Sixteen Acres : The Rebuilding of the World Trade Center Site

by Philip Nobel

• ISBN13: 9780805074949
• ISBN10: 0805074945
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2005-01-04
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Summary

When we stand in downtown Manhattan in the future and look up and ask, 'Why?'-Why is it so strange, so rude, so striving, so right, so wrong?-we will have Sixteen Acres to give us the answers. Tracing the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site from graveyard to playground for high design, insurgent critic Philip Nobel strips away the hyperbole to reveal the secret life of the century's most charged building project. Providing a tally of deceptions and betrayals, a look at the meaning of events beyond the pieties of the moment, and a running bestiary of the main players-developers and bureaucrats, star architects and amateur fantasists, politicians and the well-spun press-Nobel's book bares the crucial moments as factions and institutions converge to create a noisy new culture at Ground Zero. Tragic and comic by turns, full of low dealings and high dud-geon, Sixteen Acres takes us behind the scenes at a site in search of its sanctity, exposing the reconstruction as the flawed product of a complicated city: driven by money, hamstrung by politics, burdened by the wounds it is somehow supposed to heal.

Author Biography

Philip Nobel writes for The New York Times; The Nation; Artforum; Architectural Digest, where he is a contributing writer; and Metropolis, where his column, "Far Corner," runs monthly. Trained as an architect, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Table of Contents

From Sixteen Acres:
There are 205,951 acres in New York City. On the morning of September 12, 2001, sixteen of those acres were in ruins. They were wrecked and burning, the scene of an unprecedented crime. But they were not exactly "erased" as so many papers reported, not "wiped off the map" as another, far away, would claim. Even in the hell of the moment, the site had not lost its principal, irresistible attribute: its value, as the largest parcel of well-placed land in the nation's first home to big-time money handling. The buildings had come down, but the land survived, fated to have its future troubled by the demands of the new American symbol that must rise there. Soon the whole nation would be searching for that elusive cure-all-hundreds of instant folk architects took pen in hand to sketch it the very day of the attack-but in the end it would arrive as only New York could deliver it, in a flurry of deals, in the exchange of memoranda, in handshakes and whispers, and (soon, soon) in the siren lines of architectural fancy. On September 12, 2001, the site was stilled, off the grid, newly haunted, but it was not out of the city's great game. Far from it-soon it would be the only game in town.

Excerpts

From Sixteen Acres:
There are 205,951 acres in New York City. On the morning of September 12, 2001, sixteen of those acres were in ruins. They were wrecked and burning, the scene of an unprecedented crime. But they were not exactly "erased" as so many papers reported, not "wiped off the map" as another, far away, would claim. Even in the hell of the moment, the site had not lost its principal, irresistible attribute: its value, as the largest parcel of well-placed land in the nation's first home to big-time money handling. The buildings had come down, but the land survived, fated to have its future troubled by the demands of the new American symbol that must rise there. Soon the whole nation would be searching for that elusive cure-all-hundreds of instant folk architects took pen in hand to sketch it the very day of the attack-but in the end it would arrive as only New York could deliver it, in a flurry of deals, in the exchange of memoranda, in handshakes and whispers, and (soon, soon) in the siren lines of architectural fancy. On September 12, 2001, the site was stilled, off the grid, newly haunted, but it was not out of the city's great game. Far from it-soon it would be the only game in town.

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Excerpted from Sixteen Acres: Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero by Philip Nobel
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