Like a man stumbling out of his cryogenic pod, a project revived after cooling on ice for decades enters a world that is oddly familiar, but largely unknown. Resurrection is risky: Will the work still be relevant? Can it remain faithful to the designer's original intent? Such questions have swirled around the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park in New York City, a memorial designed by Louis I. Kahn shortly before his death in 1974. Now, after 38 years, the park is ready to open to the public on October 24.
At the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, a gleaming white granite exclamation point braces against the currents of the East River between Manhattan and Queens. Composed of a triangle and a square, the symmetrical four-acre park has a simple, two-part idea. 'I had this thought that a memorial should be a room and a garden. That's all I had ' I just chose it to be the point of departure,' Kahn said in a 1973 lecture. The garden is 'a personal kind of control of nature. And the room was the beginning of architecture ' an extension of self.' As Kahn intended, too, it is a spiritual place. It not only imparts the feeling of the structure's eternity'which he understood as defining monumentality in architecture'but it also prompts the visitor, in the face of such heft and solidity, to contemplate her own role in the larger scheme of things.
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