The Freedom Tower

From Gabriel Arana’s personal blog, “From Wharf and Welt,” we get this as the rag tag pieces of steel columns, insurance payments, on and off again tenants, corner stones and all of the others things that hopefully will put this Humpty Dumpty Freedom Tower project back together again:

“I was thinking about Albert Speer’s Theorie vom Ruinenwert (theory of ruin-value) that guided building construction and architectural design during the Nazi regime,” says Arana who is currently living in Ithaca, New York.

“As the Freedom Tower goes up in downtown Manhattan, the principle–to build in order to produce, in a thousand years time, elegant Roman-like ruins evidencing a powerful lost civilization–is not considered in the design and construction of our diaphanous glass skyscrapers.

When the Freedom Tower is completed, it will echo its limestone counterpart in Midtown, the Empire State Building, and be the tallest building in the world, at least for a while. As pinnacles of the world’s two largest business districts, the pair will stand as contrastive historical markers in the timeline of our national consciousness.

The Empire State Building went up during the Great Depression as unemployed workers across the country lined up at soup kitchens. It became, upon completion a year and 45 days after construction began, an instant populist monument and an escapist expression of man’s desire to lift up into the clouds, leaving the ignobility of the earth below. It was “architecture as idea”–an amorphous idea, but one that has something to do with ambition, with dreams and their accessibility.

The Freedom Tower, on the other hand, is a defiant retort.”