Some of the skyscrapers proposed last week for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center might be grand, but what’s the point of this exercise? As a Washington Post article makes clear, there is a surplus of office space in the area. Some projects try to address this with staggered building plans, but such an approach has a major flaw: Financial firms are moving out, not in, because the lesson of September 11 is that the future is decentralized. Any gradual approach, then, will result in an incomplete project, an Antwerp Cathedral of a building, with towers that will never be finished. Much better to realize this and to turn the site into something which the city needs more of: a park, albeit above a transit hub.

If one of the plans has to be realized, I would vote as often as I can for the Foster plan, purely on esthetic grounds. Those towers are grand. They are also what the World Trade Center should have looked like the first time around. There’s two of them, they are the tallest buildings ever, they restore the balance of the skyline as we knew it, yet they are better: more approachable, more lissome, more graceful. Other plans have good ideas, but most fall flat on a crucial point here or there.

Felix‘s favorite suffers from looking like a group of people who need to pee badly. It reminds me of the Burghers of Calais after a very long sitting for Rodin. It is also guilty of the same criticism Felix leveled against this proposal—that it cuts off downtown from the rest of New York. And one more psychologically dubious selling point: Are New Yorkers really ready to walk _under_ the equivalent of a leaning World Trade Center after this whole ordeal? I don’t think so.

Other proposals suffer from delusions of grandeur. They are not designed on a human scale, an unfortunate tendency in modern architecture that the good people of Canberra and Brasilia will gladly tell you about. To a certain extent, the original World Trade Center suffered from this as well. I almost always walked through the mall to work, only rarely on the plaza above.

Finally, I’d like to argue against over-memorializing. This is not the Holocaust that happened in New York. 2,800 people lost their lives in a terrible attack, but we should not build memorials that rival those remembering the sacrifices made in WWII. Let’s look at the Pearl Harbor memorial as an inspiration; it is understated, and gains power from that. It is also similar to one proposal’s memorial that plays with the shadow of the WTCs over the Hudson. It is simple and powerful. There can never be enough parks in New York.

So, my plan: Turn the whole thing into a park, with a transportation hub underneath, and perhaps some cultural magnets, but enough with this obsession with office space already. In this scenario, if you must have a tall structure, play with the concept of needles, light, telecommunications towers, etc… But realize that Sept. 11 is the moment that people of the future will point to as the moment when the internet-connected world began realizing that the economic argument for decentralization was compelling.

But if this lesson is not yet learned, and we must build office buildings, then let’s improve on the original, with Foster’s buildings. As for memorial, I’d pick the park in the Hudson.

[Mon, Dec 23 2002 – 00:24] Felix (www) (email) There’s a debate, if you’re interested, which started here and is continuing here. My latest contribution has been to quote the LMDC, which, while far from impartial in such matters, at least offers the opposing point of view:

A vibrant New York City economy must create new jobs over the next twenty years. This requires new Class A office space. New York City added an average of 38 million sf of office space per decade during the past 30 years. However, as of 1999, the supply of new Class A office space was exhausted and New York City began losing jobs to other regions: 5.9 million sf to New Jersey in 1999 and 9.0 million sf in 2000. It is estimated that Midtown can provide 19 million sf of new office space.

Therefore, in the next decade, at least 19 million sf must be constructed in markets other than Midtown. In the subsequent decade, other markets must accommodate practically all of 38 million sf.

Consequently there is a compelling need in Lower Manhattan to accommodate a large portion of New York City’s future job growth: at least 17 million square feet of premium Class A office space over the next 20 years. The WTC site cannot absorb all of this demand, nor should it. However, the investment in transportation infrastructure, the need to connect Wall Street with the World Financial Center, and the potential for creating suitably large floor plates make the WTC site an appropriate location for some significant new commercial development.

[Thu, Jan 02 2003 – 09:49] Charles Kenny (email) (Matthew, beyond noting I’ve meta nice woman and now I’m going to marry her, I will keep this nice and straightforward.) I’m with Stefan about the park, because more parks are good, as he says. This reason also has the advantage of not requiring for support any futurist mumbo-jumbo regarding the Internet and the end of the urban space (anybody notice previous ‘communications revolutions’ leading to the end of cities as was each time predicted? or a drop-off in the number of face-to-face meetings now that the Internet is ubiquitous in the US office? or even the cyber-prophet Stefan himself moving to the countryside?).

[Fri, Jan 03 2003 – 04:55] Stefan Geens (email) Be careful what you wish for on that last point, Charles.