The conditions of Libeskind’s appointment were slippery, however. Pataki named the skyscraper the Freedom Tower. Libeskind came up with a sharp-angled skyscraper, topped with a twisting spire. But during the competition, officials instructed the would-be planners to design buildings to help illustrate, and sell, their master plans. Libeskind was technically not competing to design the site’s individual buildings. After their first failure, officials in charge of the rebuilding plan seemed to feel that a high-profile, international design competition would help people imagine a future World Trade Center site and grow more excited about office buildings. But Larry Silverstein, the site’s developer, along with Governor George Pataki and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, wanted to rebuild all of Silverstein’s destroyed office space-ten million square feet. Two months earlier, at an enormous town-hall meeting called “Listening to the City,” the public had overwhelmingly rejected several sets of master plans, in part because people said that they put too many office buildings on a now sacred, historic piece of land.
At the time, commercially develop on the site was controversial. In September of 2002, he had been running an architecture studio in Berlin when he entered a competition to design a master plan for the World Trade Center site. As one victim’s family member memorably put it, in an interview with the Times, Libeskind is “that magical little guy with the black pants, black shoes, black socks, black belt, black shirt and black glasses.” He talks in a free-form, stream-of-conscious manner, hands in motion, peppering his soliloquies with references to Baudelaire, or to the history of the Eiffel Tower, or to the beauty of the New York Street grid. He dresses almost exclusively in black, from his cowboy boots to his thick, square-framed glasses. Libeskind, sixty-seven years old, is unlike other downtown decision-makers. Libeskind has quietly transformed into one of the site’s most ardent boosters. But as the opening of 1 World Trade Center approaches, a curious thing has happened. “I am the people’s architect!” he was known to declare. At first, the exile inspired Libeskind to lash out in frustration: he launched a public-relations offensive and filed a lawsuit. I’ve been investigating the political battle behind the rebuilding effort since it began, over a decade ago, and have just published a book on the topic, “Battle for Ground Zero.” Libeskind is one of the story’s most dramatic characters.
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