Product Description

In Up from Zero, Paul Goldberger, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the inside story of the quest to rebuild one of the most important symbolic sites in the world, the sixteen acres where the towers of the former World Trade Center stood. A story of power, politics, architecture, community, and culture, Up from Zero takes us inside the controversial struggle to create and build one of the most challenging urban-design projects in history.

What should replace the fallen towers? Who had the courage and vision to rise to the task of rebuilding? Who had the right, finally, to decide? The struggle began soon after September 11, 2001, as titanic egos took sides, made demands, and jockeyed for power. Lawyers, developers, grieving families, local residents, politicians, artists, and architects all had fierce needs, radically different ideas, strong emotions, and boundless determination. How could conflicting interests be resolved? After hundreds of hours of often rancorous meetings, the first sets of plans were finally revealed in the summer of 2002–and the results were staggeringly disappointing.

Yet, as Goldberger shows, the rebuilding process recovered and began to flourish. Rather than degenerating into turf wars, it evolved in ways that no one could have predicted. From the decision to reintegrate the site into the dense fabric of lower Manhattan, to the choice of Daniel Libeskind as master planner, to the appointment of a memorial jury, the process has been marked by moments of bold vision, effective community activism, and personal instinct, punctuating the often contentious politics of public participation.
Up from Zero takes in the full sweep of this tremendous effort. Goldberger presents a drama of creative minds at work, solving seemingly insurmountable clashes of taste, interests, and ideas. With unique access to the players and the process, and with a sophisticated understanding of architecture and its impact on people and on the social and cultural life of a city, Paul Goldberger here chronicles the courage, the sacrifices, and the burning passions at the heart of one of the greatest efforts of urban revitalization in modern times.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1211467 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-07
• Released on: 2004-09-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Renowned architecture critic Goldberger (Above New York) has undertaken the Herculean task of describing the three years of proposals, counterproposals, chaos and compromise that resulted in a plan for the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site. Unlike many post-9/11 books, this careful, detailed analysis is sure to remain a valuable reference work for future generations, who will wonder how the redevelopment took the shape it did. Goldberger provides a blow-by-blow, yet always readable, account of the myriad interest groups, meetings, press conferences, backroom negotiations and public forums that led to the selection of a plan for the site and designs for the Freedom Tower and memorial, "Reflecting Absence." While displaying a deep understanding of history, urban planning, human psychology and power politics, Goldberger remains a largely neutral reporter of events. At the end, however, he mourns the lost opportunity to diverge from New York's traditionally commercial approach to real estate development. He concludes, "What played out through 2002 and 2003 was the use of architecture for political ends, not the use of politics for architectural ends—that is the key moral of the story.... Idealism met cynicism at Ground Zero, and so far they have battled to a draw."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Architecture, the most public and stationary of arts, requires taking the long view. Buildings that were disparaged upon unveiling can, over time, begin to accrue the soft glow of fond remembrance; even the Eiffel Tower had legions of early detractors. A similar fate, writes the New Yorker's architecture critic Paul Goldberger in Up From Zero, seemed to have been bestowed upon Minoru Yamasaki's World Trade Center.

When the Twin Towers opened in 1973, Goldberger himself described them as "boring, so utterly banal as to be unworthy of the headquarters of a bank in Omaha." Still, the towers began to find a place in Manhattan's hard skyline. "Like all architecture, it is there," writes Goldberger, "and you cannot avoid it the way you can choose not to listen to a piece of music you dislike." Architectural fashion changed too: "Crisp metal boxes did not seem so harsh, and sometimes they even seemed refreshing." The World Trade Center became part of the scenery.

Al Qaeda's destruction of the towers on Sept. 11, 2001, brought the public's evolving rapprochement with them to a tragic, murderous close. Suddenly there was a gaping hole in the city's skyline and, not surprisingly, a clamor over how to repair it. Architecture, an art of time-lapse slowness, had entered a realm of heated emotional response: There were as many people calling for the towers to be rebuilt instantly as there were arguing that Ground Zero should be never be built upon again.

"Rebuilding Ground Zero," writes Goldberger in his authoritative telling of the complex work-in-progress in Lower Manhattan, was to become "the first great urban-design problem of the twenty-first century." It was also to become the most closely watched and most passionately argued architectural debate in New York City's history.

This is generally not the stuff of high-wire narrative -- which is why architecture critics usually concentrate on the end result -- but this process was a watershed. Indeed, Goldberger's description of the pivotal public hearing on the timorous first round of proposed designs, held in the sprawling Javits Convention Center, seems more like an old-style political convention than a planning hearing. "The schemes are not ambitious enough, and the buildings are too short," said one speaker, to thunderous applause. "Nothing here is truly monumental -- it feels like Albany."

Something had changed, Goldberger notes. "People were demanding a level of vision and imagination in the public realm that they had not called for in New York for more than a generation." A city used to banding together to stop public projects was getting together to start one -- no mere building but an emotionally charged memorial, an act of closure, and an implicit referendum on the future of both the city and the country.

