If there is one man in the world who lives by the mantra “bigger is better,” it is Donald Trump. Infamous for his riveting one liner “you’re fired,” and for making over anxious Harvard business grads look even more OCD on the NBC reality show The Apprentice, Trump is apparently also entitled to blasphemous rhetoric regarding the redesign of the Twin Towers. Trump is no stranger to extravagant architecture–he called his Taj Mahal “the eighth wonder of the world.” There is, however, somewhat of a discrepancy between the Vegas strip, and the New York City skyline. Trump’s beef is with the design propositioned by the Lower Manhattan Development corp., which has been christened the “Freedom Towers.” The towers would be home to two “recessed pools” bearing the names of the 9/11 victims, as well as a 4.5 acre memorial, restaurant, and wind turbines to help supply the building with energy. In addition to being progressive the design is rooted in the generally widely appealing patriotic symbolism. 1,776 feet represents the year of independence, and its 276-foot spire is reminiscent of the arm of the Statue of Liberty. Freedom Towers bear little resemblance to their predecessors, the roofs of the buildings are slanted, and the heights bear little uniformity. They are not, however as Trump states so eloquently, “The worst pile of architectural crap I have ever seen in my life.” Trump’s proposed monstrosity, is nearly identical to the original, only taller. The buildings are as utilitarian as his vision: “What we need is support to build a bigger and better version of two buildings and more that were taken down by people that were animals,” Trump said in a news conference last week. Not one for sentimental value, Trump’s demeaning criticism of the design, chosen in February of 2003, was received with patronizing responses. He has failed to realize that when NBC decides to make a made for TV movie documenting your life in which you are portrayed by a B-list actor with a bad comb-over wig, people tend to take you a little less seriously. The most unsettling, however, is not Trump’s bad hair, or his TV show with a theme in which the only identifiable lyrics are, money, money, money, money, money, MONEY, or the even the fact that his idea of a marketable item was “Trump Ice,”(bottled water with his face plastered across the label). It is that Trump and his design in no way represent the precept behind replacing the towers in the first place. Trump is a first-rate businessman with a first-rate ego. Everything he has built in New York City bears his unabashedly pretentious trademark There are his headquarters, 5th Avenue’s Trump Tower, and Trump World Tower. Trump and tower make a nice alliteration, a good marketing ploy, and perhaps part of the explanation for his eagerness to patent the new world trade center Twin Towers II, as his own. As Paul Goldberger, the dean of Parsons School of Design and the architecture critic for The New Yorker, said in a CNN.com article, “I think the challenge of Ground Zero goes beyond anyone’s individual ego, and the problem of Donald Trump is he’s never gone beyond his own individual ego. Everything he’s produced is ultimately about Donald Trump, and we need a solution at Ground Zero that’s going to be about New York, about America and about healing of the city — and Trump I don’t think is suited to that.” Trump’s reincarnate towers would not only bring negative deja vu of their nearly identical fallen counterparts, but would enshrine the corporate glitz of one man’s insatiable lust for a monopoly of the city’s skyline. Sequels are notoriously bad, and it is time that Trump laid his self-serving proposal for towers part deux to rest. His plan has recognizably come too late in the game, but the presumption behind it is nevertheless unnerving. Then again what else is to be expected of the man who in a meeting with a New York City Church, presented the archbishop with a t-shirt bearing the words, “Jesus Loves Donald Trump”? What indeed?
