Architects Present New Plans
For World Trade Center Site

Dec. 19, 2002 - NEW YORK -- The agency charged with rebuilding the World Trade Center site unveiled nine new visions of lower Manhattan, trying to captivate a public that was decidedly unimpressed with the first attempts.

The latest designs are a departure from the earlier ones -- in detail, vision, ambition and most significantly, height. Some would build the tallest man-made structures in the world, including one that calls for a 2,100-foot-tall skyscraper more than 700 feet higher than the original towers. Another would construct "twinned towers."

"Each embodies the collective aspirations of our city," said Louis R. Tomson, who serves as president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. "It's no accident that every plan intends to reclaim a powerful skyline."

The seven teams picked to develop plans for the site include world-renowned architects like Norman Foster, who designed the new Reichstag in Berlin, and Richard Meier, who designed the Getty Center in Los Angeles. The teams were selected from more than 400 in October.

A plan by United Architects calls for a 10.5 million-square-foot complex of five buildings with the tallest reaching to 112 stories, or 1,620 feet. The tallest buildings in the world, the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, are 1,483 feet high. The United Towers would be built in phases and, when completed, would combine to form one enormous structure.

The United group, which includes architect Greg Lynn, would create a five-story "city in the sky" beginning at the 60th floor of the building. It would contain restaurants, shops, sports facilities, conference centers and gardens.

The plans each respond to the outpouring of public comment that came out of the first round of failed designs by preserving the "footprints" of the Twin Towers, redefining the New York skyline, and creating a detailed vision of a memorial space. Lower Manhattan Development Corp. officials, stung by the criticism in July, insisted those plans were preliminary, and Wednesday they emphasized the public's role in shaping the development of the World Trade Center site.

The designs "reflect the unprecedented level of public comment we have received since the process began," said Joseph Seymour, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site.

The development agency and Port Authority will hold two hearings in January to get public input on the nine designs. The two groups will study the designs during the next few weeks and come up with a World Trade Center Master Land Use Plan by February.

The plans all incorporate a massive transportation hub, a reconnected street grid and lifestyle features like theaters, museums and parks. The design of the World Trade Center memorial will come from an international competition, not from these architects' plans.

The one new design that radically departs from the others is the Think Team's World Cultural Center, which would include no commercial space. Instead, it would house performing-arts centers, museums, education centers and viewing platforms in a spiraling scaffoldlike structure. After the public outcry in July, the LMDC lowered the amount of office space that had to be included.

Think's other designs include the Great Room, a 13-acre, glass-covered public space topped with a 2,100-foot-tall building. Its third design, the Sky Park, would create a 16-acre park atop three buildings, one of which would be the tallest in the world.

A design by Daniel Libeskind would erect a 1,776-foot-tall tower called "Gardens of the World" and preserve the footprints of the towers down to the bedrock 70 feet below ground. "I was sitting with a group of family members who were quite taken with it," said Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, a New York civic group. "There were people with tears running down their cheeks as he was explaining this experience."

Mr. Libeskind's team would create a "Wedge of Light," positioned so that each Sept. 11, the sun would shine on the area from 8:46 a.m., when the first plane hit the World Trade Center to 10:28 a.m., when the second tower collapsed.

Foster & Partners would build two towers, the tallest in the world, which would be joined at three points, creating "twinned towers" built to environmental specifications that Foster says would make them the greenest buildings in the world. The triangular structures used in the building would help provide its strength. Foster's plan also would preserve the footprints of the towers for the memorial, and create a 20-acre park by submerging part of West Street.

One of the New York teams, headed by Mr. Meier, would construct two perpendicular 1,111-foot-tall lattice-shaped buildings in a plan called Memorial Square. The footprints of the Twin Towers would be covered with glass-bottomed reflecting pools and several cultural facilities would be built nearby.

Another New York team, Peterson/Littenberg Architecture & Urban Design, envisions twin towers 1,400 feet tall. Each would contain 55 floors of office space, with one tower having 35 floors of hotel space atop the offices and the other tower having 35 floors of residential space atop its offices. At the center of the site would be a "memory garden" on the footprints of the original Twin Towers.

The final team, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of New York, would build 16 acres of "sky gardens" in its plan, along with 16 acres of cultural facilities. The building would be energy self-sufficient and would even have surplus energy to supply the city, according to the group's proposal.

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