Grand Visions Rise From Rubble

Seven teams of internationally prestigious architects offered bold proposals Wednesday to rebuild the World Trade Center site, ranging from designs for the world’s tallest buildings to memorial parks floating in the Hudson River.

As they discussed aesthetics and outlined plans for the 16-acre site, some of the world’s most famous architects also jousted over which team was offering the best proposal for New York City and America -- their presentations accompanied by rock music, spiritual messages and flashy computer graphics.

The provocative designs, four of which call for buildings taller than the former World Trade Center’s twin towers, were unveiled before an overflow crowd at the Winter Garden, a large public atrium across the street from where the towers once stood. The Lower Manhattan Development Corp., a government agency that oversees development at the site and sponsored the competition, is expected to select a final design for the area in February. Agency officials culled the seven teams of finalists from more than 407 entries this year.

“Some of these designs call on the traditions of 19th century Europe, while others leap into the 21st century, and beyond,” said Roland Betts, an agency planner who helped direct the competition.

“But they all address the same question: What do we want this site to look like generations from now? Today’s presentation is for the visionaries,” Betts said.

The nine proposals reflect an astonishing range of human emotion and spirituality, Betts added -- as if Rembrandt, Cezanne and Jasper Johns were asked to paint the same building. When the final proposal is picked next year, he said, officials will launch a separate international competition for the design of a memorial at the site of one of the terrorist attacks.

John Whitehead, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., praised the designs as “a preview of what Manhattan will look like in 10 years,” and said the public will be invited to comment in two public hearings, as well as on response cards that will be available at the Winter Garden through Feb. 3. He also pledged that agency officials will pick the final design -- or a combination of several designs -- “in a spirit of real democracy.”

The architects who made 20-minute presentations Wednesday looked and sounded as diverse as their proposals. Daniel Libeskind, the German designer of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, was dressed all in black and he lectured the audience intensely on what the site meant to him. Norman Foster, a renowned London architect, came across as an Oxford Don, talking about architecture and public need.

One proposal vowed to restore the New York skyline, with mega-buildings reminiscent of the doomed World Trade Center’s towers. Another called the site sacred ground, saying that commercial buildings should take a back seat to public space honoring the Sept. 11 dead and the country’s hope for the future.

Although there were seven competing groups of architects, the Think team -- with 10 partners, including architect Rafael Vinoly -- offered three proposals. Besides Libeskind and Foster, the other finalists included a consortium led by Richard Meier, who designed the Getty Center in Los Angeles; Peterson/Littenberg, a husband-wife team based in New York; United Architects, led by Greg Lynn; and a huge consortium headed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

While the issue of how to rebuild the site still triggers intense disagreement, many observers believe that the presentations Wednesday will revive public interest in what had become a sluggish, highly technical debate. Six proposals unveiled last summer had been strongly criticized for being unimaginative and were quickly discarded by the development agency. The new designs got a much better reception.

The architects’ often colorful pitches during the locally televised three-hour event “brought us to a much better place, a more thoughtful place about what we’ll build,” said Jack Lynch, a member of the Coalition of 9-11 Families, whose firefighter son, Michael, was killed at the site.

“There are a lot of ideas we can work with here,” added Mary Fetchet, with the Voices of September 11 families group. “Some of the ideas are quite good.”

Yet the discussion, however lofty, had its bare-knuckle moments.

“We’re the New York team, and some people call us the dream team,” said Meier, introducing a team of his prestigious architects to the audience. “But we’re very real. This is our city, our home. It’s where our children grew up. All of this matters.”

Not to be outdone, architect Steven Peterson said he and his wife, Barbara Littenberg, are also from New York, and that “while [Meier’s group] might be the New York team, we’re the New York project.” He said his proposal -- which called for immense twin towers -- would restore local pride and fill a physical void in the city’s spiritual life.

Concerns about height -- which many expressed after the Sept. 11 attacks -- apparently were not a major issue, for the development agency or for several of the competing firms. The agency set no limits on height, and four of the proposals call for office space and cultural uses on upper floors of buildings taller than the original towers.

Although many New Yorkers have said they would not want to work at such heights in any new buildings in the area, newspaper polls have found that 40% or more of respondents want the original twin towers rebuilt and occupied as before. Currently, Malaysia’s 1,483-foot Petronas Twin Towers are the world’s tallest buildings.

“This is not Dallas, and it’s not Houston. It’s the Big Apple, and we want to bring back what was lost,” Peterson said. “The towers would be like a compass; you would always know where you are in relation to them, and they’d be visible throughout New York.”

The proposals did not include cost estimates. Developer Larry Silverstein, who has a 99-year lease to the trade center property, is expected to finance any new buildings through a combination of bank loans, insurance payments and tenant leases.

All the proposals respected the so-called “footprints,” or physical locations, of the original towers, either by leaving the space vacant or offering to construct noncommercial structures there.

And the competing teams stressed that they were only offering ideas for what memorials might look like on the site, given that a separate competition for the memorial design would take precedence.

But it was hard to separate the diverse ideas in the proposals from the issue of a memorial. All spoke directly to the question of what Sept. 11, 2001, meant, and how it might best be remembered by future generations.

Some proposals, such as the Libeskind design, highlighted the physical depths of the site, vowing to preserve a portion of the exposed bedrock foundation that now is all that remains of the twin towers.

“We need to journey down, some 70 feet into ground zero, onto the foundation,” he said. “The foundations withstood the unimaginable trauma of the destruction and stand as eloquent as the Constitution itself.”

Other designs sought to focus the human eye skyward, with memorial parks built atop huge new buildings. Some proposals -- such as the design offered by Meier’s group, which includes memorial parks on the Hudson -- would leave much of the site vacant, building on less than 27% of the area.

Others sought to make grand architectural statements that would tower above the city. Foster’s group proposed to build immense, twin towers connected at three points. He suggested that they would be the “tallest, most physically secure and ecologically responsible buildings in the world,” but he didn’t rely on words to make his point.

As graphics flashed on the screen, Foster told the hypothetical story of a little girl who learns the story of Sept. 11 through the architecture.

She might visit the barren spaces for a memorial and ask, “Why is this space empty?” he said. “And the mother would answer: ‘It’s not empty, it’s full of memories. And one day you’ll understand.’ ” When the child finally ascends to the top of the twin buildings with her family, “she can look down into the void,” he said, “where there is no life, and see where it all started.”