WTC Memorial - by Michael Arad (Architect) and Peter Walker (Landscape)

[Jasonik]

The single biggest mistake in this entire ordeal was Pataki twisting the Listening to the City results to validate his personal promise to keep the foot prints down to bedrock unbuilt upon.

Virtually every other decision revolved around choosing the option that would keep that foolish promise.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/sh...2&postcount=59

Carol Willis should take all the 'credit' for that one.

[Cityslob]

World
Trade Center
Site Memorial Competition
G U I D E L I N E S


5.4 ADDITIONAL PROGRAM CONSIDERATIONS
Supplementary uses that support and augment the Memorial Mission
Statement, Memorial Program Guiding Principles and Elements, are
allowed. These might include, for example, a modest amount of facilities
for supporting activities and related services. However, the memorial site
cannot include commercial structures.
The budget for the memorial will depend upon the memorial design.
During Stage II, selected finalists will be asked to develop their
designs, which will include feasibility studies and cost estimates.


10 Stage II
The jury will select approximately five finalists from among the
Stage I submissions. The selected finalists will be invited to refine
their proposals in Stage II of the competition.
Finalists in Stage II will be given a detailed program and set of instructions
from LMDC. Stage II instructions will include additional information, an
update of the site planning and elaboration of the rules, regulations, and
guidelines. Finalists will be contracted and compensated by LMDC for
further development of design concepts, including but not limited to
models, schematics, engineering assessments, and cost analysis.

...

In extraordinary circumstances, LMDC may terminate this competition
and will not be responsible for any consequences to registrants,
competitors, or any other interested party. LMDC is not liable for any
failure for any reason to award a commission or to construct any of
the designs designated as finalists.


11.3 CRITERIA FOR JUDGING
The jury shall use the following criteria to evaluate the submissions
and select the finalists:

The Memorial Mission Statement,

Memorial Program Guiding Principles,

Program Elements,

Additional Program Considerations (in section 5).

Excellence in design and vision.
In collaboration with LMDC, the jury may determine special standards
for judging an exceptional design concept. There will be additional
criteria to evaluate Stage II submissions including cost and feasibility.

[BPC]

These guidelines just get more and more fascinating! I could read them all day!

[lofter1]

When you're done reading ^^ could you pass them over to me?

(Having some trouble falling to sleep lately. Might be just the trick.)

[TomAuch]

The single biggest mistake in this entire ordeal was Pataki twisting the Listening to the City results to validate his personal promise to keep the foot prints down to bedrock unbuilt upon.

Virtually every other decision revolved around choosing the option that would keep that foolish promise.

Do you remember what the LTTC results for that were? I also remember a month before that, he said at a speech that he would make it a promise of his to make sure that the footprints were kep from development. I think that he was either sincere, or he was pandering to get support for his 2002 re-election bid.

BTW, I also remember how restoring the skyline was the most popular request, but the news headlines made it seem as if people were terribly outraged at all 10 million square feet of office space being rebuilt. The fact was that people did not like the site being so dense, and this is because when you build a series of 50 or 60 story buildings on four or five blocks, you will inevitably have this density. Personally, I wish that we could go and revisit whether or not it was even a good idea to not build on the footprints, as leaving the site empty has created a lot of logistical challenges.

[TomAuch]

http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/sh...2&postcount=59

Carol Willis should take all the 'credit' for that one.

I think there she wasn't the only one advocating that. I remember seeing some of the design proposals from ordinary people showing similar proposals. I think that the desire to preserve the area of the footprints primarily arose out of a compromise with the Memorialists, around the time they stopped outright asking for a 16-acre Memorial. This took place around December 2001 to January 2002, when I remember reading about the proposal more often.

[Kris]

World Trade Center Memorial Foundation Memo (pdf)


May 6, 2006
Mayor Chastises Foundation Over Memorial's Costs
By CHARLES V. BAGLI


A model of the Sept. 11 memorial, in an office of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

All sides agree that the bickering over the World Trade Center memorial complex is going to get worse before anything gets resolved.

