Rate the new WTC plans

[Kris]

There are cultural institutions but I admit that it may not be enough. It would be a place more of reflection and contemplation than transit and shopping.

[JMGarcia]

I will give the Meier plan this - its really creates an icon landmark on the skyline. If built, there would be no doubt what city you were looking at.

[BrooklynRider]

Nice commentary - I haven't been down to see the plans yet, but you offer some fresh insights into what I saw on NY1.

[Grimm]

Quote: from JMGarcia on 1:33 pm on Dec. 22, 2002
I will give the Meier plan this - its really creates an icon landmark on the skyline. If built, there would be no doubt what city you were looking at.

Too bad it's not (even) as tall as the original Twins...

(Edited by Grimm at 10:52 am on Dec. 23, 2002)

[Kris]

It's absurd to be technical. This is not about securing a place in the record books.

[Derek2k3]

I saw the plans again today. Now I really believe, out of all the plans, Liebskin's is the most logical. Unlike Foster's plan which is like placing two targets in the middle of a park, Liebskin's proposal actually looks like it is a continuation of the city but still provides distinction, great architecture, and a suitable memorial.

[maxinmilano]

A part the Petersin-Littenberg project all proposals are bold. Some of them are masterpieces. In particular the design of the polish architect Daniel Libeskind and of the British Foster are probabily the best. In the Libeskind project we can find many of his aesthetical points: the cuts, diagonal cuts, the irregular forms, the symbolic meaning of architecture. Strange fact, Libeskind (who was born in 1946 in Poland) studied at the Hejduk and Eisenmann Cooper Union (Eisenmann is one of the others architects involved in the new WTC). Libeskind studied music and philosophy in Essex, U.K. and his way of approching architecture is atipical: very teoretical. In this project you can find quotations of the disaster (the buildings cut, the shape not-well shaped, the huge diagonal cut, metaphor of the injuries of the tragedy so the memory still and forever present) but at the same time the gardens-spire, which phisically brings the life (the garden) in the sky, in that sky where came the dead.
The Foster's project is less conceptual, less poetic, but it's however very lyrical, elegant: hi-tech, symbol of the progress, but with a touch of poetry in the elegance of the design, so light. Lightness, metaphor of what the sky should be, blue and without - black, smoke.

[Agglomeration]

More news folks, there are reports that SOM has decided to withdraw from the rebuilding competition. Its initial design of 9 or so skyscrapers got poor reviews from critics of all stripes. That will leave six architectural firms and eight designs. We'll have to see what follows from this point on. The authorities have set a deadline for the end of January for one of the projects to be approved.

[Kris]

SOM's and PL's proposals are the only I've eliminated from consideration. The three I'm most interested in are Meier's, Libeskind's and Foster's. All are flawed and all are thrilling. Almost every time I re-examine them I change my mind. It's so complex, there's so much at stake and they've given themselves so little time to choose. It's actually only a competition of ideas, as Bernard Tschumi, who was one of the semifinalists, said at a conference I attended. He continued to develop his scheme regardless of his loss. He presented it: three very tall towers of different shapes - "the tri-towers (of Babel?)" - with hanging gardens, connected to each other high in the sky, which recalls some of these.

[JerzDevl2000]

I'm staring to like the Libeskind proposals more and more - it is great architecture AND art, and continues the city's grid and urbanism quite well into the old WTC site. Kudos to SOM getting eliminated. Now they can go back to redoing Hong Kong in ticky-tack fashion....

Grimm - thanx for the KPF proposal. I know it's not one of the 7 or 9 that were in the set that came out this week, but it's interesting to get another take on the views for rebuilding. I'm not crazy about it though, the approach to the site seems to cute off BPC like a chinese wall. It seems eerily similar to the ill-fated Brooklyn-Battery bridge proposal of the 1940's!

[Kris]

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/26/ny...p;position=top

[amigo32]

Spectacular! * ONLY Spectacular! *That is all that I ask. *
MAKE these people sort out the details! *OK, *I am only dreaming. *They never will. *Their agendas will cancel each other out. *

(Edited by amigo32 at 7:41 am on Dec. 26, 2002)


(Edited by amigo32 at 7:54 am on Dec. 26, 2002)

[Kris]

This page should address some of the concerns about the NY team's plan: http://www.richardmeier.com/press.htm