Making ground zero fit

The selection of two finalists last week in the competition for the design of the World Trade Center site is the best proof yet that serious architecture will play a role in the redevelopment of one of the most important sites in U.S. history.

Both teams -- the Berlin-based Studio Daniel Libeskind and the Think Team, a partnership that includes Rafael Vinoly and Frederic Schwartz, both of New York, and Shigeru Ban of Tokyo -- include well-established voices in the architectural community. Both designs place heavy emphasis on the memorial area, loading it with a mix of cultural activities.

But the selection also underscores the degree to which commercial considerations and political maneuverings will determine what the final master plan will look like. What the Libeskind and Think designs share, to different degrees, is an ability to bend to the political needs of the various interests that control the site’s future, in particular downtown’s commercial power brokers. And in that sense, the designs say less about our collective ideals than about the limits of the democratic process when it comes to building in New York.

The announcement of the finalists is the latest stage in what has been a long and often clumsy process. In July, when the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. originally unveiled plans for the site -- a collection of banal, unimaginative designs by the firm Beyer Blinder Belle -- the public reacted with outrage. Since then, the agency has been in the awkward position of having to appease public expectations without abandoning its perceived obligations to the commercial realm. The current competition is an effort to meet those seemingly contradictory goals.

As architecture, Libeskind’s design is the more promising of the two. The scheme is anchored by a gigantic void that encompasses the footprints of the former twin towers. Covering 4.3 acres, the void drops 70 feet into the ground, exposing both the Manhattan bedrock and the massive concrete slurry wall that prevents the Hudson River from spilling into the site.

Libeskind sees this space as a metaphor for the durability of American democracy. The bedrock symbolizes the foundations on which that democracy was built, the slurry wall the moral strength needed to uphold its core values.

But the design also evokes the kind of conflicting cultural tensions that give a city its vibrancy. Housed in a shimmering glass cube, the museum tilts precariously out over the memorial pit -- a powerful image of instability. More cultural spaces -- their functions yet to be defined -- jut out from either side of this museum like enormous crystal shards. Behind them, a series of towers is designed to accommodate the 6.5 million to 10 million square feet of commercial space that the Port Authority is demanding on the site. Another blade-like tower punctuates the site’s northwest corner, its upper levels supporting a series of memorial gardens.

Libeskind is a master of architectural metaphor. He is best known for his 1999 design of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and since then he has gained a reputation as an interpreter of universal suffering. The Berlin museum, for example, is conceived as a broken Star of David. Its zigzag-shaped form traces the Jewish experience in Germany, from assimilation to the Holocaust to exile in Israel.

The narrative of his ground zero design is less narrowly prescribed. Two broad streets -- Fulton and Greenwich -- crisscross the site of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, linking it to surrounding neighborhoods. Wedge-shaped parks cut between the towers, allowing life to spill in from various directions. The towers’ crystalline forms shoot up out of the ground with palpable energy. The image here is one of resurrection: life rising out of the ashes of death.

The design’s main weakness, occurs when those metaphors become too literal. The memorial tower, for example, is exactly 1,776 feet tall -- a detail that smacks of patriotic posturing. A long, curved observation deck sweeps out over West Street so tourists can peer down into the void without actually entering it -- a gesture that only serves to weaken the effect of the memorial site. At moments like these, one feels that Libeskind is pandering to public sentiment.

The Think Team’s design also begins with a provocative image. The original twin towers are replaced by two soaring tubes of steel latticework. Various cultural buildings -- museum, convention hall, school, performing arts space, memorial gardens -- are suspended within these open cylinders. The image is arresting: twin ghosts rising over the skyline, their bodies inhabited by strange cultural organisms.

Conceptually, the towers’ design vaguely recalls Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, an unbuilt landmark of Soviet architecture whose spiraling steel frame with four transparent volumes suspended inside was meant to evoke the dynamic energy of a revolutionary society. Think’s design, by comparison, is more static. As a symbol, it suggests a nostalgic take on old Modernist dreams.

But even that image is an illusion. To build the towers, Think would have to overcome a number of practical considerations. Elevators, stairs and mechanical systems would have to thread their way up through the towers to service the cultural spaces. The result would most likely be a sort of vertical Pompidou Center. The towers’ interiors would be filled by a dense tangle of pipes and tubes. The sense of transparency that gives the design its elegance would be lost. Meanwhile, at ground level, the design is strikingly bland. A large reflecting pool would surround the base of the towers, with a triangular entry plaza set to the west. A big, wedge-shaped atrium would house the transportation hub to the east. A series of conventional commercial office buildings would surround the site on three sides. In the current version of the design, these structures are treated like an irrelevant afterthought.

One wonders if officials of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and Port Authority even considered such issues when they were making their selections. Sir Norman Foster’s design, for example, was justifiably admired by the public. It featured two slender, faceted towers whose forms touch at various points as they rise, as if they were gently kissing. At the base is a glass-and-steel plinth that would house the transportation hub, giving the towers an exquisite delicacy as they meet the ground. The scheme also includes a vast public park, punctured by two voids marking where the towers once stood. Foster’s design was more refined than the Think Team proposal. More important, perhaps, it is more feasible. Over a long career, Foster has proved to be a master at building large-scale structures. The best of them, such as the 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank headquarters building, are exquisite compositions of steel and glass. Anyone who knows Foster’s work could easily imagine the ground zero scheme in its final form.

But perhaps other considerations were more important to downtown’s power brokers. What the Libeskind and the Think Team proposals uniquely share is that they focus most of their creative energy on the memorial and cultural spaces rather than on the required commercial space.

That, in effect, allows the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and the Port Authority to ghettoize the architecture. In the case of the Think Team proposal, for example, the “World Cultural Center” towers could be built independently of the commercial space, which could then be sliced up and doled out to various developers and their architects. A beneficiary would be Larry Silverstein, the developer who held the 99-year lease to the former World Trade Center.

In this regard, Libeskind’s scheme poses more of a challenge. Like the Think Team, Libeskind set most of the commercial space on the site’s periphery. He has also stated that his plan would allow other architects to design the various commercial towers. But Libeskind’s design is a more carefully calibrated urban composition than Think’s. Its strength stems from the relations of its parts: the memorial void, the soaring towers, the connective tissue of streets and parks. As such, surrounding his cultural buildings with a pastiche of mediocre office blocks could severely dilute the poetic tension that gives the design its power.

By comparison, it seems that all of the other architectural teams that took part in the competition made a gross political miscalculation. In each of their proposals, the commercial office towers were a critical aspect of their designs. That meant that they could not be conveniently parceled off. That is the most likely reason that Foster, say, did not make the cut. His design may have been more sublime than the Think Team’s, but it was not as politically viable.

Such calculations emphasize the balance the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. has set between public and commercial interests. At last week’s news conference, the announcement of the two finalists was presented as a great public victory. “Rarely has design so captivated the public imagination,” development corporation chairman John C. Whitehead said. Joseph Seymour, executive director of the Port Authority, added that the selection was evidence of “the most open public process in the history of this city and region.”

What they neglected to say is that it is only by quietly acquiescing to the desires of downtown’s commercial interests that an architect, no matter how talented, will survive that process.