A decade ago, about a year after Daniel Libeskind, AIA, was appointed master planner of the World Trade Center site, I asked him a question: "In 10 years' time, will this place look like New York City?" His charming and evasive reply: "When the famous portrait of Gertrude Stein was painted by Picasso, she said to him, 'It's a beautiful portrait, but it doesn't look like me.' And he said, 'But it will.'" Picasso's iconic portrait, of course, cast Stein as a cubist Mona Lisa. And Libeskind, something of a cubist himself, seemed to have the idea that he was remaking not just the 16 acres nominally under his command, but New York City itself, dragging the wounded, architecturally recalcitrant metropolis into the 21st century.
展开▼
