Six Teams Will Develop Trade Center Proposals

Plans for the World Trade Center site grew more focused this week as the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. selected six teams of architects and planners--among them designers of the Getty Center, Berlin’s Jewish Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, Queens--to come up with new proposals for the 16-acre site.

The six designs will be narrowed to three by year’s end, and a final proposal--which could combine elements of several plans--will be released in spring 2003. Each team will receive a $40,000 stipend. The plan, which will include office space, transportation, shops and a memorial to the fallen towers, must accommodate the interests of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the site’s owner. Exact space requirements, which are likely to be less than the 11 million square feet specified in developer Larry A. Silverstein’s original lease for the buildings, have not yet been reached.

The architects were chosen from 407 submissions from 34 nations by the LMDC and a collection of architects, engineers, designers, curators and academics.

Among the architects selected are Richard Meier, designer of the Getty Center; Berlin’s Studio Daniel Libeskind, architects of the city’s Jewish Museum; Rafael Vinoly, designer of the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia; and New York’s David Rockwell, who designed the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.

The call for new proposals comes after a series of master plans, presented to the public in July, were met with an overwhelmingly critical reception. “A lot of the elements in those plans were well received, and a lot will be carried forward, including the grand promenade, the notion of preserving the footprints and residential housing,” said Matthew Higgins, an LMDC spokesman. The architects will leave space for a memorial to be developed in a process that begins early next year.

Michael Maltzan, the L.A. architect behind the recently completed MoMA Queens, will be part of a team helmed by New York’s Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. “I have very ambivalent feelings about it,” Maltzan said Friday. “There’s a magnitude to the coming work, which is going to be very complex and more than likely emotional.”

The six teams are:

* Studio Daniel Libeskind, Berlin.

* Foster and Partners, London.

* Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and Steven Holl, all of New York.

* United Architects, a team that will include Foreign Office Architects of London, Imaginary Forces of New York and L.A., UN Studio of Amsterdam, Greg Lynn of Los Angeles, and New York’s Reiser Umemoto and Kevin Kenon.

* New York-based Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, with Tom Leader of Berkeley, Michael Maltzan of Los Angeles, Neutelings Riedijk of Rotterdam, Field Operations of Philadelphia and New York, SANAA of Tokyo, and artists Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Rita McBride, Jessica Stockholder and Elyn Zimmerman.

* Think, a team that includes Shigeru Ban of Tokyo, Frederic Schwartz of New York, Ken Smith of New York, and Rafael Vinoly, London’s Arup, Buro Happold Engineers of England, Jorg Schlaich of Stuttgart, William Moorish of Virginia, David Rockwell of New York, and Jane Marie Smith of Baltimore.