EYES ON THE PRIZE.(selection of new building design for World Trade Center Site, New York, New York)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 10-MAR-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

From September, 2001, Paul Goldberger on the immediate aftermath of 9/11

From May, 2002, Goldberger on framing the debate over a memorial

From January, 2003, Goldberger on the welter of proposals for the site

From September, 2002, Cathleen Schine looks back at the site's early history

The world of architecture has rarely been as lively as it was recently, during the competition for the commission to design a master plan for the World Trade Center site. It was a story about art and culture that had popular appeal, and both the tabloids and the Times ran regular updates on their front pages, including the announcement last week by the governor and the mayor that Studio Daniel Libeskind had won. At the beginning of February, a poll on the web site of New York 1, the local news channel, had shown that twenty-one per cent of the citizenry preferred Libeskind's design, fourteen per cent liked that of the other finalist--a team known as think, headed by Rafael Vinoly, with Frederic Schwartz of New York, Shigeru Ban of Tokyo, and the New York landscape architect Ken Smith--and sixty-four per cent didn't want either one of them. This didn't prove much, of course. If you'd asked the French to vote on Haussmann's boulevards, they probably would have said no to them, too. I suspect that, for all the talk about moving quickly to decide the future of Ground Zero, many of the people who wrote letters to the editor or participated in the seemingly endless round of online forums and polls about the World Trade Center site didn't actually want a final resolution. The closer a design got to becoming real, the less desirable it appeared to be. For one thing, it destroyed the fantasy that the twin towers would be put back the way they were. Reconstructing the original towers makes absolutely no sense, but it has a curious allure for many people, as if spending several billion dollars to duplicate one of the more conspicuous architectural mistakes of the twentieth century would be the way to show Al Qaeda that we are in command of contemporary civilization.

One of the most popular among the nine plans submitted for Ground Zero in December was a scheme by the British architect Norman Foster for a pair of seventeen-hundred-foot towers based on triangular forms. They united the jingoists and the avant-garde. You could like them if you felt that rebuilding the twin towers was the right thing to do, and you could like them if you believed that the site deserved a serious piece of contemporary architecture. Foster, who is one of the leading architects of skyscrapers in the world--he designed the Commerzbank in Frankfurt, the tallest tower in Europe, and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank headquarters in Hong Kong--was widely thought at one point to have the inside track on Ground Zero, and his failure to make the final round of the competition came...

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