The recriminations started even before a memorandum surfaced this week estimating that the cost of the proposed memorial complex had nearly doubled to $1 billion.

And the charges and countercharges over escalating costs and designs intensified yesterday between members of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, which commissioned the new cost analysis, and officials with the city, the state and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

During his weekly radio program, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg suggested that the cost could be cut to $500 million, in part by moving a museum and the state-built visitors center out of the memorial and into the nearby Freedom Tower.

He chastised the foundation, saying the group had become obsessed with the design and construction of the memorial. "The foundation should be focusing on fund-raising," he said. "The agreement fundamentally was that the L.M.D.C. — the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation — would do the design, somebody would build the building and it would be run by the foundation, who would be raising private money."

The foundation has raised about $130 million of a promised $300 million; the development corporation has agreed to provide $200 million and the Port Authority $100 million.

Officials of the rebuilding suggested that the mayor was laying the groundwork for the Port Authority to take over responsibility for construction of the memorial, something that both he and Gov. George E. Pataki have suggested before.

But the mayor's verbal spanking did not go down well at the foundation, whose board includes people who lost family members in the Sept. 11 attacks as well as rich and powerful New Yorkers, including Howard W. Lutnick, chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald; Richard D. Parsons, chairman and chief executive of Time Warner; the philanthropist David Rockefeller; and Thomas S. Johnson, former chief executive of Greenpoint Financial.

"It's an unfair criticism," said Mr. Johnson, the foundation's chairman. "The board itself reached a conclusion some time back that given the political authorities' inability to make the right decisions that would result in an overall plan that is feasible, we couldn't in fairness to the community continue to go out and ask for money."

Mr. Johnson added that board members were willing to resume fund-raising, "but only after all the parties agree to a single unified plan that is affordable."

Board members also bristled at Mr. Bloomberg's lectures over cost-cutting, saying that they were the ones who first raised the alarm.

Although the design for the memorial was selected after a lengthy public process, some parts of it have come under recent criticism from some family members of victims. There are also some security concerns related to the complex.

The tense atmosphere carried into a meeting pulled together yesterday afternoon by John Cahill, the governor's chief of staff, attended by officials from the foundation, City Hall, the development corporation and the Port Authority.

According to four participants in the meeting, Mr. Cahill sharply challenged the validity of the numbers in the latest estimate, which put the cost of the museum and the memorial at $672 million, up from $494 million only four months ago.

The total reached $973 million because the report identified another $300 million in site preparation and infrastructure work that the foundation said should be borne by the Port Authority.

"Nobody likes the news we heard, but don't shoot the messenger," said Gretchen Dykstra, president of the foundation.

Ultimately, both sides agreed that they made some progress in identifying tens of millions of dollars in items that did not belong in the new estimate. The two sides will debate other items over the next week to pare costs further. Foundation officials expressed frustration, however, at the slow pace of the process.

Mr. Johnson said the foundation had explored a less expensive alternative, which he thought would satisfy security concerns and address the criticisms of some victims' families by moving important elements of the design out of the footprint of the twin towers to plaza level.

He said a modified plan could cut costs and remain consistent with the original design by Michael Arad and Peter Walker.

But state officials and others have resisted efforts to change the design.

"Once a quantifiable cost has been agreed upon," Mr. Cahill said, "we can focus on ensuring that the memorial is delivered within the $500 million budget that was always contemplated, while remaining consistent with the Arad-Walker vision. We expect this process to be expeditious."

Winnie Hu contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

May 6, 2006
News Analysis
Trimming Down to a Less Costly Design at Ground Zero
By DAVID W. DUNLAP

First of all, substitute plastic pipes for stainless steel pipes in the World Trade Center memorial and you may save $8 million. Good. Now, only $164 million more in savings is needed before reaching the newly declared budget limit of $500 million for the ground zero memorial.

