by Lionel Bascom — January 23rd, 2007 — 1 comment
The Freedom Tower is superfluous, according to the Gothmist, a blog that says this is the view of architect Rafael Viñoly.
Viñoly leveled this charge last week in the Third Thursday lecture series sponsored by the Downtown Alliance.
“Viñoly characterized Freedom Tower–designed by Childs and SOM–as economically inefficient and aesthetically mediocre, especially in relation to the adjacent, arguably superior office towers now being designed by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki (towers 2, 3, and 4 on the WTC site).
The crowd of around 1000 appeared amused and perhaps stirred by Viñoly’s flippant, imaginative renderings of the site depicting the Freedom Tower at half-height and then missing altogether. “You don’t lose much,” he quipped. Viñoly reasons that the Freedom Tower’s 2.6M square feet of office space could be redistributed among other towers, and observes that its chief architectural features are its cheesy name and its height as measured in feet, which is the same number used to describe how many years passed between Jesus’s birth and the American Revolution.
Finally, Viñoly compared the “comedy of errors” of designing and redesigning the Freedom Tower to the US invasion of Iraq, in the sense that the situation may be too flawed to fix. “You can’t save face–because you made a blundering mistake,” he said.
9:56 PM in Uncategorized, The Construction, World Trade Center, Ground Zero, Related Stories, Freedom Tower News
Mr. Viñoly appears to be a mediocre architect, who wishes to make a name for himself through his insults. Perhaps, he needs a lesson in emotional intelligence. Obviously, this man does not comprehend simplicity of design to illustrate structural beauty and respect for the dead, in this case, respect for the murdered.
And the attentive crowd with its smug, amused response to this inane critique should be ashamed of themselves.
Jeanne · January 23rd, 2007 at 10:48 pm