Amid the flurry of competing interests and factions, the architect best suited for the fray was Daniel Libeskind. "None of the other architects could speak so convincingly to a lay audience," Goldberger writes. Where most architects tend to rely on drawings and models, Libeskind was able to use language to bolster his case: his immigrant's tale of coming to New York, his fervently optimistic "stump speeches," the easy-to-grasp concepts like "Wedge of Light" and "Freedom Tower."

With Up From Zero, Goldberger has assigned himself no easy task: crafting a compelling tale out of the normally unfertile grounds of design competitions and bureaucratic committees. (Architecture, like sausage and legislation, is not really something you want to see being made.) While his architectural criticism is always deft, incisive and admirably lucid, one often wants a more textured sense of the many players involved. This is New York City, after all; one longs for more backroom dealings, more combustible personalities. (We do get some, however; the competing architects are prone to sniping at each other's work, and Libeskind calls Rafael Viñoly's entry "skeletons in the sky," while Viñoly dubs Libeskind's "the wailing wall.")

Up From Zero is hardly a triumphal tale, as Libeskind's role in the project becomes increasingly marginal (despite his game-face assertions to the contrary) and architecture's necessary realities -- politics and money -- enter the picture. Larry Silverstein, the developer who held the lease on the original World Trade Center, is portrayed here as a seasoned blackjack player, waiting patiently as cards are dealt. Not surprisingly, the developer decided the way to recoup his losses was not avant-garde architecture or public cultural facilities but office space.

Whether Lower Manhattan was ready for another large influx of such commercial space seemed as tertiary an issue as it did when the towers themselves were built. "Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the entire saga of planning Ground Zero," writes Goldberger, "was the possibility that the Freedom Tower might turn out to be less a symbol of renewal than of how little had been learned from the troubled history of the original World Trade Center. In mid-2004, the Freedom Tower seemed less to signify innovation than history repeating itself." And yet, Goldberger notes, it was not just business as usual. A traumatized public did raise its voice, and it was heard. Still, the ending of Goldberger's book is not really an ending -- just a fleeting moment in architectural time. When Ground Zero is rebuilt, another story will begin.

Reviewed by Tom Vanderbilt
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
As we mark the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the future of the 16 acres known as Ground Zero remains a subject of intense debate. Recognizing that the attempt to both memorialize those who perished and bring life back to Lower Manhattan is a historic challenge deserving of careful documentation and analysis, Goldberger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic currently at the New Yorker, offers just that in this avidly detailed account of the messy process by which government officials, developers, architects, family members of the victims of 9/11, and community activists struggled through grueling public hearings to formulate and select a master plan. Fluent in the complicated aesthetic, political, and financial issues involved, keenly attuned to the deep emotions aroused, incisive in his profiling of major players, and refreshingly candid in elucidating the failings of the original World Trade Center (for more on this, see City in the Sky [BKL N 1 03]), Goldberger asks, Can a powerful and realizable vision emerge from so much wrangling and compromise? Stay tuned. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

A true epic of a great contemporary city, New York.
What's so great about this book?

Is it because the book carefully analyzes
pros and cons on the history of the area?

Is it because the book brings alive the political
games of Port Authority and LMDC?

Is it because the book broadcasts the competition
of world-class architects?

Is it because the book records the behind scenes
of super architects' dirty cat fight?

Is it because the eye of the book is not only from
top-down, but also bottom-up?

Is it because the book tells what the role of developer is in NY?


Well, the book surely answers all of above-mentioned questions. But the real drama of the book is in what the New Yorkers did together to make this site memorable and meaningful (both symbolically and practically); a strong testimony to the victorious civic life against the destructive terrorists attacks.

Paul Goldberger bites that drama with such tenacity and rigor that it's really difficult to put down the book once in hands. The book actually mentions that NY had to wait several months before speaking of rebuilding because nobody dared to speak when the scars of terrorism was just around the corner. What a tragic yet promising story!

The heart of the matter is that in the turmoil of rebuilding energy arises a revelation how a great contemporary city -such as New York- claims it's identity. It's a city of ideas. It's a city of debates. It's a city of interactions, and it's a city of generating hope from the deepest despair of human affairs. "It's a city of Victors, not Victims"

I would like to believe that Goldberger, as a New Yorker, simply could not resist speaking of what he had witnessed. The book is mind bothering, yet, heart beating read.

Factual, informative, broad, and surprisingly objective
Who would have expected from Paul Goldberger to produce such a restraint in personal opinion and - instead - factual, informative, surprisingly objective, and detailed history of the Ground Zero's struggle to rebuild the WTC in NYC? It is a story involving distribution of billions of dollars by those having executive power (combined with exemption from NY City building code) giving the politicians ("Emperor" Pataki, the Director of LMDC Roland Betts - a close friend and business partner of President George W. Bush, ...) opportunities to establish arbitrary restrictions and allowances regardless of the cost and usefulness, to arbitrarily select the participants of design process regardless of their merit, ability, capacity, and a public interest, etc. They created (initiated and developed) opportunities for favored participants in the design process to gain from their political and not entirely appropriate, but self-serving decisions, which - at the end - bit them, after confronted by a reality check, which exposed their selfishness and ignorance.
Supplementing illustrations are in "Imagining Ground Zero" - ISBN: 0847826570.