After an open competition, seven architectural teams are in contention to design a replacement for the Twin Towers, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor.
It was always inevitable that "something" would be built on the site of New York's vanished Twin Towers. As a piece of real estate on the bedrock of Manhattan, the site was bound to be developed rather than left as a squared-off hole in the ground where 2,797 people lost their lives on September 11th, 2001. Initial proposals for redeveloping "Ground Zero", put forward by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the 16-acre site, were rejected by the public as unimaginative. So the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation responded by holding an open architectural competition to find a more inspiring design.
The 406 initial entrants have now been whittled down to seven, with nine proposals, and it's no surprise that they include some of the world's architectural superstars - Norman (Lord) Foster, Daniel Libeskind, Richard Meier, Shigeru Ban and Rafael Vinoly - as well as Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM), past masters in the art of designing skyscrapers. Six of the new plans incorporate mixed-use towers that would rise higher than the 416 metres of the original World Trade Centre. Four propose going higher than Malaysia's 452-metre Petronas Towers, currently the tallest buildings in the world. All incorporate detailed plans for memorials, in deference to the families of those who died.
But the plans are mainly about going up, in one way or another. "Vertical is to live, horizontal is to die," as Buckminster Fuller once observed. His dictum was recalled by Herbert Muschamp, architecture critic of the New York Times, who wrote that nobody "knows that better than New Yorkers. We come here to live the vertical life."
Few could disagree with Norman Foster that redeveloping the World Trade Centre site is "the most important urban planning and architectural challenge of our time", not least because it involves reassembling the "iconic skyline" of Lower Manhattan. But which of the seven very different visions now on offer will end up being built? The proposal from Foster and Partners is for a unique crystalline twinned tower, the tallest in the world, where the two "halves" would hug and kiss each other, permanently conjoined like Siamese twins. The footprints of the original twin towers would become walled enclosures below ground level as a memorial to the victims. The three points at which the two halves meet would have public observation decks, exhibition spaces, cafés and amenities to "break down the tower's scale into village-like clusters", each with tree-filled atriums. They would also provide escape routes from one tower to the other.
Studio Daniel Libeskind, based in Berlin, also go for a green theme. Its centrepiece is a towering spire, 541 metres high, designed to restore New York's "spiritual peak" and containing "gardens of the world" with plant life from around the planet. Its form is shard-like, a trademark of the work of the architect who designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
There would be two large public spaces - called the Park of Heroes and the Wedge of Light - invested with Libeskind's characteristic symbolism. Each year on September 11th between 8.46 a.m., when the first plane hit the World Trade Centre, and 10.28 a.m., when the second tower collapsed, the sun would shine without shadow on the site.
THINK Design, a collaboration between Shigeru Ban, Frederic Schwartz, Ken Smith and Rafael Vinoly, has proposed a 16-acre rooftop public park atop a pair of open latticework towers, built above and around the footprints of the World Trade Centre. It would also have a vast public plaza under an enormous free-span glass ceiling.
SOM's much more dense scheme also covers 16 acres, but the architects claim that it returns this to the city by providing within its various strata 16 acres of "sky gardens" and 16 acres of space dedicated to cultural activity - more than the sum of all of New York's existing cultural spaces. It would not be all stacked-up office space.
Peterson/Littenberg Architecture would provide a pair of tapering towers at the eastern edge of the site. A sunken garden below the streets - including an amphitheatre on the footprint of the north tower with 2,797 seats, one for each victim of the tragedy - would serve as "an inner courtyard for the whole city, a place of refuge".
United Architects' proposal provides five towers, including one looking like an upturned funnel, creating a "cathedral-like enclosure across the entire 16-acre site. At 242 metres, the towers would be interconnected by a "city in the sky" consisting of gardens, educational centres, shops, cafés and sports facilities.
The entry by Richard Meier, in partnership with Peter Eisenman, is the most curious. Five interlinked towers, 336 metres high, are designed like portcullis gates and arranged at a 90-degree angle around a memorial square. They are meant to suggest "screens of presence and absence, encouraging reflection and imagination".
"These are designs not only for our time, but for all time," according to John Whitehead, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, a state agency. "They must transcend the present, to speak to our children and to their children . . . to send an immortal message." The winning design is to be chosen on January 31st, following two days of public hearings. Nobody knows who will foot the bill, which is estimated at $20 billion, including a new transport hub. My guess is that Daniel Libeskind will win out over Norman Foster, whose scheme has been branded as redolent of Hong Kong.