World Trade Center architect to speak

The architect chosen for the World Trade Center towers site Daniel Libeskind will deliver the first talk in the Dorit and Gerald Paul Lecture in Jewish Culture at 7 p.m. tonight in the Whittenberger Auditorium at the Indiana Memorial Union.\nLibeskind's talk, titled "Memory Foundations," will be the inaugural event for the new Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts. The director of the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program, Professor Steve Weitzman, said bringing Libeskind to campus exemplifies the institute's mission to promote the understanding and appreciation of Jewish creativity.\n"He's one of the major shapers of culture and memory of our age," Weitzman said. "He's at the center of how we'll remember 9/11." \nThe institute's director, Alvin Rosenfeld, said he was overwhelmed by Libeskind's first major building, the critically acclaimed Jewish Museum in Berlin. \n"I was just balled over by it," Rosenfeld said. "He's built into that building cuts or gashes that reflect the traumatic history of Jewish life in Germany. Parts of the main floor are uneven. You almost feel like you're toppling over at some points. He really has absorbed the traumatic effect of the Holocaust and built that into his museum. He has a particular genius for finding architectural forms to link up with historical calamities."\nRosenfeld said the new World Trade Center site plan must reflect the past but at the same time transcend it. \n"The building will be a living building, not a mausoleum," Rosenfeld said.\nThe lecture will also be webcast to a room at Ball State's College of Architecture and Planning. The school's associate dean, Michel Mounayar, said Libeskind's solution to the problems with the World Trade Center site was brilliant.\n"You can imagine the complication that is loaded onto that site with its history and emotion," Mounayar said. "I think it's going to celebrate the resilience of New York. I think it's going to be a triumphant building." \nLibeskind's plan for the World Trade Center site includes a glass tower that, once built, would be the tallest building in the world. The tower's 1,776-foot height would represent the year the U.S. declared its independence from Britain. The footprints of the twin towers would remain empty, and the slurry wall, which formed the foundations of the towers, would be left partially exposed. \nThe final look of the buildings at the site is far from set though. Libeskind's plan lays out the location of the site's new buildings, but future competitions will determine which architects will design the specific structures. \nIU expects the lecture to attract a large and diverse audience. Rosenfeld said he knew of at least 58 Indianapolis architects who planned on making the drive to Bloomington to hear Libeskind. \n-- Contact staff writer Daniel Wells at djwells@indiana.edu.