First off, I must apologize for not blogging in a while. I’ve been quite busy with a number of different things, one of which was watching the U.S.’s political system reach an astonishing level of dysfunction. (I’ve blogged before about architecture and politics — the two are closely linked.) My views on this summer’s debt ceiling debacle can be found in an article of mine in the Hartford Courant here.
On September 12 of this year, after literally a decade of wrangling among an ever-expanding group of officials, developers, victims’ families, planner and architects, the National September 11 Memorial will finally open. No one in the world of architecture is particularly excited about the occasion: though it’s certainly an important event for the country, the selected design for the memorial isn’t really a favorite (though it is not nearly as hated as the site’s largest new tower, 1 World Trade Center, which was designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merill and is an abomination).
The National September 11 Memorial just a few weeks before opening. Photo courtesy Los Angeles Times.
This week, the architecture critics from the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, Blair Kamin and Christopher Hawthorne, respectively, reviewed the new memorial. (Side note: where’s Michael Kimmelman, the new architecture critic for The New York Times?! He’s still got a few weeks, but he’d better start off strong.) Kamin and Hawthorne’s conclusions about the memorial are both similar and predictable, but also quite legitimate. To read Hawthorne’s review, continue past the break.
Concrete Aspirations 