Add two to the ground zero design team

The creator of the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Japanese winner of a prestigious architectural award will design the next two office towers to be built at the World Trade Center site.

Lord Richard Rogers, a British architect known for the Pompidou Centre and the Millennium Dome in England, and Fumihiko Maki, a Pritzker Prize winner who is designing a temporary United Nations headquarters, will create the two towers at the 16-acre trade center site.

In an elaborate renegotiation of Larry Silverstein’s lease to the destroyed trade center, the developer gave up rights to the symbolic, 1,776-foot Freedom Tower and another planned skyscraper to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the trade center.

Silverstein also agreed to change the order in which he would build the three most potentially lucrative towers on the site. Now, the tower that Rogers will design will be built first, then Maki’s, then a third that Lord Norman Foster has been named to design. All three towers are scheduled to be finished by 2012.

Construction on both towers is scheduled to begin next year.

They join half a dozen other architects designing projects at ground zero. Santiago Calatrava of Spain has designed a $2.2-billion transit hub under construction. Americans Michael Arad and Peter Walker designed the trade center memorial, David Childs designed the Freedom Tower, and Frank Gehry has been hired to design a performing arts center. Daniel Libeskind of Germany created the original master plan for what should be built at the site.