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Buildings
WTC Designs: Is Inspiration Enough?
(archrecord.construction.com
- 12/31/02)
By James
S. Russell, AIA
When splashed across newspapers, television
screens and Web sites worldwide on December 18, the nine proposals
for the World Trade Center site may have looked like a brave
new skyscraper world—to paraphrase the headline of December
19th’s New York Daily News—or an exhibition of architectural
ego as Lisa Rochon put it in the Toronto Globe and Mail. But
if people make judgements about the value of the schemes based
on those skyline images, both the debate on the future of
the site and the notion of what architecture can accomplish
will suffer. Every project offered a rich synthetic vision.
In each case, a myriad of difficult issues were dealt authoritatively
and often inspirationally.
None of the designs can be counted a
definitive solution. But there’s plenty here to fuel
real debate at last. If you can’t get to the Winter Garden
at the World Financial Center, then peruse www.renewnyc.com,
which offers detailed presentations of each project.
The plan-in-a-void process that has
been used to date generated a consensus around certain ideas,
many of which the designers—intentionally or not—exploded
as specious. Officials, for example, have planned to carve
out a bit of real estate and hand it off as a defined memorial
precinct that will be the subject of a competition. But some
of the teams sought to incorporate a commemorative sensibility
into the very fabric of the redevelopment. The team called
United Architects fashioned their huge commercial tower around
what would be visible from a memorial in the tower footprints.
From this vantage the undulating bundled tubes appear as a
single soaring form—arced in a protective gesture, like
a giant cupped hand. A corresponding public space at the top
of the building urges the viewer to contemplate the footprints.
A number of the projects offered several
memorializing places, many of them high in towers. Some were
skygardens which would not only be sites of mourning but would
commemorate the tragedy within the context of the everyday
life of Lower Manhattan. These approaches represented an explicit
desire to avoid ghettoizing the memorial.
Most of the teams respected the footprints
as memorial elements, as surviving families had requested.
But this consensus may deserve reconsideration. To allow visitors
to participate in the footprints as memorial space entails
bringing them 70 feet below grade—and designers struggled
to make this work.
Several teams, including Foster &
Partners, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Studio Libeskind,
and United Architects made especially persuasive designs for
a transit hub. They succeeded in uniting the awkwardly placed
separate rights-of-way for two subway lines and the PATH train
(which, inconveniently, interferes with the idea of leaving
the south-tower footprint inviolate). In different ways, designers
brought daylight to the concourses, tied them architecturally
to the tower proposals, and made the experience of entering
and leaving memorable—which cannot be said of the facilities
they replace or the feeble intentions displayed so far by
the Metropolitan Transportation Authority or the Port Authority.
One of the deepest-held assumptions
about the site is that all the streets that existed prior
to the trade-center construction would be restored. In fact
none of the teams suggested putting back all the streets (which
would be impossible should the tower footprints be reserved
for a memorial). This suggests that some streets are better
than others, which would not be a radical notion except where
uncritical planning orthodoxy rules as it has too often in
the rebuilding debate.
A number of teams showed vast raised
plazas, some larger than the echoing plain that once surrounded
the original towers. Prior to these designs, if anyone had
said "plaza," the resounding answer would probably
have been, "no way!" But each makes a much stronger
case than the original. In truth, it is very difficult to
make the site work without some kind of raised plaza, not
only because there is a drop in grade, but because making
a connection to the water—as several propose—means
running the public space above West Street, the broad north-south
avenue to the west of the site.
The skyscrapers attracted the most initial
attention: for their form, their size, and their height. All
overturn much conventional real-estate wisdom. The bundled-tube
forms and triangulated façade treatments, for example,
express methods for safely structuring tall buildings that
preceded 9/11, but have rapidly advanced since.
In embracing skygardens and other forms of public space high
above the ground, the teams lent their towers a civic quality
that today’s cookie-cutter office-building norm utterly
lacks. Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s Roger Duffy offered
the interlocking gardens crowning his consortium’s nine
towers as "iconic expression of the leveraging of commercial
development for public benefit." Several schemes proposed
naturally ventilated facades and other carbon-reducing techniques—none
of which are anymore beyond European norms but are radically
advanced by hidebound American standards. The extraordinary
confidence expressed in the design of Foster & Partners’
tower comes out of the fact that little about it is actually
new. Much of its advanced technology and inventive structure
has been tested in earlier buildings done by the firm—none,
sadly, in the U.S.
Can any of these ideas form the kernel of a rebuilt World
Trade Center? Not according to the real-estate community.
"You can’t build that stuff," one unnamed developer
told New York Times writer Charles Bagli in a December 19
story. Douglas Durst, a prominent developer, said the result
"will resemble the conceptual plan only in spirit."
Durst is historically correct. He threw out guidelines that
supposedly bound sites he developed in New York’s Times
Square. (They were prepared in part by Stanton Eckstut, who
has been designated by the Port Authority to make an urban-design
layout out of the work presented December 18.)
But the real-estate community has offered no leadership to
date in reviving lower Manhattan. It has succeeded in persuading
government agencies to generously underwrite rent and tax
incentives intended to lure tenants downtown. These would
have the incidental effect of lining developers pockets, only
so far they have largely failed. The industry has not rallied
around the development of a strong business case for tenants
to locate downtown, and seems unwilling to consider whether
any of the seven architect’s tall-building schemes might
offer templates for 21st-century tenants.
But the real-estate industry path-of-least-resistance rebuilding
process will prevail without some political leadership, which
has been to date sorely lacking. Governor Pataki has been
reluctant to use his power to get turf-obsessed agencies to
work together. Instead of uniting competing interests, Mayor
Bloomberg belatedly offered his own "plan" for lower
Manhattan on December 12. It freely lifted elements of work
Peterson/Littenburg did for the Lower Manhattan Development
Corporation, for example. The architects have gone far beyond
the charge given them in September (and far beyond the tiny
allotted fees). They’ve supplied ideas and inspiration
in abundance. How meaningful and inspiring the redevelopment
can be now depends on what level of quality, public commitment,
and public investment officials are willing to support.
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