Gaudi's
Grand Hotel on Ground Zero
A
Proposal By
Paul Laffoley, Architect, A.I.A., 2002
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Gaudi's
Gothic sensibility elicited the very best of the creativity
of his colleagues and subordinates. He carried on
the medieval guild system of art working. Everyone
regardless of their level of talent became involved
in some part of a serious art project. This is exactly
what would take place in bringing Gaudi's hotel to
fruition.
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Although there
have been many proposals as to how to memorialize Ground Zero
in New York City, so far the ones that have gotten through
the various bureaucratic screenings have been those that exhibit
the "proper" degree of ephemerality (according to the city's
abundant supply of politicians and culture mavens), such as
"the Towers of Light" a project by the team of Julian LaVerdiere
and Paul Myoda, both artists, and John Bennett and Gustavo
Bonevardi, architects developed, which called for twin rectangular
arrangements of powerful lights pointed skyward from a pair
of large barges anchored in the Hudson River next to Ground
Zero. It was scheduled for 28 nights, one for each year of
the existence of the Twin Towers, early in November of 2001,
but illumination was delayed until April of 2002 to coincide
with a sixth month memorial of 09/11/2001.
When I saw the
maquette for the project for the first time I was struck by
the uncanny resemblance to what the Architect Albert Speer
(1905-1981) staged at Nuremberg for Adolf Hitler (1889-1945).
At Nazi party rallies in the early 1930's. Speer used many
searchlights aimed upward into the night sky to suggest "Cathedrals
of Light." They were combined with massed flags and blocky
forms for buildings.
Anyone who has
seen the work of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (1902-
) especially "The Triumph of the Will," which recorded the
megalomaniacal tableaux of Speer, and displayed the charismatic
appeal of Hitler, would have to agree that vertical light
seeking the darkness of outer space has an undeniable visual
poetry. But it is the poetry of the unfettered ego, or at
least, in this case the ghost of the ego that built the Twin
Towers.
Al Qaeda brought
down the World Trade Center by pitting ego against ego plus
a sneak attack. To continue in this symbolic vein means that
the United States has been reduced in its expression to the
level of the terrorists.
"The Towers of
Light" Project was actually one of more than 50 exhibits that
were displayed in a reactive exhibition presented from 17
January to 16 February 2002 at the Max Protetch gallery in
New York City's Chelsea section. Viewing the proposals on
the internet right now, the immediate reaction to ŇA
New World Trade Center: Design ProposalsÓ of most people
is to echo the sentiments of architect Robert ("don't call
me Post-Modern") Venturi (1925- ) Đ the restrained aesthetic
of doing nothing at all."
Most of the proposals
seem surprisingly naive but this may have been the result
of the haste with which this exhibition was concocted. From
the Sixth of April until early June 2002 it was at the National
Building Museum in Washington D.C. And, of course, the one
glaring omission from the "Design Proposals" was the possibility
of erecting Gaudi's hotel on Ground Zero, its intended site
for 1908.
As time goes by,
the significant design issues will begin to emerge. Already
Rudolph Giuliani, who was the Mayor of New York City during
9/11, has said of a memorial to the victims, that it should
be "soaring, monumental, beautiful." He later stated that
whatever is placed on Ground Zero must be ready to last at
least one hundred years and not act as spatial inhibitor above
Ground Zero.
Architect Peter
Eisenman (1932- ) to my mind said it all about setting the
stage for building something on Ground Zero: "I purposely
didn't go into the Max Protetch Show. I couldn't ask the questions
that needed to be asked. Whatever goes up has to be a public
icon, whether it makes an impact from the water or the air
or the ground. It has to be some sort of public acknowledgement.
It can't be another set of buildings that just blends in."
Lemma:
There are many
reasons why Gaudi's Grand Hotel should be built. Just a few
of them are:
(1) Structual
Strength. Gaudi's Grand Hotel is a structural ideal
of Memento Mori (a Reminder of Death). Its own history is
the death of an architectural ideal in 1908 which resulted
in a deadly curse. Generically, an ideal is that which unites
artistically in a single form all the excellencies found in
nature in different individual forms of the same type or belonging
to the same category. "The ideal," therefore, aims to be more
perfect than anything that can be observed in nature and,
thereby, proceeds from the artist's own vision of perfection,
which is also a vision of death.
What Gaudi wanted
was to utilize the catenary paraboloid (a surface all of whose
intersections by planes yield either parabolas and ellipses,
or parabolas and hyperbolas). Because the form is catenary
in reverse (instead of resisting loads in complete tension)
the form causes all its material to resist loads in complete
compression.
