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.
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