John Young Architect

New York Newsday, January 25, 1989, Part 2, p. 2.

## Who Was That Masked Man?

By D. D. Guttenplan

Architect John Young is mad as hell at Ch. 13, and he is doing something about it.
Young was a guest on a recent broadcast of WNET's "Eleventh Hour," focusing on "Unbuilt New York." One segment of the show was devoted to an alternative plan for Donald Trump's Television City site on the West Side of Manhattan. Architects Lebbeus Woods, who drew the illustrations for the plan, and Michael Sorkin, who provided the text, were interviewed by host Robert Lipsyte. Young, who said he was involved in the engineering side, the practical side, and the political side," was on camera --where he sat, silently, his identity concealed by a welder's mask.
Saying he was censored by the show's producers, Young has placed a series of tiny advertisements on the bottom of the front page of The New York 'rimes to protest. "WNET /13: Why silence me on The Eleventh Hour?" asks one.

"We were led to believe they were going to take a serious look at development in New York," Young said Monday. "I did all kinds of leg work for this show. I even rented a helicopter, out of my own pocket, to show them the Trump site."

Young says that when he told producer William Shebar he planned to discuss "the anonymous people who actually carry out projects, I was told my comments 'weren't suitable' for the show." Young said Shebar warned him the topic was "too controversial."

Shebar called Young's charge "total nonsense."

Describing Young's actions as "a little bit crazy," Shebar insisted he "was not silenced. Nobody forced him to put on that mask."

Young, a practicing architect since 1970, says he donned the mask "once it became clear that their attitude was 'these are airheads who have no interest in real world problems.' "

Shebar says he "took this project very seriously." But there simply wasn't time, he explained, to address the issues Young wanted to raise.
"Lipsyte was in his first week," said Shebar. "He was reeling from one thing to another, and some things got lost."
"I'm not so offended as John," said Young's collaborator and fellow guest Michael Sorkin.
But Sorkin, who praised Shebar's efforts, still thought the show "set us up, digested us, [and] spit us out."

Still bristling at being branded "self-indulgent" hy Lipsyte, who also labeled their scheme "cute science fiction," Sorkin called the show's host "Channel 13's Morton Downey."

"We knew perfectly well we could make a better-looking plan for 8,000 condos,'' Sorkin said. "But that seemed not to be the point."

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