The catenary,
in its ideal form, is a curve assumed by a cord of uniform
density and cross-section that is perfectly flexible but not
capable of being stretched and that hangs freely from two
fixed points. When a catenary surface occurs in nature in
living membranes, for instance, it is subject to ever-changing
wave fronts of energy which forms its matrix of strain, growth
and repair. When the catenary is "frozen" in space, all of
its material resists gravity. Being frozen in space also means
frozen in time and, therefore, as ideal and changeless as
death.
Since the structure
of Gaudi's Grand Hotel is hollow and generally conical, its
internal surface stresses are twisting shear stresses. This
torsion is composed of a force couple (the applied torque
and resisting torque). The hodograph of this stress pattern
is the same as that which appears in all ordinary univalve
seashells Đ the logarithmic spiral Đ the path of
which the biologist Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948)
stated: "... is characteristic, not of that of living tissues,
but of the dead. And for the same reason it will always or
nearly always be accompanied, and adorned, by a pattern formed
of "lines of growth," the lasting record of successive stages
of form and magnitude."
Seashells are
composed of aggregates of calcium carbonate, which is also
used in making lime and portland cement. Gaudi planned to
build the Grand Hotel of reinforced concrete in ringed sections.
This process is as close as one can get to producing gigantic
seashells. One of the fundamental structural principles of
the seashell is to resist lateral thrusts of large creatures
with large teeth. Or in the case of skyscrapers, the lateral
forces of airplanes or guided missiles. Can we assume that
Gaudi anticipated this far into the future?
(2) Permanent
Memorial. Gaudi's Grand Hotel, because of its basic
imprinting with the forms of death, would be the most appropriate
structure as a memorial for the thousands of people who died
at Ground Zero, another type of Memento Mori at the personal,
social and emotional levels.
The center catenary
paraboloid in Gaudi's design for the hotel is devoted to celebratory
and memorial functions from the Space Tower Observatory to
the great exhibition hall, 375 feet high (as high as the towers
of Gaudi's masterpiece, "The Sagrada Familia") down through
the large theater and lecture hall, down, down through the
six enormous restaurants which symbolize the five continents
of the Earth: Asia, Africa, Oceania, Europe, and America,
until finally the lobby space at the footprint of the building,
the extent of which fits directly over Ground Zero.
Since the lobby
is 400'-0" in diameter and 150'-0" high, it would provide
a lavish indoor burial ground for the hotel, complete with
circumferential glazing and spectacular imagery of the universe
obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope, holographic and
virtual reality films of the attack on the World Trade Center;
natural daylight could be delivered through the inside of
the building by means of tubes that are mirrored on their
interiors and curved as cylinders, spheres, and paraboloids.
Also light rays are transferred without light loss by means
of opti-thermal-imagers.
The other lobby
areas surrounding the center area are so extensive that they
can accommodate any number of visitors either to Ground Zero
or the ten ancillary hotels that cluster around the main shaft.
(3) Celebration
of New York City. While Gaudi's Grand Hotel would
act as a permanent memorial for all those who lost their lives
in the terrorist attacks, it would be paradoxically a celebration
of the life for which New York City is famous. In the great
exhibition space, Gaudi had planned to have enough space in
this hall for gigantic statues of the Presidents, with enough
pedestals remaining to take America into the Third Millennium.
Much of this space could be devoted also to separate memorials
for disaster victims, which would highlight the nature of
the lives they led rather than just an indication of their
existence.
In terms of the
physical details, Gaudi had planned that his Grand Hotel would
have the most lavish of surfacing materials used both for
the interior and the exterior. On a base of structural reinforced
concrete first would be placed heat resistant tiles (the kind
used to surface rocketships for reentry into the earth's atmosphere),
something obviously needed in the present, would be placed
alabaster tiles, giving the exterior a pearlescent luster,
along with different colored marbles and carved granite at
the base of the cluster of towers. Beyond that, the structure
would be surfaced with bits of debris (in this case from Ground
Zero) terra cotta sculptures, minerals and fragments of colored
glass.
The interior beyond
the heat resistant tiles would have stained glass windows,
sculptured surfaces of plaster, terra cotta, various woods,
and historically formulaic interiors and elaborately modeled
stucco. This slow-setting plaster known from antiquity was
made of very fine sand, pulverized white carrara marble, gypsum
(hydrated calcium sulfate), alabaster-dust and water, often
with other additions, such as coloring provided by mixing
in metallic oxides. Stucco was sometimes mixed with gum dissolved
in lukewarm water. When the stucco was perfectly dry it was
rubbed and polished.
