by Lionel Bascom — August 28th, 2006 — No comments
Second guessers from the Second City are wagging their fingers at us back east again, this time suggesting that there’s more rhetoric surrounding construction of the 1,776 foot Freedom Tower than there is actual building going on here. In New York.
The last big ruckus between the two cities was about the origin of deep dish pizza. Oh and there was some barking for years about where the tallest building stood. Well, we haven’t had a dog in that fight now for some time, so “where’s the (new) beef?”
“What is a Freedom Tower made of,” asks Lynn Becker, writing for a Chicago-based website. “Pure spin,” she says. “Perhaps never before has a project been so encased in rhetoric, and never has that rhetoric turned out to be so feebly incapable of obscuring the bankruptcy of the ideas beneath,” says Becker, writing for Repeat, a website that posts “Observations and Images on Architecture, Culture and More, in Chicago and the World.” Well, coming from a place with that much bluster, maybe Becker knows a thing or two about the subject except she’s got the numbers wrong.
“In an act of truly stupendous chutzpah, architect David Childs of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill chose AIA New York’s Design Awards, whose stated purpose is to “increase awareness of outstanding architecture”, as the forum in which to present what he claims are the final drawings for the 1,368-foot-tall skyscraper to be built on the site of the World Trade Center. It’s come down to blowing smoke and using mirrors - in this case, a facade of glass prisms,” Becker says.
Of course its spin Becker.
The Freedom Tower isn’t being built on Michigan Avenue. It’s going up inside the most famous gateway there is. The gateway to America is not on Lower Wacker Drive or along the Miracle Mile of your fabulous Michigan Avenue. Our gate has to have spin, panache, if you please, because its the first thing those thongs who are still “Coming to America” see when they arrive in “New York, New York, the city so nice, they named it twice.” This is where chutzpah was turned into an art form, Madison Avenue, the birthplace of spin.
Fagitabouit!
Why it has almost become anti-American to do anything in this country of ours without spin. Grow up already. Take your spin like a real American, right between the eyes “It’s the real thing.”