Business
& Labor
LMDC Announces Pending Dissolution
(archrecord.construction.com - 08/22/2006)
By John
E. Czarnecki, Assoc. AIA
The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation
(LMDC) announced in late July that it will essentially disband
and end operations by the end of this year.
The LMDC was created as a joint state-city
corporation in the aftermath of September 11 to plan, finance,
and coordinate the rebuilding and revitalization of Lower
Manhattan: Its planning process resulted in the adoption of
the Daniel Libeskind masterplan for the World Trade Center
site and the competition for a permanent memorial that Michael
Arad had won. But with completion of the memorial, Freedom
Tower, and other new construction at the site still years
away, critics question why the LMDC is stopping operations
now.
In an interview for the public radio
program Marketplace, architecture critic Paul Goldberger compared
the announcement to the United States abruptly leaving war-torn
Vietnam decades ago, saying “LMDC has sort of declared
that it's won and is disbanding. But, in fact…[it’s]
leaving a very incomplete, uncertain project behind that's
in a lot of chaos and confusion.”
The LMDC, which allocated more than
$2.7 billion in federal grants to support downtown residents,
businesses, and cultural programs, says that the Port Authority
of New York and New Jersey will oversee construction of the
major buildings on the site. The World Trade Center Memorial
Foundation will oversee the memorial (see story overleaf).
But the LMDC has not yet finished design guidelines for the
construction of the tall buildings on the site. The exact
dates of the release of the design guidelines and the LMDC
disbanding were not available at press time.
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