Some places to view the new proposals for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center:
- Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (official site, but slow)
- http://www.LowerManhattan.info (same site as above, but faster)
- Newsday slideshow (extensive but well essentialized; has video “tours”)
- NY1.com (has video clips)
Also, detailed plans are available at a few of the architects’ sites:
What a relief that seven of the nine proposals call for towers taller than the original WTC! Just the fact that they were proposed makes me feel like we’re not living in a nation of cowards and compromisers without vision or ambition.
James Gardner comments on the World Trade Center proposals, in today’s New York Sun:
What is so striking about most of these projects is that, beyond their individual infelicities of style, incommodities of structure, and illogicalities of thesis, they partake in almost equal measure of the two besetting sins of architecture in our time: indifference to beauty and an excessive attachment to meaning….The newest generation, however, creates a single form, or at best a sequence of forms, that has been twisted, facetted, knotted and distressed in slavish obedience to the Deconstructivist style that, for the moment at least, dominates “quality” architectural discourse….[C]ould it be that architecture that departs radically from symmetry and a circumscribed number of basic forms–most atrociously the hulking clusters of towers put forward yesterday by SOM and United Architects–is simply and irredeemably obnoxious to the human eye…?
One is reminded of adolescents trying to express their individuality, whether through Afros, Quiana shirts, or piercings, in such a way that, absurdly, they all end up looking the same….The team led by Richard Meier claimed that its five joined towers were supposed to suggest clasped hands, which would be goofy enough. What they really resembled were five Gumbys in a chorus line. Buildings should not look like Gumby.
Just about the only firm that managed not to follow fashion slavishly was Peterson/Littenberg. And while there was something almost consoling about the rectilinearity of their plan, the two lofty towers at its center seem poorly conceived….Probably the best project is the first of three submitted by Think, led by Raphael Viñoly. It appears to be the most coherent and the least irritating, even though it feels completely contemporary.