A towering controversy rises on ‘Sacred Ground’

New York Gov. George E. Pataki might want to be president someday. As if the aspiration for ultimate authority were not enough, he also harbors an apparent hankering to be an architect.

That disconcerting desire emerges near the close of tonight’s edition of “Frontline” on PBS. The grim if revealing hour charts the epic struggle over the design of a Manhattan skyscraper planned to replace the architecturally undistinguished but emotionally compelling World Trade Center at ground zero.

The soul-shattering events of Sept. 11 have made the site “Sacred Ground,” as the documentary is titled.

Director Kevin Sim makes effective use of a conventional view of the central conflict in the effort to rebuild. Is the site primarily a memorial to the worst terrorist attack in the nation’s history and the more than 2,700 people who died? Or, is it a real estate development at the heart of the world’s financial capital, one with the capacity to profoundly bolster the city’s fiscal health and thus stand as its own symbol of regeneration?

And if the site is both, can conflicting ideals of humanity and economy, of democracy and capitalism, be reconciled by architecture?

Even without that momentous complication, the creation of powerful art within a public context is an enormously difficult feat. When the patron -- here in the ambitious person of Pataki -- decides that he will step in and become the artist, aesthetic mediocrity is ensured.

Not that the site had much hope without him. The two architects who fought each other over the design for most of 2003 brought little to the table.

Polish-born American architect Daniel Libeskind had bested 500 competitors in an international contest to design the site’s master plan. Memorializing is the animating spirit of his scheme.

Libeskind had designed the acclaimed Jewish Museum Berlin (1999-2001), but he had never built a skyscraper, much less designed a complex urban master plan. His winning plan called for a rising spiral of buildings that culminates in Freedom Tower -- a 1,776-foot skyscraper with an asymmetrical spire derived from the structural form of the Statue of Liberty’s upraised arm, in nearby New York Harbor.

Libeskind is an architectural advocate of a recent -- and dubious -- trend in memorial design, which proposes narrative storytelling as the truest method. (The failed Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial in Washington is the latest noteworthy example.) His banal pop symbols and “up from the ashes” spiral of buildings did not inspire confidence.

On the other side was corporate grind David Childs, a consulting partner at the aesthetically faded establishment firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He was hand-selected by the ground zero site’s commercial developer to maximize potential profits from the project.

Childs, unlike Libeskind, has built a lot -- but little that’s distinguished. (Most recent is the gross Time Warner behemoth at Manhattan’s Columbus Circle, a suburban office-shopping mall topped by expensive condominiums.) Still, his influence in New York, Washington and Los Angeles -- where he was recently chosen for the much-debated Grand Avenue redevelopment -- makes Childs perhaps the most powerful architect in the United States today.

What began as a simple documentary following Libeskind’s development of a master plan became something else when Childs was unexpectedly hired to design Freedom Tower: a stinging record of the vulgar, passive-aggressive battle between two architects separately designing one building, yet ostensibly collaborating. Childs, together with his unctuous structural engineer, Guy Nordenson come off worst here, as their megalomaniac plan for a torqued tower soars to a height of 2,000-plus feet, dwarfing everything in sight. Roland Betts -- the Yale fraternity pal of President Bush (and lead owner in Bush’s Texas Rangers partnership) charged with getting the politically necessary project underway before the opening of the Republican National Convention -- pulls no punches in his withering remarks.

“I wish I had stayed in there and been a referee in the active sense of chairing the meetings,” Betts says, “and basically saying to David Childs, ‘Stop it. Grow up.’ But I didn’t.”

Director Sim and his “Frontline” producers -- Nick Rosen, Tom Roberts and Michael Sullivan -- deftly establish a second set of opposing forces. The more moving conflict plays out between the deeply personal, often anonymous anguish of the survivors of Al Qaeda victims and the high-stakes saga of backroom power struggles within the glamorous public world of architecture.

An effective sequence interweaves the ugly fight between Libeskind and Childs with a humble ritual performed by Gordon Huie, whose sister perished on the 106th floor. The two lifelong New Yorkers used to meet on Sundays near the World Trade Center for tea and coffee. Now, the surviving sibling prepares tea the way his sister liked it, and he brings it to the site to pour into the ground at the edge of the construction fence.

As the December 2003 deadline for unveiling the Freedom Tower design looms, Libeskind and Childs are not speaking. To break ground by July 4, piling leaden symbol atop symbol, the deadline cannot be missed. Pataki decides to crack heads. Orders are issued.

In essence Pataki takes Childs’ design, lops off more than 20 floors to bring it within the 1776-inspired range and instructs that a Libeskind-style asymmetrical spire be attached to the top. Now, everybody’s happy -- or nobody, save the cheery governor, judging from the other grim-faced participants at the press conference where the uninspiring result is revealed. Ground has since been broken on the cut-and-paste tower.

Almost always, great architecture requires a great patron. Freedom Tower occupies an especially conflicted site, but like so many in the last three years who have played the tragedy of Sept. 11 for political gain, Pataki made a cardinal mistake. The patron might hold one kind of power, but he never possesses the artist’s kind.