J Gardner, NYSun, dissects the architect's impulse of personality (@WTC) by contrasting Nobel's Sixteen Acres with Goldberger's Up from Zero. | nysun | article

The Power of Personality
BY JAMES GARDNER
January 3, 2005

Several years ago, if memory serves, three films devoted to the Joey Buttafuoco story aired in prime time the very same week. I was reminded of that lugubrious statistic as I started to read "Sixteen Acres" (Henry Holt, 304 pages, $25), Philip Nobel's account of the redevelopment of Ground Zero. His book comes only a few months after Paul Goldberger's "Up From Zero," which I reviewed at the time in these pages. Meanwhile, other accounts have already appeared and still others are on the way.

Let it be said at the outset that Mr. Nobel's is the better book. The reason for this is that, with almost nothing built thus far, the only thing we have to talk about - and we have to talk about something - is the personalities of the people involved. For this you need to have a sacred hunger for gossip, which Mr. Nobel clearly has, but which Mr. Goldberger - with his Brahminical dithering and notwithstanding the occasional snotty aside - does not.

At his best, Mr. Goldberger functions efficiently as an architectural historian and places the World Trade Center in its rich and proper historical continuum. At his worst - unfortunately in most of his book - he is telling much the same story as Mr. Nobel, but in that patented, chinless New York Times drone.

Mr. Nobel, by contrast, probably could not care less about architectural history and may not even realize that it exists. But his zeal for gossip is contagious. And though, like Mr. Goldberger, he has acquired the pop journalist's habit of applying a Homeric epithet to each character he introduces, his skill in this regard is far more admirable. From the very first pages, with his reference to Larry Silverstein and his "yachting-ravaged skin," you know that you are in for a good time.

While Mr. Goldberger aspired to objective historiography, Mr. Nobel is "comfortable" with the essentially partisan nature of his account. The only problem is that he is not really partisan: He attacks most everyone. The only people who come off a little better are - suspiciously - those whom the author seems to have interviewed personally. Beyond that, everyone is held up to ridicule.

It is interesting in this regard to consider how differently the two authors assess Alexander Garvin, former head of planning at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Whereas he was the level-headed hero of Mr. Goldberger's book, in Mr. Nobel's he becomes "almost like (Robert) Moses in his vanity - he was always mugging to best advantage for the cameras that increasingly sought him out - and his arrogance: he was always right."

Meanwhile, Daniel Libeskind comes off as a scheming gnome, Rafael Vinoly as a man with uncomfortably close ties to the former military junta in Argentina, and Richard Meier, Norman Foster, and Peter Eisenman as doddering self-important twits. The one thing that both writers agree on is a more or less total contempt for Herbert Muschamp, former architecture critic of the New York Times - who, however, plays a far larger role in Mr. Nobel's work than he probably should.

To Mr. Nobel's credit, he shows greater reportorial enterprise and imagination than Mr. Goldberger, who told his story straight. Mr. Nobel has fished out and even read the autobiography of Minoru Yamasaki, the principal architect of the original World Trade Center, and he has even slogged through the unreadable poetry that Daniel Libeskind wrote years before he realized he would become a player on the world stage and thus would have to answer for it. Mr. Nobel is also far better than Mr. Goldberger in his treatment of the infamous email campaign against Messrs. Vinoly and Muschamp, which was ultimately traced to Libeskind's office.

If Mr. Goldberger has a largely formalist or essentialist view of architectural history, Mr. Nobel is more in the manner of Saint-Simon or Clarendon. Personality is everything. It would be foolhardy to try to choose one over the other as the final word in the matter. On the other hand, it is true that personality plays a far larger role in the process of getting buildings built than formalist criticism will admit.

This was not the case in earlier ages, when competence, even more than training, was paramount. Leo X entrusted the design of his new Saint Peter's to Raphael, who had built little or nothing before that, because Leo believed (quite correctly) that Raphael had the most powerful visual sense of any man alive. He could thus be counted on to produce something great (as he would have done, had he not died prematurely).

Today, competence is hardly paramount. In fact, it counts for almost nothing. I know a 60-something architect whose white hair is far more distinguished than his portfolio. He looks good in a suit and has a pleasant manner about him. He never told me in so many words, but he is quite certain he got many enviable jobs in New York from a combination of these three factors and nothing else.

This is what happened at Ground Zero, only on a larger scale. In the initial competition, the public took to Daniel Libeskind because he was an individual - a striking, endearing, hobbit like individual - rather than a somewhat impersonal team like the ones responsible for the other projects. Also he had that funny accent, those unmistakable glasses, and cowboy boots.

David Childs, who eventually carried the day, did so because he was in the pocket of the man who counted most, the yachting-ravaged Silverstein, who simply liked him and trusted him to be suitably mediocre. One way or another, as everyone now agrees, this was no way to run the most important architectural competition in a century. Yet, for these reasons, a boring building is about to rise above Ground Zero.