OUTSIDE WORLD - CUDC Quarterly 3:1 - Winter 2003

When Tradition Is Unequal to History
Lessons from Lower Manhattan
by Steve Rugare

In the weeks following the shock of 9/11, it would have been the height of bad taste to say so, but many people with an interest in buildings and cities must have thought it at some point: "at least the buildings aren’t much of a loss." For many the featureless, prismatic towers and the dreary, empty plaza at their feet pretty much epitomized everything that was wrong with modernist urbanism in the 1950s and 60s. In its own way, the general public probably agreed. While the towers were so conspicuous that they came to symbolize the New York skyline, the World Trade Center was never much loved as a place. Visitors to New York might spend an  afternoon at Rockefeller Center, but the only thing to do at the WTC was ride the elevator.

The conventional American wisdom on urbanism would seem to dictate that something very different should replace the twin towers. Instead of a megablock that ruptures the Manhattan street grid, current thinking would recommend the approach used to much acclaim at neighboring Battery Park City, where a new patch of lower Manhattan fabric was created in emulation of the scale and texture of older parts of downtown. In fact, the design community’s first impulse was to do just that. Planners and urban designers began agitating with an almost vengeful zeal for a "neo-traditional" approach to the WTC site, even while the ruins were still smolderning.

And that is more-or-less what was released to the public last summer in the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s preliminary design concepts for the site. The firm of Peterson/Littenberg produced six perfectly reasonable site plans that managed to accomodate the vast amounts of space required by potential developers, while still leaving some room for a potential memorial. The massing and site plans seemed to imply that what was required was a kind of Rockefeller Center redux. But the neo-traditionalist reliance on precedent (even a very good precedent) was almost universally seen as inadequate for the WTC site. The design profession appeared content with stitching fabric over the wound, as if the site and event at hand didn’t have its own singular proportions and requirements.

Newspaper reports implied that the LMDC and their planners were taken aback at the public hostility that greeted their plans. Forced to regroup, they organized a new competition, which resulted in nine designs released in November. The one by Peterson/Littenberg carried through on the initial approach, but the others could not have been more different. All of them sought to celebrate the scale of the project and to create novel spatial experiences out of the complex play of the huge buildings and multi-level transit hub that the program required.

Daniel Libeskind’s design has now been selected, though how (and if) it will be executed remains to be seen. Given his compelling approach to a memorial, the choice of Libeskind is not too surprising, but there were even more dramatic and remarkable urban ideas in some of the other designs, particularly those of the THINK group (led by Rafael Viñoly) and United Architects (Greg Lynn). What made these designs stand out was not a doctrinaire modernism but a realization that, as Rem Koolhaas has observed, the modern-ness of Manhattan’s architecture is a necessary response to the unprecedented scale and complexity of modern life. While the original twin towers excelled at little else but being big, the new WTC will have to deal with the ultimate in complexity. symbolizing aspiration while remembering horrible pain. The lesson isn’t that this kind of design is always appropriate, but it’s important to know how and where business as usual has to be interrupted. – Steve Rugare

The Studio LIbeskind project and the other designs for the WTC site can be viewed at the LMDC website.