Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Goldberger took the podium at Annenberg Auditorium last night to speak about architecture’s relationship to two of the greatest crises of recent times — the World Trade Center disaster and Hurricane Katrina. As a Christensen Fund Distinguished Visiting Lecturer, Goldberger gave a presentation entitled “After the World Trade Center and Katrina: Rethinking the City for Our Time.”

Goldberger is the dean of Parsons School for Design and an architecture critic for The New Yorker. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his architecture criticism and a writer at The New York Times for 25 years, he focuses on social and political implications of design. Goldberger has also authored several books, most recently “Up from Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York.”

Goldberger began the lecture by speaking about New York and his book titled “Up from Zero.” He focused his lecture on the rebuilding of Ground Zero and expressed his pessimism regarding its progress.

“Lately, it has not been encouraging,” he said. “It has taken something of a nosedive in the last few months and has turned into a complicated, dreary mess. This story is indeed more about politics than architecture. It is no exaggeration to say that Ground Zero is the greatest urban design challenge of the 21st Century.”

Goldberger compared the problem to that of rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

“The problem in New Orleans is vastly more severe since the existence of the city as we’ve known it is at stake,” Goldberg said. “We feared that would be the case in New York in the awful weeks after Sept. 11, but it turned out not to be. What happened in New Orleans is a different kind of killing — the potential death of the city itself.”

He then tracked the history of the World Trade Center as a part of the New York skyline.

“Looking back at the short life of the World Trade Center, there were three distinct phases,” he said. “The first phase we can call resentment. What was this pair of things doing there? So big, so banal. Then came a second phase, which we can call acceptance. We can get used to anything. In the case of architecture, we better get used to it. Then came the final phase: The phase of martyrdom. The World Trade Center is now inexplicably bound up in a whole set of values that martyrdom embraces. And martyrs, after all, are beyond criticism.”

Goldberger also discussed the towers as a symbol of modernity.

“To most of the world, these towers represented the modernist idea in its most perfect, realized form,” he said. “The ultimate symbols of modernity were the ultimate target. The World Trade Center looms larger in death than it ever did in life. It’s now more than ever before American. Modern architecture has never before been intimately tied to the identity of this country. The terrorists managed to do what an architect has never been able to do — make this country cherish a national design.”

The lecture also focused on the rebuilding process. Goldberger highlighted the dispute regarding Ground Zero between the Port Authority, different architects, the governor, families of the victims and numerous other parties. He criticized the lack of public control over the process and the idea that the towers should be rebuilt.

“Rebuilding denies history,” he argued. “To put things back the way they were as if nothing happened signifies that you think of the city as a kind of theme park, not a real place. Real places show their history, they don’t deny it. We have to do two contradictory things — to commemorate and rebuild. We have to blend the awesome and the everyday.”

Goldberger focused the rest of his lecture on the combination between the commonplace and the sacred, discussing the alternate plans for Ground Zero’s rebuilding. He criticized the political factors at work, noting how the Drawing Center and the Freedom Center were forced out of the site due to objections over the content of the museums.

“I come back in the end to a paradox,” he said. “We need to combine the awesome and the everyday and that’s not easy. We need to make a new place and we need to connect and enhance the old. But as difficult and as seemingly contradictory as all of these things are, they are part of the art of city building and they always have been. I am discouraged about the state of things right now at Ground Zero, as you can plainly see.”

However, Goldberger did not fail to wrap up his talk with a hint of optimism.

“But I still believe that this is a place where our dreams and realities meet with greater intensity than ever before,” he said. “And I hope with greater intensity that it is where they will ultimately come together.”

The Christensen Fund enabled the Department of Art and Art History to bring Goldberger to Stanford. The organization began in 1990 and provides free lectures not only for the Stanford community, but the general public as well.

“The fund allows us to invite a distinguished, internationally recognized art or architectural historian to the Department to present a major public address,” said Lisa Vestal, Art and Art History Department publicist. “The Christianson family has been very generous to us. It affords us to bring a world-renowned speaker to come and give a public lecture. This enables us to bring the best and the brightest out there.”

Vestal noted the honor of bringing such a renowned architecture critic to campus.

“He’s a huge name in the art world and particularly in architecture and architecture criticism. He’s talking about these timely disasters and thinking about these catastrophes in a new worldview and what our city is or needs to be in terms of a sociological standpoint.”

Junior Megan Green agreed on Goldberger’s importance in the art world.

“It was the big art history lecture of the quarter and he’s kind of a forced to be reckoned with in architectural criticism,” said Green. “Reconstruction is a very pertinent topic right now with New Orleans and New York.”