The Supreme Court will be handing down decisions at 10:00 AM EDT. The decisions are expected to rule on the display of the Ten Commandments in public spaces and downloading of songs from the Internet. Guess which one will be written about more by bloggers.
Both are important cases in their own way. The Ten Commandments case goes to the heart of many passionate bloggers on both sides of the case, but the downloading case is an economic issue at its heart.
Notice of Determination:
The NYT ran this article on the front page of the Metro Section, talking about the nearing completion of 7 WTC.
The answer is emerging these days at the northern edge of the trade center void. A shimmering, sharp-edged parallelogram sheathed in glass is being married to the brutalist 78-foot-tall substation with what looks like a sculptural installation: a kinetic, interactive stainless-steel wall.Did you catch the part in bold? If you did, then you'll know that I'll be all over that Wednesday news about the Freedom Tower.
Architects have said that this screen, intended to be a source of reflected color and light, may serve as the prototype for the cladding of a new, sturdier base at the 1,776-foot-tall Freedom Tower that will be built next door. That skyscraper's security redesign is expected to be unveiled on Wednesday.
At 7 World Trade Center, the high-tech wall must also serve as a porous ventilator for hidden vaults of three-story transformers that need to breathe. Mr. Silverstein said there was "a whole set of design challenges that David had to solve," referring to David M. Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architects of 7 World Trade Center.
To Mr. Childs, it was essential not to slap "some external piece of art" onto the 52-story tower, he said, "but something integral, that was designed from the start."
Mr. Childs sought the expertise of James Carpenter, whose Manhattan firm, James Carpenter Design Associates, also helped to create the glass cable-wall system at the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle, and is currently working on an extension to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
To observers, Mr. Childs hoped, it would seem that light was not only captured by the building, but also emanated from it. So the architects ordered 13.6-foot-long white glass sheets, low-iron panes that minimize the conventional greenish hue of glass, for the upper floors. These could be extended in one piece from the ceiling of each of the building's 42 tenant floors down past the spandrels, the horizontal panels at the base of each floor slab.
7 WTC is the first major building to be replaced at Ground Zero - and it shows that if there's a will to rebuild, there is a way. Silverstein owned the building outright, so there wasn't a maze of bureaucracy to deal with. However, there was the reconstruction of a Con-Ed substation in its lower floors.
Now comes the hard part - selling the floors to tenants. Among the selling points - security. Although the central core of elevators and utilities will limit floor plans to 40,000 sq. ft. each, the core is protected by two feet of concrete. Survivability is a selling point and in the post-9/11 era, that cannot be understated.
UPDATE:
Scotusblog will have more on the Supreme Court decisions. Expect The Volokh Conspiracy to have analysis as well.
UPDATE II:
Then, there's the small matter of whether Justice Rhenquist will announce his retirement. Powerline has more.
UPDATE III: Notice of HUH?!
The Court split the two cases dealing with the Ten Commandments. It ruled that the Big Ten can't be displayed in a courthouse, but that it can be displayed on government property. The key to determining the outcome appears to be whether there is religious intent in the display. So, display on historical grounds is okay as long as the religious component is not present.
Um, the Big Ten was religious originated - and some would even argue divinely originated. How can you separate the two? Well, the Supreme Court claims to have managed that Solomonic task. I, for one, am skeptical as to how these two cases will be reconciled and applied. Using Souter's logic, as long as religious intent is never behind a painting or display of the Ten Commandments, they can be plastered all over the place. Religious motivation is the key.
Splitting 5-4 in the first of two rulings on government displays of the Ten Commandments, the Supreme Court upheld a federal court order against a display of the religious document on the wall of courthouses in two Kentucky counties.via Scotusblog.
The Court, in an opinion by Justice David H. Souter, said the ruling does not mean that a sacred text can never be integrated into a governmental display on law and history. It found, however, that the displays in Kentucky were motivated by a religious purpose, which did not change as the display was modified twice during court challenges.
Justice Antonin Scalia announced portions of his dissenting opinion. The case was McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky (03-1693).
Chief Justice Rehnquist announced the second decision on a religious display, finding no constitutional violation in the placement of a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the state capitol building in Austin, Texas. That decision was widely splintered. Announcing the votes of the various Justices, Rehnquist quipped -- to widespread laughter in the courtroom -- that he did not know there were so many Justices on the Court. The case was Van Orden v. Perry (03-1500).
UPDATE IV: UPDATE'S REVENGE:
Didn't take long for the satirists to grab hold of the
Technorati: World Trade Center, WTC, Supreme Court.
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