What other savings can be found? Will the fundamental design of the memorial have to be radically revised? And how did costs get so high in the first place? These questions were swirling around the disclosure this week of the most authoritative estimates yet.

Bovis Lend Lease, the construction manager for the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, has put the cost of the memorial and memorial museum at $672 million, out of a total for the whole memorial setting — cooling plant, underground roadways, a stabilized slurry wall, police dispatch center, sidewalks, utilities — of $973 million (not including an $80 million visitors' orientation and education center).

Perhaps the most radical notion going around involves a reorientation of the memorial. As designed by Michael Arad, the names of victims would be inscribed on low parapets in galleries 30 feet below street level, surrounding the enormous sunken pools and waterfalls that mark the voids where the twin towers stood.

Eliminating those galleries and moving the commemorative parapets above ground, surrounding the pools at plaza level, is one cost-saving possibility that has been discussed by executives of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg floated his own idea yesterday, suggesting that the 9/11 museum and the visitors' center might be put in the base of the Freedom Tower. As currently planned, the museum would be adjacent to the memorial within the twin towers' foundations.

The Freedom Tower would be a "perfect place" to "display artifacts or have places to teach kids about what happened at the site," the mayor said on his weekly radio program. "Do it there. It's a good use of that lobby. It's going to be a building that the Port Authority is going to own anyway, and it's two less buildings that you have to build."

Other possibilities include eliminating the waterfalls or the contemplation room planned in the north tower footprint, although Gretchen Dykstra, the president of the memorial foundation, said yesterday, "I haven't heard anybody, on any side of any fence, say that they want to disrupt the beauty and dignity of Michael Arad's reflecting pools."

No final design choice is likely to be made soon. First, government officials and foundation executives have to agree on what the actual costs are likely to be.

"I haven't said no to any alternative," said John P. Cahill, Gov. George E. Pataki's chief of staff and the state's top downtown redevelopment official. "But until you know the extent of the problem, both on the construction side and the operation side, it would not be fair to make any firm suggestion of what would be the final result."

The current design evolved from Mr. Arad's stark original entry to the 2003 memorial competition. It had no aboveground buildings, underground museum or even trees.

The jury chose a more verdant proposal in January 2004, after Mr. Arad was joined by the landscape architect Peter Walker. That month, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation said it would add an underground artifact center to the memorial and build a cultural building.

That building, designed by Snohetta, has since been transformed into a much smaller visitors' orientation and education center. Snohetta is also designing the museum entrance pavilion, which was cited by the foundation as one of the "largest drivers" of the new cost estimate, having added $22 million to the cost.

No matter where savings are found, the trade center site imposes its own challenges.

It occupies a 70-foot depression in landfill at the edge of the Hudson River, a sort of reverse bathtub that must resist tremendous pressure. When the towers stood, their basement floor slabs provided the needed lateral bracing for the foundation walls, also known as slurry walls. Without floors to buttress them, the slurry walls are temporarily being held in place by cables.

To make the point that the memorial and the museum were not exorbitant, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation asked the consulting firm Faithful & Gould to estimate how much it would cost to build a generic structure — no museum and no memorial — simply to close up and reinforce the 70-foot pit.

Thomas R. Jaske, a vice president of the firm, said his estimators assumed the structure would largely be unoccupied and need only minimum utilities; that it would have three main floors and a rooftop at plaza level, with columns every 35 feet; that it would be made of steel and concrete; and that it would permit access by the public to the slurry wall and column remnants.

Such a structure alone, he said, would cost about $370 million.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

RE: PATAKI

...he said at a speech that he would make it a promise of his to make sure that the footprints were kep from development. I think that he was either sincere, or he was pandering ...

Pataki THOUGHT he was being sincere, but he was also pandering.

After all, he is a politician. In that realm sincerity shifts like the wind.

