PI ONLINE:
11-26-04
BY BEN WINTERS
The fight for freedom never ends. For many months we were treated with the details of the squabbling between Daniel Libeskind and David Childs, the two very famous architects supposedly collaborating on the Freedom Tower, which will one day rise on the World Trade Center site. (This is a collaboration that Libeskind has repeatedly referred to in print as a “forced marriage.”)
Now comes a new twist in the saga, as a “former Yale architecture student says Freedom Tower designer David Childs stole his skyscraper idea” for the tower, according to the Daily News on Nov. 9. The plaintiff is named Thomas Shine, and he says that Childs got a hold of his idea when serving on a jury evaluating a batch of student projects way back in December of 1999.
Now Shine is all grown up, running his own firm in Massachusetts, and accusing Childs of ripping him off to create the “twisting tower and exterior grid…meant to evoke the Statue of Liberty torch” that is the centerpiece of the Freedom Tower plan.
Childs wasn’t talking to the Daily News, or the Hartford Courant, which also ran a lengthy piece on the lawsuit. Shine has plenty to say, though. He explains to the Courant that at first he wasn’t sure, but as he saw more and more pictures of the Childs/Libeskind plans in the paper, he was increasingly convinced that his work was being used. “Shine became certain that coincidence could not explain the similarities between his work and Childs’ twisting structure. His building and the Freedom Tower shared a diagonal column grid, giving the towers their twisted shape, a diamond-patterned facade and other features.” Shine’s biggest bit of evidence seems to be that Childs, after jurying the contest in ’99, complimented Shine’s work in an alumni magazine.
Shine’s reaction to being (allegedly) copied off in the design of such a symbolically fraught new American building ranged between shocked and psyched: “There’s some disbelief, some disappointment, that this could happen,” he told the Courant. “But also, I think, to see my building as that building is stunning. It’s really surprising.”
Elsewhere in architecture news, Shanghai is sinking. No, seriously. According to a Nov. 8 item in London’s The Guardian newspaper, the Chinese metropolis “is slowly sinking,” a victim of its own mania for development over the last couple decades. “The city’s greedy appropriation of the air is proving too much for the ground beneath to bear,” is The Guardian’s conclusion.
If Shanghai does disappear under ground, it will take a lot of people with it. The Guardian piece says that 10 million people live in the city and 10 million in the suburbs. It is the world’s most densely populated city.
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| Open Eye Productions' Middle Aged White Guys |
Two political satires by scruffy young theatre companies opened in Midwestern theatre capitals in early November. Neither had much chance of affecting the election, however, as both opened after it happened.
Of course, people attending political satires by scruffy young theatres were most likely voting for Kerry, anyway. Christopher Piatt, in his Chicago Sun-Times review of Open Eye’s Middle-Aged White Guys, goes even further in dismissing the capacity of theatre to win hearts and minds. “The last time a play changed the country’s history,” he writes, “was an 1865 production of Our American Cousin.” (He’s being a bit ironic of course—it wasn’t the play’s content that affected the country, so much as President Lincoln being shot while watching it. But just for the record, Our American Cousin was a long-running success in its day, and the actor Joseph Jefferson cited his role in the show as a turning point in his career.)
Piatt summarizes the message of White Guys as “[not] that bloated patriarchy needs to be eliminated. It simply needs to learn how to apologize for itself once in a while.” As for the production, he concludes it is “so irreverent and so simultaneously patriotic that it becomes a beer blast on behalf of the First Amendment.”
In Minneapolis, the Pig Eye Theatre Company’s offering was The Mudslinger Party, which, per John Townsend’s review in the Star-Tribune, features a Jesse Ventura clone who “wears sweatpants and a suit coat, and guzzles malt liquor from cans he punctures with screwdrivers.” That’s the sort of thing that would have been a lot funnier before the sitting governor of California referred to his political opponents as “girly men.”
But is it Art?
The National Book Award is two times controversial this year. The fiction finalists are controversial, summarizes Caryn James in the New York Times, because of “their sameness—all women, all living in New York City, all little-known names.” Was there no room on the list, folks wondered, for Philip Roth, whose “The Plot Against America” was widely hailed as the more original novel of the year. (James, by the way, didn’t care much for the books chosen: “Not one of these books is big and sprawling. And not one has much of a sense of humor.”)
There is controversy, as well, on the nonfiction side, where among the nominees is “The 9/11 Commission Report,” the book length report of the nonpartisan committee set up to investigate what went wrong that day. “Critics call the best-selling report an inappropriate choice,” wrote Heidi Benson in a long San Francisco Chronicle piece on the choice, “because: 1) it was written by committee, 2) it avoids placing blame and 3) it tells the story of the Sept. 11 attacks in an inappropriately dramatic and entertaining narrative.” And some feel the Book Award judges are making an anti-Bush statement by congratulating the work.
Interestingly, Victor Navasky of The Nation magazine and no fan of the administration, is among the critics of the choice. “These people [the judges] like what the 9/11 commission said, so they’ve given it an award,” he tells Benson. “I happen to agree with the politics, but I wouldn’t put that ahead of all the great nonfiction that was produced this year.”
The other nominees in the nonfiction category include David Hackett Fisher’s “Washington’s Crossing,” which is not being criticized as political, though is comes out strongly in favor of George Washington.
(Editor’s Note: Open Eye Theatre’s president and White Guys producer, Jon Sevigny, is the operations manager for PerformInk.)