THE NEW
GROUND ZERO
By EDWARD WYATT
EVER since the effort to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial made
a star of a 21-year-old architecture student named Maya Lin, the open
competition ó one that invites all comers to submit proposals ó has been the
gold standard in selecting a design for a public memorial. So when officials
overseeing the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan began to consider how to erect a
homage to the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, there was little
question how they would structure the contest.
Now, however, as the jury that will pick the winning design for
the World Trade Center memorial trudges through 5,200 entries ó three times the
number submitted for the Vietnam memorial in 1981 ó it might seem that the
purpose of the exercise has been turned on its head. For while an open,
anonymous competition is intended to make sure that every entry receives a fair
viewing, the flood of proposals ensures that hundreds or even thousands of
entries are likely to get no more than a moment's glance from jurors. The panel
reviewing proposals for a memorial to victims of the Sept. 11 attack on the
Pentagon, for example, vowed to consider every submission. Yet the members acknowledge
that some proposals ó say, the full-scale, stainless steel model of an airplane
mounted so that it would appear to be about to crash right into the Pentagon ó
were viewed for only the briefest of moments.
On the other end of the spectrum, many of the world's most
esteemed artists and architects avoid such competitions altogether, given the
cost of their time and the extremely long odds against winning. They typically
prefer invited competitions, where the entrants are limited to those with
professional expertise.
The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the agency that is
overseeing the memorial competition, will not reveal how many of the 5,200
entries are from superstars and how many are from wannabes. It won't reveal
much of anything, in fact. The jurors meet at an undisclosed location, and the
competition entries have been shorn of any identifying information. Any artists
who make statements that could be interpreted as promoting their entries risk
being ejected from the contest.
This fall, the jury is expected to select five to eight finalists.
But according to organizers, even those names may not be made public, at least
not initially. The finalists may instead be notified privately, and then given
more than $100,000 to transform their initial submissions ó which by regulation
were two-dimensional displays on a single 30-by-40-inch board ó into proper
three-dimensional models before the public sees them.
That move could help level the playing field for the
less-well-financed finalists. But it also could protect the organizers of the
memorial competition from the widespread condemnation that followed the
unveiling of the initial designs for the World Trade Center site last summer.
Those designs, which included only speculative notions of buildings represented
by plain white blocks, were roundly rejected as unimaginative and ugly.
According to many who have managed or judged competitions in the
past, inexperienced competitors often try to mimic the characteristics of
previous winning designs, or to anticipate the submissions of other
contestants. In effect, they end up fighting the last war. Maya Lin made just
that point in an essay written in 1982. "I think the most important aspect
of the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was that I had originally
designed it for a class I was taking at Yale and not for the competition,"
she wrote. Nor did she conduct extensive research about Vietnam or the war.
"In that sense, I had designed it for me ó or more exactly, for what I
believed it should be. I never tried to second-guess a jury."
Artists who have responded to the call for a World Trade Center
memorial, however, all lived through the aftermath of the attack on the World
Trade Center, along with the rest of America and the world. With such a powerful
common experience, then, how does an artist communicate a distinctive vision in
what amounts to little more than a sketch?
Raymond Gastil, the executive director of the Van Alen Institute,
a nonprofit architecture organization, said entries required what he called
"a clear, bold gesture." Without one, he said, "there's just no
way a jury is going to spend time with you." But if the World Trade Center
jury spends even one minute with each entry, it would take two 40-hour work-weeks
just to view them all, and longer to discuss which to keep. In fact, many
proposals will get even less
time, and people who have served on competition juries say that given the
quality of some of the entries, that's appropriate.
"Talent is not distributed
equally," said Terence Riley, the chief curator of the department of
architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, who served on the Pentagon
memorial jury. "You want to respect everyone's efforts. But once you begin
looking through piles and piles of submissions, benchmarks begin to be
established. There are projects that tend not to leave your mind, and others
that are obviously not going to meet the standards of the best projects you've
been seeing."
