It Takes a Village: In praise of the New Urbanism

National Review, July 14, 2003 by Catesby Leigh

For a glimpse at civic art's future, look at the vastly superior scheme for Ground Zero produced last fall by Michael Meszaros, then a junior at the University of Notre Dame. Meszaros achieves monumentality and grandeur without resorting to record-setting heights. He creates a beautiful architectural setting for a rotary circle with a memorial column crowned by a statue of a firefighter. Buildings with office and retail space front on the circle, whose arcades might accommodate sidewalk cafes. Plazas flanking the circle to east and west are enclosed by civic buildings, a new Museum of the City of New York, and, facing the World Financial Center's Winter Garden, a galleria. Elsewhere in an extensively restored street grid, Meszaros has arranged residential buildings with street-level retail. Next to this exercise in civic art, Libeskind's hyper-expressionism seems threadbare and obsolescent.

The future is with young architects like Meszaros, and with the historic idea of the urban community to which a growing number of civic designers in this country subscribe. What's at stake is the integration of art and life, and a built world worthy of the freest, most prosperous, most powerful nation in human history.