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New York City just unveiled the plan for the new Fascism Tower--oh, sorry, Freedom Tower--that will once again disrupt the balance of the lower Manhattan skyline and give terrorists everywhere a goal to destroy. Yay! Just what we needed. Our Republican mayor and governor think the design for the "1776" foot tall building--the World's Tallest, until it's destroyed--is super-grand. The architect, Daniel Libeskind, and the developer, Larry Silverstein, agreed on the height of the building, just not the design and usage of the top 30 (largely ornamental) floors. Somehow we have got to adjust our notion that pride and patriotism always means a monster phallus.
According to press accounts Libeskind "compromised" with Silverstein's architect on the final design (the latter wants bird-slaughtering, supposedly power-generating windmills on the top floors): now, our only hope is that Libeskind plans to pull a Howard Roark and will blow up the building in the dead of night once it's completed (Roark, a character in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, did that after a developer incorrectly completed his design.*) Also, this is all contingent on shyster Larry getting the double payment he is seeking from insurance companies for his claim that two buildings were destroyed on 9/11. He needs 7 billion, not 3.5, to complete the project. C'mon, courts!
UPDATE: NY Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp gets paid the big bucks to write meaningless phrases. Here's the essence of his lead today about the newly unveiled World Trade Center design: "Sir, what you have produced is, if I may say so, a...piece of architecture."
Here's what they'd get if they hired me:
"Pointing its taloned middle finger at the sky, the new design says, 'Fuck you, we need a big building complex downtown and this is what you're going to get.' The most intriguing aspect of the project is that it is both fascist--with menacing sharp angles and a haughty disdain for the scale of the surrounding buildings--and treehugging, with the top floors devoted to power generation by wind. The latter is really just a sop to environmental sentiment, however--besides killing untold numbers of birds, the giant fans will only supply a portion of the building's greedy power suckage."
Times editors: "Tom, what you've written here is a...piece of criticism. Now, get out."
*UPDATE 2/DISCLAIMER: In the movie version of The Fountainhead, no one dies when Roark blows up his own building. He is put on trial for a property crime, makes a stirring speech to the jury about the glories of American individualism, and is acquitted.