(4) Social
and Cultural Concerns. The major cultural issues
concerning the design of a memorial for Ground Zero have emerged
as:
- First, the
general populace across the United States, and New York
City in particular, wish to keep Ground Zero just as it
is with no modifications for at least the next 100 years.
Some prominent architects have underscored this decision;
- Second, the
artistic and design communities of New York City are determined
to create a physical memorial for Ground Zero. Other designers
from the national and international venues echo these
sentiments;
- Third, there
is a need for a designer with whom everyone across the
country can relate, whether or not they are from the professional
design community or laymen;
- Fourth, also
the selected designer must be of such a nature that he
or she will not succumb to the temptation to indulge in
the ego-mongering that most successful design professionals
are subject to, thanks to the ubiquity of the media. Using
the commission of a memorial to such an august historical
event as Ground Zero as a chance for self-promotion would
be totally counter to the spirit of the seriousness of
the situation;
- Fifth, most
everyone who has thought about it agrees that any structure
used as the Ground Zero Memorial must not be used for
any world trade commercial activities. From the start,
the World Trade Center failed to fulfill its stated mission
as being the business nexus for world trade. As time went
on, more and more of its rentable space went to small
computer based industries that would have been better
served as rural cottage enterprises.
(5)
Vision and Collective Involvement.
It is my belief, therefore, that the Grand Hotel for New York
City by Antonio Gaudi y Cornet, designed 94 years ago but
never built at that time, if built today at and above the
Ground Zero site will be able to meet the challenges of these
and other issues regarding the memorialization of this national
tragedy.
Gaudi
died 76 years ago. His ego is not at stake, but his reputation
is. Gaudi's reputation has been growing steadily since his
death from that of an architectural oddity to one of the masters
of architecture in the modern world. Eventually his work will
be seen less as the marginalia of "Art Nouveau" and more as
the anticipation of the physically alive technology that the
inhabitants of earth will need in its quest to penetrate and
live successfully on and in other planets and outer space.
By then Gaudi will be hailed as the greatest architect of
Modernism.
Hotels
in the strictest sense are not commercial ventures, they are
part of the "theater of life" and, as such, are often revived
after they failed as businesses, because of the joy and urban
history they have engendered. Consider the history of the
Waldorf Astoria. In Gaudi's case, his New York Hotel has the
potential for a double history, first as an unbuilt project,
and second as a built work. Also it would not be a pastiche
if built, but would be an actual new work.
Gaudi's
Gothic sensibility elicited the very best of the creativity
of his colleagues and subordinates. He carried on the medieval
guild system of art working. Everyone regardless of their
level of talent became involved in some part of a serious
art project. This is exactly what would take place in bringing
Gaudi's hotel to fruition. The design and artistic team would
be almost self selected with people dropping out when they
discover that they cannot perform as they claimed.
The
basic fear about the hotel may be that there is no architect
alive now with talent enough to match Gaudi's vision. But
that is not the problem. Gaudi's vision is what will carry
the day and inform the participants as to how to go about
building it. The difficult part will be gathering the collective
will to do it.
Paul
Laffoley may be reached at Boston Visionary Cell, 36 Bromfield
Street, Suite 200, Boston, MA 02110, (email: gaudihotel@aol.com).
Artwork and bibliography: www.kentgallery.com, info at: www.dilettantepress.com.
See Gaudi's architectural design for his "American Hotel"
at http://www.op.net/%7Ejmeltzer/Gaudi/hotel.html.
For info on the '2002 Year of Gaudi' festivities in Reus,
Spain see http://www.reusgaudi2002.org.
References
La Vision Artistique
Et Religieuse De Gaudi, 1969, Robert Des Charnes and Clovis
Pre'vost, Edita S. A. Lausanne and Dorset Press N.Y.C.
Antoni Gaudi
Y Cornet - A Life Devoted to Architecture, Rainer Zerbst,
Rikuyo - SHA Publishing, Inc. Tokyo, Japan 1985
Gaudi, Gijs
Van Hensbergen, 2001, Harper Collins Publishers Inc. New
York City
Antonio Gaudi:
Master Architect, Juan Bassegoda Nonell, 2000, Abbeville
Publishing Group N.Y.C.
Gaudi,
Henry Russell Hitchcock, 1957, Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.C.
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