Volume 52, Number 3 · February 24, 2005
Filling the Hole
By Martin Filler
Imagining Ground Zero: Official and Unofficial Proposals for the World Trade Center Site
by Suzanne Stephens with Ian Luna and Ron Broadhurst, and with a foreword by Robert A. Ivy
Architectural Record/Rizzoli, 224 pp., $60.00
Sixteen Acres: Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero
by Philip Nobel
Metropolitan, 288 pp., $25.00
Up from Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York
by Paul Goldberger
Random House, 273 pp., $24.95
Breaking Ground
by Daniel Libeskind with Sarah Crichton
Riverhead, 288 pp., $27.95
'When the gods wish to punish us,' Oscar Wilde wrote in An Ideal Husband, 'they answer our prayers.' That seems to be true in architecture, whose modern history is replete with eagerly contested public commissions that have turned out to be quite the opposite of the triumphs their winners first imagined them to be. Rarely in the past century have the most memorable buildings resulted from competitions, no matter how promising their rosters of participants. The 1922 contest for a new Chicago Tribune headquarters is now best remembered for the losing entries of leading early modernist architects such as Walter Gropius, Eliel Saarinen, and Bruno Taut. Indeed, Adolf Loos's iconic design for a tower in the form of a colossal Doric column is far more famous today than the tepid neo-Gothic pastiche by Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells that was constructed.
Review, 5280 words
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