Russell on WTC Memorial

James Russell, writing for Bloomberg, continues to be one of our smartest voices on hot-button architectural issues—previously, on rebuilding post-Katrina New Orleans, today, on rebuilding Ground Zero. He calls for Michael Arad‘s memorial to be drastically scaled back, and adds that “some of the items tucked into the estimate by the construction management firm Bovis Lend Lease scream boondoggle….These are Pentagon procurement-scandal numbers.”
With all the bickering, delays, redesigns and skyrocketing cost projections, the National Nightmare is becoming a national embarrassment. Freedom Tower may loom as a half-empty national monument to our failure of imagination—the inability to envision anything other than another hulking office tower on that mournful site.