by Lionel Bascom — March 16th, 2007 — 1 comment
A Christian view of the many controversies swirling around construction of the Freedom Tower has again zeroed in on designer Daniel Libeskind, the “latecomer” whose architectural vision did not see light of day until recently.
Libeskind is the outsider who came to New York and won the coveted Freedom Tower job.
World Magazine, a Christine website says Libeskind had help.
“What’s his secret? How can one man prevail in the face of such a task and given such odds? In Libeskind’s case, by knowing whom to listen to: his mother, his wife, and Saint Augustine.
Libeskind heeded the words of Augustine from the bowels of Ground Zero on a rainy day in November 2002. He had bested over 400 design entries to become one of seven finalists in a design competition many denounced as premature, pushed by leaseholder Larry Silverstein to recoup his 10 million square feet of office space destroyed on 9/11.
The other finalists were content to survey the site from an office window at 1 Liberty Plaza, but Libeskind wanted to go into it. With a Port Authority worker, he and his wife Nina descended a ramp to bedrock. This was the pit: a hole in Manhattan 16 acres in size at the surface and 70 feet deep that opened when the twin towers fell.
Here, Libeskind said, he felt “the enormity of the loss.” Seven stories of foundation and infrastructure that once lay beneath the World Trade Center, gone.
But down in the pit Libeskind discovered the “slurry wall,” a dam far beneath lower Manhattan, holding back the Hudson River and serving as the western foundation to the World Trade Center site. It was intact. Had it split with the force of the World Trade Center’s collapse, the New York subway system would have flooded and the city likely would have been underwater.
Libeskind says that at that moment, his hand pressed to the cold, damp slurry wall, he heard the same voice Augustine reports hearing in his Confessions. “Take it and read it. Take it and read it.” For Augustine it was a call to take up the Scriptures; for Libeskind it was a call to “read” the slurry wall, “a revelatory experience,” he says, and a metaphor for what remains when everything else falls down.”
Now that some kind of divine intervention.
10:14 PM in Uncategorized, World Trade Center, Ground Zero, Related Stories, Freedom Tower News
In reading the scriptures, St. Augustine learned that the human mind was capable, and simultaneously incapable of completely understanding Divine wisdom.
Within the human consciousness, awareness of both the mind and soul through sincere human endeavor is necessary for comprehensive understanding and completion of the divine experience. St. Augustine explained it this way, “Thus there are two wills in us, because neither of them is entire: and what is lacking to the one is present in the other.” (Confessions, 8: IX)
Although Libeskind may be able to design a structure that will contain the message through his sentience with the slurry wall, creative interpretation of this message will reveal its soul, for that will be the expression of Divinity’s Will.
Jeanne · March 16th, 2007 at 11:17 pm