If you build it . . .

The following is from the latest issue of the New York Review of Books (not yet up online, but perhaps I'll add a link once it is). Anyhow, I must say I'm a bit skeptical of Vaclav Havel (anybody who is the subject of the kind of hero worship that Havel is becomes automatically a bit suspect, in my opinion), but I very much agree with his opinion of a "Freedom Tower" as expressed in this piece from his forthcoming book, To the Castle and Back.

Let's set the scene:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced yesterday that he supported going ahead with construction of the Freedom Tower at ground zero, making official his change of mind about a project that he once called a white elephant.
(the New York Times, 21 February 2007)

Havel writes:

19 May 2005

I have to admit to something I don't know whether I can actually say here: I absolutely hated those two skyscrapers at the World Trade Center. They were a typical kind of architecture that has no ideas behind it. Moreover, they disrupted the skyline of the city; they towered absurdly over the beautiful crystalline topography of Manhattan. They were two monuments to the cult of profit at any cost: regardless of what they looked like, they had to have the greatest imaginable number of square meters of office space. I was once on the top floor of one of those buildings for dinner, and I discovered that the entire edifice was constantly swaying slightly. I took it as a sign that something was not right and that something was going on here that was, in a sense, against nature. A boat may sway, but a building should not. The view down was dull; it was no longer the view from a skyscraper and it wasn't yet the view from an aircraft.

And here's what I fear: that for reasons of prestige they will build something even higher on the same spot, something that will spoil New York even more, that will enter into some kind of absurd competition with the terrorists; and who will win in the end, the suicidal fanatics or an even higher Tower of Babel? You have to fight against terrorists with armies, the police, the intelligence services; their sympathizers have to be dealt with by politicians, political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists. Buildings, however, should be erected to enrich human settlements, not to make them duller. Why couldn't new buildings be put up on that spot proportional to the buildings already there, and that would simply blend into the existing skyline? Likewise, I don't think that some bombastic monument should be erected at Ground Zero. What happened there must be commemorated, but tastefully, as the fallen from the Vietnam or Korean wars are commemorated in Washington, or simply with a single large space or room that would evoke the catastrophe and its context.