[ZippyTheChimp]

These guidelines just get more and more fascinating! I could read them all day!

I'm tired of having these guidelines thrown around like they're some paragon of design.

Besides, we are not legally bound to adhere to them. They were not legislated into law, and no one voted on the issue. In my opinion, they are at the root of the problem.

This will never happen, but...

The PA should send out an RFP for a scaled back memorial. Since it's been estimated that a support structure for the bathtub would cost $370 million, the bus garage should be moved back to the site as originally planned. That would take care of the cost of the bathtub support and eliminate the cost of another bathtub at 130 Liberty. The footprint concept should just go away.

[lofter1]

So much of what is now planned should go away: fountains, footprints exposed to bedrock, underground museum.

Conceptually they are very interesting and evocative ideas. And they look fantastic in drawings and renderings.

But practically they are a nightmare of engineering, costs and maintenance.

[BPC]

The PA should send out an RFP for a scaled back memorial. Since it's been estimated that a support structure for the bathtub would cost $370 million, the bus garage should be moved back to the site as originally planned. That would take care of the cost of the bathtub support and eliminate the cost of another bathtub at 130 Liberty. The footprint concept should just go away.

That is the only real solution here. How can we make this happen?

[BrooklynRider]

Someone needs to learn to say, "No." "No." is a complete sentence and it is one that has not been used at all. These politicians and panderers will have a tough time getting their puckered lips around this one, being so used to having their mouths wrapped around other things to get what they want.

[TomAuch]

So much of what is now planned should go away: fountains, footprints exposed to bedrock, underground museum.

Conceptually they are very interesting and evocative ideas. And they look fantastic in drawings and renderings.

But practically they are a nightmare of engineering, costs and maintenance.

Agreed. I think that they should just keep the reflecting pools, if only to convey the scale of what was lost. However, most of the underground stuff should be scrapped. Put most of the museum above ground or in the lobby of the FT (this would also give more of an incentive to beef up security there.)

[davestanke]

Problem 1: Listening to the city where everyone is lead to expect that their personal interests could be reflected in 16 acres, when there were over-riding ownership and long term city redevelopment needs that should have been the first objective.

Problem 2: Memorial Mission Statement: Where everyone is lead to expect that their personal interests can be specifically and literally reflected in the memorial.

Problem 3: Pataki promising to not to build on the footprints when he had no idea exactly what the footprints meant, or how costly that promise would become.

Problem 4: Pataki picking Libeskind, which left the bathtub empty, because Pataki knew it would eliminate family member opposition by leaving the footprint area empty. This enshrined the concept of no building on sacred ground.

Problem 5: LMDC allowing the Memorial selected to be such a technical challenge, as if money would never be a concern.

Problem 6: Pataki showing that a concerted family effort could get him to rethink any decision when he dumped the idea of an exhibition space. With this decision all potential financial supporters with a degree of rationality ran to the sidelines.

Problem 7: The Port Authority kept revising plans to protect the bathtub area without consideration or publication of costs. PA costs for infrastructure are huge. More practical infrasturcture plans could have saved so much money that a reasonable memorial could have easily been payed for.

I think I could go on, but these are some of the biggest mistakes.

I happen to think that the Memorial Center does a lot of stuff that family and others want and might be considered reasonable. I don't believe the Memorial Center has the highest costs. Dumping the memorial for one with no underground component would free up space and dramatically reduce costs. If that space were used effectively, the Freedom Tower might have less infrastructure in its bottom 200' and everything around the site might be cheaper. The savings might support the Memorial Center, the new Memorial, and perhaps help develop the Performance Center and an Exhibition space.

The biggest opportunity is that reflecting absence makes so much space completely useless. And change to the memorial should allow visitiors to walk into the footprints. The memorial agenda should be executed within the area of the pools.

It all seems reasonable, except that the people most looking to change the memorial simply want more of everything they already have.