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TWO CENTS' WORTH
The
towering challenge of the WTC
project
By Henry
C K Liu
The September 11, 2001, terrorist attack
on the World Trade Center (WTC) towers in New York
destroyed 13.4 million square feet (nearly 1.25 million
square meters) of downtown office and retail space,
caused the death of more than 2,800 innocent civilians
from all walks of life, destroyed a major transportation
hub underneath the 6.5-hectare site, and rendered much
of Lower Manhattan uninhabitable for months. By all
measures, it was a tragic event of massive dimension.
That New York has managed to continue to function as a
world-class city with only minor disruption is a
testimony to the vitality and resourcefulness of its
people and its civic institutions.
That vitality
and resourcefulness are now being concentrated on
replacing the WTC with a new structure that fulfills
practical needs and at the same time honors the dead and
stands as an appropriate legacy. It is by no means
clear, a year and a half after the tragedy, that these
goals will be achieved.
Eight years before the
September 11 attacks, in 1993, terrorists set off 500
kilograms of explosives packed into a minivan parked in
the basement parking garage at the WTC. And despite a
violent blast that left a crater more than 6.5 meters
wide and five stories deep, with six people killed and
1,000 injured, the towers stood and were repaired,
cleaned, and reopened in less than a month with new
security precautions. That experience added to the false
myth of the invincibility of the 110-story twin towers.
The twin towers of the WTC were more than just
buildings. They were a living testament of New York's
faith in its own boundless destiny. Built more than 30
years ago through sheer power of will at a time when New
York's future seemed uncertain, and in the face of weak
demand, the towers restored confidence and helped bring
a halt to the decline of Lower Manhattan. Brash, glitzy
and bigger than life, they quickly became symbols of a
tenacious New York, the city of superlatives in a nation
of superlatives.
In the aftermath of the
September 11 attacks, New York Governor George Pataki
and then-mayor Rudolf Giuliani created the Lower
Manhattan Development Corp (LMDC), a joint state-city
corporation governed by a 16-member board of directors
evenly appointed by the governor and the mayor, as a
subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corp, the
state's construction arm, to help plan and coordinate
the rebuilding of the WTC and the revitalization of
Lower Manhattan, and charged with "ensuring Lower
Manhattan recovers from the attacks on World Trade
Center and emerges even better than it was before".
According to the mission statement issued by the LMDC,
"the centerpiece of its efforts is the creation of a
permanent memorial honoring those lost, while affirming
the democratic values that came under attack on
September 11".
The LMDC has committed itself "to
work in cooperation with its partners in the public and
private sectors to coordinate long-term planning for the
WTC site and surrounding communities, while pursuing
short-term initiatives to improve the quality of life in
Lower Manhattan during the revitalization effort". The
LMDC is committed to an "open, inclusive, and
transparent planning process in which the public has a
central role in shaping the future of Lower Manhattan".
Several advisory councils representing a broad spectrum
of groups affected by the WTC attacks - including
victims' families, business owners, professional
organizations and downtown residents - regularly consult
with the LMDC on issues of concern to their respective
constituencies. The LMDC said it will work with the
general public in developing a memorial process, as well
as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the
leaseholders, and all of the groups and agencies
involved. The LMDC also conducts public hearings,
participates in Community Board meetings, and
continuously meets with community groups, civic
organizations and public officials to ensure that the
opinions of those who were affected by this tragedy are
taken into account.
The preliminary components
of a blueprint for rebuilding Lower Manhattan include
respecting the site of the WTC as a place of remembrance
and reserving an area of the site for one or more
permanent memorials well integrated with its
surroundings, including a museum of freedom and
remembrance. The LMDC vows to establish an international
design process to produce the most moving and
appropriate memorial possible. The memorial is to become
"a symbol known around the world", as "an eternal
tribute to the victims, the enduring strength of
democracy, a celebration of freedom, and a testament to
the resurgent power of the city and the nation".
Neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan, including
Battery Park City, the Financial District, the South
Street Seaport, Chinatown, the Lower East Side, TriBeCa
and SoHo, experienced serious disruption from the
attacks. The LMDC seeks a balance between reconstruction
efforts and the need for residents, workers and
businesses quickly to resume normalcy in their daily
lives, working with the Port Authority, the Metropolitan
Transportation Authority, the Department of City
Planning, State and City Departments of Transportation,
the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management, Con Edison
(energy), Verizon (communication), local Community
Boards (planning), the Downtown Alliance, local
businesses, community-based organizations and other
involved groups and agencies to identify and complete
interim actions to clean up and restore essential
services in Lower Manhattan and to come to agreement on
a final plan.