In the first round, a jury
typically tries to eliminate 75 percent to 80 percent of the entries. Richard
Andrews, the director of the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, said that
sophisticated juries could rule out some entries within 10 seconds. "But
there will also be entries," he said, "where three or four of the
jurors say they didn't see anything and one will say: `Look at it again. Here's
what I found.' And it will be held over for a second round." That's when
jurors really start debating and discussing stylistic differences among
submissions.
Despite the effort to preserve the
artists' anonymity, experienced jurors often can tell who is behind a
particular entry. And at other times, they merely think they can. In the late
1980's, an anonymous competition to design the Bastille Opera in Paris resulted
in the selection of a design that everyone ó from the jury members to President
FranÁois Mitterrand ó assumed was by the architect Richard Meier. They were
astonished when the winning entrant was revealed to be not Mr. Meier but Carlos
Ott, a Canadian born in Uruguay.
Along the way, the fights can be
fierce. Agnes Gund, president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, recalled
caustic battles among fellow members of a jury that was convened to guide a
public art fund for Stuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan. The educators on
the panel, she said, were looking for art that evoked the lessons and
aesthetics of an earlier era. "They wanted the kind of works that we
wouldn't get with a living artist," Ms. Gund said. To get their wish, the
jury would have had "to pick the artists and tell them what to do,"
she added. The rest of the jurors, who represented the art world, refused to
consider that possibility. The jury came close to scrapping the competition
altogether, but members finally managed to settle their differences.
Some juries' differences are
irreconcilable. During the 1995 competition to expand the Prado in Madrid, 500
entries were narrowed to 10, but the jurors were unable to agree on a winner.
Eventually they declared that none of the entries solved the museum's extensive
structural problems. Two years later, a second competition was conducted, and
the 10 finalists were invited to try again. In 1999, Rafael Moneo, a Spanish
architect, was awarded the job.
Even a consensus among jurors is no
guarantee of success. In 1998, the University of Texas enlisted 61 entrants in
a competition to design its new Blanton Museum of Art. Two Swiss architects,
Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, were selected as the winners for their
modern design. But members of the university's board of regents pushed for a
traditional building that matched the stucco-and-tile-roof style of other
campus structures. After nearly a year of struggle, the architects quit, along
with the dean of the university's school of architecture.
Rarely will a jury ask to combine
elements of different submissions. "That's like saying to an artist, `It's
a nice painting, but can you put more red in it?' " Ms. Gund said.
Architects do, however, often revise their designs in response to suggestions
from a jury or a client, or sometimes even in response to the designs of
others.
After the German government decided
to relocate to Berlin, it commissioned a competition to rebuild the Reichstag,
which had been destroyed during World War II. Three winners were named: Norman
Foster, Santiago Calatrava and Pi de Bruijn. Only Mr. Calatrava's design
included a version of the building's original dome. After initial review, the
architects were encouraged to revise their designs based on a new program of
elements. Sir Norman's second submission ó now including a dome ó was awarded
the prize. (He said it was an extension of a cloud-like canopy from his first
submission.)
Just how the World Trade Center
jury, with its diverse backgrounds and aesthetic preferences, will get along,
or even how it is progressing, is not fully known. Little more than a week
after the jury had begun reviewing submissions, John C. Whitehead, the
development corporation's chairman, said, "I think it's fair to say that
the jury has narrowed down the 5,200 submissions to a much smaller
number." He declined to be more specific.
Already, however, the process is
beginning to look as though it might take longer than expected. Planners had
originally hoped to have a winning design chosen by the second anniversary of
the attacks. Then, the plan was to have a group of approximately five finalists
named by this Sept. 11. Now, memorial officials are saying only that the
finalists will be named in the fall, and that a winner will be selected
sometime after that.
To those who have experience with
juries, the delay may not be surprising. "No matter what the estimate is,
it's going to take longer," says Dan Cameron, a senior curator at the New
Museum of Contemporary Art who is also serving as the curator for the Eighth Istanbul
Biennial. "And the longer it takes, the better off we all are going to be
with the decision. I'd feel very nervous if the jury came out and exactly met
the deadline."