite phrases that still do the job of newer versions of the likes of “the early bird gets the worm,” or “in for a penny, in for a pound” phrases. I’m also no stranger to getting beat on stories since I gave up being a newsman years ago in favor of writing longer pieces that sometimes turn into books on obscure or neglected subjects like the long-dead savings and loan scandals of the 1980s. So, who gets the story first these days is a very hard nut for me to crack in these times of so-called instant news. News is a relative commodity and it seems as if everybody is claiming to be on first, even Fox, a network that hasn’t bothered to let the facts ever get in the way of a good story.
But I digress.
The Times story a year ago about whose design ultimately is what’s going up at Ground Zero and mine of a few days ago, may one day become the centerpiece at dinner parties in posh quarters of lower Manhattan where “whose on first” has become a burning question related to the design of The Freedom Tower. The Times brought up the question about design elements of the tower first when the ruling was first handed down a year ago. My version of events suggested it was a recent event, the lawsuit I mean. My bad. The question over whose drawings came first, has still become part of the mosaic of this downtown oddessy.
Thomas Shine, a 2000 graduate of Yale, alleges that architect David Childs at least borrowed design elements of a building Childs saw in drawings Shine showed him years before the World Trade Center attacks. Childs denies the claim.
“In architectural copyright cases, juries usually determine whether or not substantial similarities exist between two designs based on the impressions of an ordinary observer rather than an architecture expert,” Robert Brauneis, the co-director of George Washington Law School’s Dean Dinwoodey Center for Intellectual Property Studies, told the Yale Daily News.