Public hearings have produced
outline redevelopment goals that include expanding the
residential population and enhancing residential life to
create a strong sense of community throughout Lower
Manhattan. Creating a critical mass of permanent
residents will require that a significant amount of land
area be devoted to housing for a wide range of income
levels, in safe and accessible neighborhoods with
educational, health, recreational and cultural
facilities to make Lower Manhattan more attractive for
families with children.
Future developments will
aimed at supporting Lower Manhattan as a mixed-use
community, with retail and commercial amenities to
service a critical mass of businesses, residents,
workers, visitors and tourists. Premier retail and
commercial offerings will enhance Lower Manhattan as a
desirable destination for the city, the region and the
world, with retail and commercial ancillary services to
attract and retain businesses and financial and
professional firms.
Lower Manhattan will be
conceived as a Freedom Park, linking the Statue of
Liberty, Ellis Island, Federal Hall, the New York Stock
Exchange (NYSE), and the proposed WTC memorial. A
critical mass of dynamic, enticing and diverse cultural
venues will be developed and sustained to make Lower
Manhattan a vibrant center for culture and the arts,
with a new museum dedicated to "American freedom,
tolerance and the values that the WTC represented", a
new home for the City Opera within a new performing arts
center to include facilities for other musical and
theater groups, a new downtown Guggenheim Art Museum,
expanding the programs and facilities of the South
Street Seaport Museum, the Museum of the American
Indian, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the Skyscraper
Museum, the Museum of Financial History and other
cultural institutions in Lower Manhattan, a museum
building in connection with the permanent memorial
structure that will house a WTC museum and other smaller
museums currently lacking adequate facilities, a "world
university" that would be a center for international
education and an accessible, attractive, and a
comprehensive park and open space system for Lower
Manhattan.
There is also a call for support of
sustainable design, "green building" technology,
state-of-the-art safety and security in design and
engineering, and accessible design features and a
continuation for Lower Manhattan as a "showplace for
world-class architecture", in part by exemplifying
environmentally friendly design, even an ambitious call
to amend building codes and/or zoning restrictions to
make "green buildings" easier and cheaper to build.
Lower Manhattan will be developed as a magnet for
tourism, education, culture and the arts that celebrates
New York's and America's heritage and leverages the
historic institutions of American freedom.
All the
goals identified by the LMDC are highly commendable and
if the tragic terrorist attacks can make such ideals a
reality, then the victims would not have perished or
suffered in vain. Unfortunately, the reality of
urban-redevelopment politics and economics have not
vanished along with the twin towers, and the final
results may turn out to be something that no one can be
proud of.
The Urban Renewal Program in the
United States during the decades of 1950-70 was also
framed with admirable ideals, supported by a coalition
of interests that included inspired political and civic
leaders, progressive social reformers, visionary urban
planners, enlightened municipal governments, creative
bankers, entrepreneurial private developers, talented
architects and engineers, and an innovative construction
industry. Yet by the 1970s, the program was widely
recognized as a dismal failure, evidenced by concrete
results. Some critics labeled it the "People Remover
Program" through which poor yet functional neighborhoods
were summarily vacated and cleared wholesale from the
urban core to make room for private developments that
enriched only private developers, and the poor were
relocated in new, remote and inaccessible highrise
housing projects without adequate support facilities
such as schools and clinics and community centers and
playground. The result was high-density housing that
turned out to be worse living environments than the old
low-density slums. The architect who designed the WTC
towers, Minoru Yamasaki, also designed a huge
award-winning low-income housing project in downtown St
Louis that had to be demolished with dynamite in the
1970 because of inhabitability. The spectacular
controlled collapse of the highrise housing slabs from
strategically placed explosives was widely televised on
the evening news.
It took architects, planners
and economists decades to understand, and perhaps some
still do not, that slums do not cause poverty. It is
poverty that creates slums. Slum clearance itself does
not eliminate poverty and often exacerbates it. Slums
can only be eliminated through the elimination of
poverty itself. The solution to low-income housing is to
eliminate low income, not to institutionalize low income
with substandard housing. Good low-income housing is an
oxymoron, for the social problems of low income
inevitably follow the poor into their housing, no matter
how well it is designed. There is no good living without
a good living wage. If you move the poor into the White
House without eliminating poverty, the While House will
turn into a slum within a week.
The municipal
governments did not fare much better from the Urban
Renewal Program. The tax incentives and exemptions city
halls had to give away, on top of the municipal debts
they had to assume to finance infrastructure improvement
to attract private redevelopment, created severe
difficulties for municipal budgets, forcing cutbacks on
vital services needed for a livable city. Most downtowns
became sterile ghost towns of vacant lots as low-income
neighborhoods were cleared wholesale overnight and new
developments took years to arrive, unable to reverse the
flight of the middle-class to fast expanding suburbia,
encouraged by massive federal subsidy for the automobile
as a private mass transit system, while neglecting
public mass transit that served the urban core. The only
group that made out like bandits were the private
developers who got control of choice downtown parcels
practically free, plus liberal government-subsidized and
-guaranteed loans and real-estate tax exemptions.
