by Ken Bell

The New York Times’ Nicolai Ouroussoff fearlessly decries ”Fear In A Soaring Tower” in his “architectural appraisal” of the design for the new Freedom Tower at Ground Zero in Manhattan.
“The new obelisk-shaped tower, standing on an enormous 20-story concrete pedestal, evokes a gigantic glass paperweight with a toothpick stuck on top,” he writes, adding parenthetically with a sneer that “the toothpick-like spire was added so that the tower would reach its required symbolic height of 540 meters, or 1,776 feet – a reference to the year independence was declared.” How crass!
Ouroussoff laments that “in its earlier incarnation . . . the tower’s eastern wall formed a narrow pedestrian alley that became a key entry to the memorial site, leading directly between the proposed Freedom Center complex and the Memorial’s north pool. The alleyway, which was flanked on its other side by the Frank Gehry-designed performing arts center, was fraught with tension; it is now a formless park littered with trees.” Littered with trees!
But what particularly galls Ouroussoff is that “what the tower evokes . . . are ancient obelisks, blown up to a preposterous scale and clad in heavy sheaths of reinforced glass – an ideal symbol for an empire enthralled with its own power, and unaware that it is fading [Emphasis mine here and throughout] . . . [that] it will be seen by the world as a chilling expression of how the United States is reshaping its identity in a post-Sept. 11 context . . . fascinating in the way that Albert Speer’s architectural nightmares were fascinating – as expressions of the values of a particular time and era [do you suppose he has some other particular time in mind?] . . . [that] Freedom Tower embodies, in its way, a world shaped by fear.”
Humorously obsessed with his own massive weight of political symbolism, Ouroussoff denounces “this obsession with symbolism [which] extends all the way up to the tower’s spire . . . pandering to public sentiment . . .”
“All of this could be more easily forgiven,” Ouroussoff sniffs, “if it were simply a result of bad design. But ground zero is not really being shaped by architects. It is being shaped by politicians.” It is “a monument to a society that has turned its back on any notion of cultural openness.”
I have yet to form an aesthetic judgment about the design for Freedom Tower. But if Ouroussoff despises it, I think I’m going to like it very much.