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Is This Forever?
War, religion, and eternity at Calatrava’s new World Trade Center church
by Lyta Gold
Photos of the church tend to show it at night, in isolation, as a glowing “jewel box” or “bauble” of light shining through the translucent Pentelic marble (the same kind of marble used in the Parthenon, as every press release about the church attests). In daylight, St. Nicholas is less remarkable: the marble of the dome takes on a sallow cast, especially on a cloudy day. Crowded in by towering skyscrapers, the church can look stubby and lost, like a toddler wandering through a mall. Many of the skyscrapers are still under construction: fancy condos for the most part, going for dangerously unspecified prices. Across the plaza, One World Trade Center gleams above the rest, as cold and professional as a steel hypodermic. On the cold February day when I visited, I found quiet construction or repairs going on toward the back of the church, and the crew wasn’t sure if it was open.
It was. The interior of the church is beautiful. It’s also tiny, its footprint composed of a small round chapel and two brief antechambers. Calatrava’s preference for unrelieved whiteness is overridden by a series of extraordinary murals painted in a fourteenth century Byzantine style, supposedly the handiwork of Father Loukas, a priest-monk from the monastery of Xenophontos in Greece. If they’re really the work of a single monk (rather than a studio, which they almost certainly are), then they’re nothing short of miraculous: covering the ceiling and much of the walls, the murals faithfully depict Christ and Mary and St. Nicholas in their traditional forms.
Critical Distance
Manfredo Tafuri’s first book—a study on Japanese modern architecture—offers a picture of a brilliant historian as a young critic.
by Casey Mack
Everything I’ve read or heard about Manfredo Tafuri’s Modern Architecture in Japan—recently translated into English from the original 1964 Italian edition—repeats the same two facts: that he was just twenty-nine when he wrote it and had not visited the country nor the individual buildings and contexts on which he was to write. Even if you put aside matters of age, Tafuri’s decision to historicize from a distance of six thousand miles presents obvious problems. Without seeing the architectural and urbanistic “facts” on the ground for his survey, he was forced to rely on the books and journals in his bibliography—photos and texts translated out of Japanese, preapproved for foreign audiences. How do his selections and omissions from these sources put him in the role of “operative critic,” the type of historian-propagandist he’s remembered for later denouncing? Had he elected or been able to conduct onsite research, the shape of his account would have likely changed. But in what ways?
Radical Realism
There was no heroic image of housing design to be had in Reset: Towards a New Commons, and this was precisely its strength.
As a “dream,” the Reset projects look barely different from low-rise American neighborhoods today. But it’s not for a lack of optimism or failure of nerve. If anything, Reset’s cautious interventions suggest a reinvigorated faith in the possibility of change—a faith less apparent in Foreclosed’s speculative utopias. With landmark zoning reform efforts underway in small progressive cities across the country, and the recent passage of California’s SB 9 statewide subdivision legalization, today’s would-be re-designers of the American city operate with the difficult knowledge that change is happening. Can architects help to craft a more inclusive dream? Reset gives a resounding yes, but with an important caveat: radically expanding who is able to live in “suburban” neighborhoods, and how they do, may not look “radical” by last decade’s standards.
New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our Editor is Samuel Medina and our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc. For their support, we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Thomas Phifer.
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