World Trade Center Developments

[ZippyTheChimp]

Here's a nice Ground Zero Development

[Kris]

Where is it exactly? Has it just been completed?

[JMGarcia]

Its at the corner of Liberty and Greenwich. 130 Liberty would be just to the right.

[Chicagoan]

From Architectural Record-

Groundbreaking for Pedestrian Bridge at World Trade Center

August 22, 2003

New York Governor Pataki broke ground Wednesday on a pedestrian bridge linking the World Trade Center with western portions of lower Manhattan.

The temporary bridge, located at the northwest corner of the WTC site, will cross West Street along Vesey street, allowing commuters to safely travel to and from Battery Park City, the Hudson Riverfront, and other areas west of the Trade Center. Officials expect the bridge to be done by November, coinciding with the completion of the temporary PATH station at the site.

The bridge will be built by Earth Tech, part of Tyco International. Renderings of the bridge show it will include light shading, partially opaque glass panels and metal mesh. Construction is being overseen by the New York Department of Transportation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and will be funded by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

“To the men and women who live in lower Manhattan, your confidence in the greatest city in the world is justified,” said Governor Pataki at the ceremony. Pataki was joined by members of the LMDC, Port Authority, and New York DOT, among others.


Sam Lubell

[NYguy]

8/23/03....I have no idea what this development
along West St is or what it will be used for, but I'm
sure the families won't be too happy about it...

[Gulcrapek]

Isn't it just a zoom of the PATH?

[ZippyTheChimp]

I think he means that steel in the right foreground. It actually sits on what used to be northbound West St.

[Gulcrapek]

I think I'm blind. I don't see any...

[TLOZ Link5]

I think I know what he's talking about.

[dbhstockton]

I noticed it last time I was there, too. *No reference to it ih the Port Authorty's renderings:

http://www.pathrestoration.com/graph..._rendering.gif

Doesn't seem to encroach on the mystical sacred imaginary footprints, so I guess people have been quiet.

[NYguy]

I'll have to check it out again. *From that angle it appeared that the ramp was gone, and a new roadside structure was built in its place. *That could be completely wrong though, but I'm almost sure it was roadside....

(Edited by NYguy at 1:38 pm on Aug. 25, 2003)

[JMGarcia]

Filling the WTC Void
Foreign projects offer visions that NYC could adapt for a reverent, living memorial

By Justin Davidson
STAFF WRITER

August 25, 2003


In Daniel Libeskind's glittering but still unelaborated plans for the World Trade Center site, an L-shaped hole waits to be filled by the winner of the memorial competition that is now under way. For the moment, Libeskind's renderings of the future site show a sprinkling of people on a vast, flat greensward, sunk three stories below street level, a featureless meadow bounded by a sheer wall, a long ramp and a perimeter of crystal- shaped buildings.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corp.'s board members are sifting through thousands of proposals for how to shape those 4.7 acres and focus the nation's painful memories on a constructed place. Eight finalists will be chosen next month. None of those proposals has been made public, but it's safe to say that the area will not wind up looking as plain and barren as Libeskind's drawings suggest. We will not be remembering our dead at the bottom of a big, empty box.

Or let's hope not. What we need at the center of the site is not a somber void, even a gracefully landscaped one, but a true piazza, a junction where memory and mundanity can meet, where people will throng, drawn by a sense of pilgrimage and by the magnetic appeal of a magnificent outdoor urban space. Dignity can be compatible with bustle.

The memorial site contains the gaps where two towering colossi stood separated by a bleak concrete plain. That is a large enough plot of land for a solemn monument, a bower of recollection - and also for a link to the living. We should be careful, lest an excess of reverence for the dead leads us to build a lifeless space.

The development corporation's decision-makers would do well to spend an hour or two at a small exhibit on the sixth floor of the office building at 30 W. 22nd St. in Manhattan called "Open: New Ideas for Public Spaces," presented by a public architecture advocacy organization called the Van Alen Institute. The show, which closes Oct. 31, offers a worldwide tour of civic projects, some freshly finished, some still being worked out. They range widely in scope and purpose. In Rio de Janeiro, the mayor has launched a plan to include the sprawling, unmapped shantytowns into the city by anchoring them with new common buildings. Genoa is converting an obsolete pier, Ponte Parodi, into an amphitheaterlike piazza thrust out into the gritty harbor. A dockside opera house in Oslo, Norway, features a public plaza that inclines to the water from a terrace on the building's roof. In wintertime, children could conceivably sled from the top of the opera house to the frozen fjord.