The initial approach taken by the LMDC to
rebuild the WTC had been less than inspiring. It took
courageous and sensible public denunciation from
respected Pulitzer-winning architectural critic Ada
Louise Huxtable, formerly of the New York Times and now
with the Wall Street Journal, to jolt the authorities
from their complacent and pedestrian initial mindset of
business as usual.
The Port Authority of New
York and New Jersey, owner of the 6.5-hectare site on
which the WTC once stood, is a public body. Its revenue
comes mostly from the tolls collected from the public on
bridges and tunnels financed by agency revenue bonds,
and from fees from the operation of the region's
airports and ports. As of June 30, 2002, it had assets
of US$6.8 billion with a net of $5.6 billion after
liabilities, mostly in the form of outstanding bonds.
For the six months ending June 30, the Port Authority
received $1.3 billion in gross revenue, yielding a net
income of $384 million. Recoverables related to the
events of September 11, 2001, came to $198 million.
Depreciation expenses for the period were $201 million.
The mission of the Port Authority is to serve
the public interest by providing transportation
infrastructure and operating transportation facilities
while staying within the bounds of sound public finance.
This mission has become murky in recent decades, as is
natural with long-standing public agencies. When the WTC
was being planned in the 1960s, critics argued that the
authority should reduce the tolls on bridges and tunnels
that had long since been fully amortized, instead of
investing in further institutional empire-building, such
as venturing into development of commercial office space
for profit.
Much of the land under the WTC,
occupied mostly by discount electronics retail tenants
with leases from small landlords, was condemned under
eminent domain and assembled through street closings
into a superblock by New York City and turned over to
the Port Authority for the controversial project.
Eminent domain is a well-established sovereign right to
take private property for public use, with appropriate
compensation, by virtue of the superior dominion of the
sovereign power over all lands within its jurisdiction.
Yielding to neo-liberal pressure to privatize,
the Port Authority in July 2001 granted developer Larry
Silverstein and Westfield Holdings Ltd a 99-year lease
on the WTC's 1 million square meters of office space and
42,000 square meters of retail space, at a total price
of $3.2 billion. Some have suggested that this was a
sweetheart deal for a politically well-connected
developer, as the true worth of the 99-year lease was
estimated to be more than $8 billion. The lease gives
the private leaseholders the legal standing to protect
their private property rights should the public interest
interfere with potential private profits over the
99-year period of the lease.
Huxtable has
suggested that the Port Authority should buy back the
controversial lease from the Silverstein-Westfield team,
which was merely two months old at the time of the
September 11 attacks, so that the Port Authority can
fulfill its public-interest mission as a public agency
unencumbered by conflicting private profit interests.
Silverstein has answered in a terse letter to the New
York Times that the lease is "not for sale",
understandably, for if he should win his lawsuit against
the insurance companies, he stands to collect $7.5
billion in claims, doubling the value of his lease, not
to mention the 99-year stream of future profit from
maximum development rights. The city is reported to be
seeking to negotiate a land swap that would give it
authority over the WTC site, while transferring
ownership of the city's two major airports to the Port
Authority in return. Rudolph Giuliani, while still
mayor, advocated postponing any decisions about
commercial development until after a memorial is
designed, and he also suggested compensating
Silverstein's group by giving it development rights
elsewhere in Manhattan.
Now the issue of private
property right threatens to stand in the path of the
public-interest objectives of the LMDC. It is curious
that no one, except Huxtable, has raised the question
why the principle of eminent domain should not be
applied to the Silverstein-Westfield lease.
Even
among private developers, disagreement has been aired
publicly over how and when the complex should be
rebuilt. Silverstein, the ink of whose signature on the
99-year lease had hardly dried before the WTC was
destroyed, was engaged in a public verbal duel with
Michael Fascitelli, president of Vornado Realty Trust, a
large New York landlord. Silverstein was determined to
rebuild the complex as quickly as possible, although
realistically the rebuilding of the WTC will not begin
for a number of years because it will take at least four
years to clean up the site and rebuild the subway and
transportation network and hub beneath it. Fascitelli
questioned whether it made sense for the city to rush to
begin rebuilding when the economy is slowing and vacancy
rising and recovery uncertain in the foreseeable future.
In response, Silverstein pointed out that the World
Trade Center would stagger the delivery of the million
square meters of space in the complex at the rate of
232,000 square meters (2.5 million square feet) a year
for four years. Silverstein also stressed that it was
vitally important to the city's and the region's economy
to restore the 100,000 jobs and billions of dollars in
wages that downtown Manhattan lost in the wake of the
September 11 terrorist attack, although he was vague
about how empty office buildings could do that.