These projects offer no specific models for a Sept. 11 memorial, but they do give a sense of how many simultaneous functions a public space can serve. Italian urbanists long ago understood the beauty of an open square - or ellipse, lopsided trapezoid, or whatever shape streets and houses would permit - on which civic, religious and commercial institutions front and which different generations adapt to their own purposes. These are hybrid areas, where the sacred rubs up against the profane. In the Campo de' Fiori in Rome, for example, fish vendors and flower sellers set up their stalls at the base of a monument to intellectual freedom, a brooding statue of the Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake on that very spot. In France, the central square of every hamlet has a cafe and a horrifying plaque engraved with the names of the local young men sacrificed to World War I.

The development corporation has set a program that is demanding and intentionally vague. The memorial must include a tomb for unidentified remains of people killed in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a private gathering place for the victims' families and another for the general public, and it must be capable of evolving over time.

But the program is mute on the subject of how the area should be knit into the neighborhood being rebuilt around it. There will be at least four access points, but will someone needing to walk from, say, the corner of West and Fulton streets to the corner of Liberty and Greenwich stay respectfully at street level and walk all the way around the memorial or choose to cut straight across? The September 11th Place that Libeskind has drawn, a passageway between the PATH station and a cultural center, juts toward the sunken space like a viewing terrace over a canyon, emphasizing the difference between street level and the sacred ground below. The competition's rules, too, seem to imply that the memorial will be cordoned off as a huge contemplative sanctum.

There is an example of such a place in the "Open" show: Peter Eisenman's design for the Holocaust Memorial in downtown Berlin, a rolling landscape of bare concrete pillars - 2,700 of them, arranged on a grid over an area roughly the same size as the World Trade Center Memorial site. Berlin, like Lower Manhattan, is in the process of healing a wound at its heart, and the memorial will occupy land between the Brandenburg Gate and the spot where Hitler's bunker stood. Perhaps slaughter on a scale that still defies comprehension merits such a huge, grim metaphor of mechanized, impersonal death. Even then, I am not so sure.

I am sure that an equally single-minded solution, recalling murder by filling the crime scene with dour blocks or some other icon of grief and segregating a sunken plaza from the rest of urban life, would be a terrible mistake. By all means, let a place of memory be separate and contained, and let the slurry wall speak. But the rest of the acreage could become a living slope, a grand, transitional space between the street and the grave, between the past and the present.

One possible model might be the Campo at the center of Siena, a great uneven bowl of a piazza, where the various neighborhoods slide off their separate hills and meet on common ground. Every summer, the city reenacts its history there, staging the wild horse race known as the Palio. On every other day of the year, the Campo teems with pilgrims, tourists, Sienese lawyers clad in immaculate tweeds and skateboarders dressed with careful slovenliness - the whole motley collection of sober and insouciant souls who are drawn to a city's airy core.

The catalog of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks made it brutally clear how much varied humanity gathers in airplanes and office buildings every day. New York City can honor the dead by creating a grand outdoor plaza that they would all have been glad to share.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.

[NYguy]

it's safe to say that the area will not wind up looking as plain and barren as Libeskind's drawings suggest. We will not be remembering our dead at the bottom of a big, empty box.

Yeah, I think its pretty safe to say, lol...

[JMGarcia]

Nothing like stating the obvious yet so many seemed to have missed that point.

[georgejmyersjr]

Quote: from georgejmyersjr on 7:39 pm on Aug. 19, 2003
I am not an architect, Gary Cooper played one in the movies, but I was very interested in the documentary on I.M. Pei in Hong Kong where he used to smell the coffee from the processing plant walking to school, and the interesting building he later put up there, with diagonal structural reinforcements, it seems to secure the eye, rather than frighten it. I once lived in a dormitory, the "Governors Residence" named for four New York State governors, when it opened in Amherst, NY, designed by them, (I.M. Pei). An older student, I enjoyed it immensely, as residential education was conducted there in the lounges, architects and artists invited to a "Seminar in the Arts" hosted by Esther Schwartz. *Buffalo, NY is a sometimes "refuge" from NYC. *I later visited the new wing of the American National Gallery, in D.C., when it opened and again was impressed by the I.M. Pei design. I wonder, if you could put all three of them together...hmm.


I was working in the archaeology of the Fort McHenry National "Shrine" in Baltimore, MD, with the NPS and the West Wing of the National Gallery had just opened with what was left of the Dresden Collection on exhibit as it opened, it was severely bombed by the Allies.