Underlying the public verbal duel was predatory
market economics. Silverstein hopes to lure tenants back
downtown with attractive rents because the cost of
reconstruction will come entirely from insurance
proceeds. "When you build without debt, you can build
affordable space," he told a real-estate trade paper.
"If we can build affordable space, people will come."
What he did not say, and what Fascitelli feared, was
that the new tenants would come not from economic
recovery or expansion, but from existing buildings that
charge higher rents in a distressed economy, repeating a
process that decimated the New York commercial space
market after the 1987 stock-market crash, as
bank-foreclosed vacant buildings returned to the market
with below-cost rents to steal tenants from financially
sound buildings, turning the New York real-estate market
into a decade-long predatory jungle of the weak eating
the strong.
Silverstein and his insurance
carriers are suing each other over how much must be paid
under the WTC's policy that entitles him to $3.5 billion
in coverage "per event". The Silverstein lawyers from
the formidable firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen &
Katz claim he is entitled to $7 billion because the two
plane attacks amounted to two events under the rules of
the "Traveler form" of coverage. The insurance companies
say the terrorist attack was only one event under the
rules of the "Wilpont form" of coverage, which defines
the two attacks as one event.
The insurance
companies tried to have the dispute resolved by a
private arbitration panel in London rather than in a
United States court. Wachtell contended that recently
passed federal legislation makes Manhattan's federal
courthouse the exclusive forum for resolving claims
related to the September 11 attacks, regardless of the
language of any contract in particular. The venue of
legal proceedings is important because Silverstein may
receive a more sympathetic and favorable hearing in New
York, and because a decision there would most likely
bind several or all the insurance firms involved. The
case is a test for the new law passed in the wake of the
attacks.
Silverstein and his fellow investors
need a quick decision because they will soon need money
to continue to make mortgage payments to their lenders
and lease payments to the Port Authority when the
transitional insurance cash-flow advances run out. Final
plans to rebuild also depend on the outcome of the
insurance dispute. Sources in the legal profession say
that it would be risky to bet against Wachtell, so
awe-inspiring is the fearsome reputation of the small
but invincible firm, which routinely annihilates worthy
opponents with overwhelming force of creative legal
logic.
If Silverstein gets $7.5 billion in total
insurance proceeds and rebuilds, or even $3.5 billion,
he would likely be able to charge annual rents of below
$40 a square foot ($430 a square meter) and still make
enviable profit. That would pose a threat to Vornado,
which has massive holdings of office buildings in
midtown and would likely be hurt if millions of square
feet of discounted space come on the market during a
protracted economic downturn. Vornado needs rents of $80
a square foot at its new development rising at the site
of the old Alexander's department store in the East Side
of Midtown Manhattan, with Bloomberg News as an anchor
tenant.
Populist political sentiment growing
from a slow economy caused by the bursting of an
unsustainable debt bubble linked to fraudulent corporate
accounting is moving against Silverstein's plan to
rebuild all 11 million square feet of office space
destroyed on September 11, 2001. A general consensus on
how Lower Manhattan should be rebuilt seems to be
emerging among political and business leaders, though
the details remain vague and sharp conflict can surface
over them. There is some hope that the massive project
may avoid being snarled by the city's tradition of
fractious politics, and the rebuilt project will be a
vast improvement over its original banal office towers
framing a wind-swept plaza that was unfriendly, if not
outright hostile, to pedestrians, disconnected from
downtown neighborhoods, faced by an undistinguished
hotel and a depressing underground retail concourse.
Instead, a balanced mixed use for the site seems within
the realm of possibility, including educational and
cultural facilities, perhaps a performing-arts center
and museum, possibly affordable residential units, as
well as an appropriate amount of retail and office
space, or perhaps even low-rent studios for struggling
artists, filmmakers and writers.
Current
thinking has set aside at least 2.4 of the site's 6.9
hectares for a memorial, making about 6 million square
feet of office space reasonable from a city planning
perspective, assuming the lackluster market can support
or even need that amount within the next decade.
Silverstein has pushed for a replacement of all the 11
million square feet of office space and the 500,000
square feet of destroyed retail space. But his efforts
have alienated powerful constituencies, and angered
surviving families of attack victims. Giuliani, while
still mayor, advocated postponing any decisions about
commercial development until after a memorial is
designed, and he even suggested compensating
Silverstein's group by giving it development rights
elsewhere in Manhattan. John Whitehead, a former
co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who is now the
public-spirited head of the LMDC, stressed the
importance of the memorial and outlined a mixed-use
vision for the site, including residential, cultural and
educational facilities. He also cautioned that phasing
of the project will be conditioned by market demand for
space in the next few years.
Much depends on the
amount of federal aid finally forthcoming beyond the $20
billion that President George W Bush made available for
cleanup and renewal - especially for the transportation
projects. Congress had approved $12.4 billion of the
cleanup money before the end of 2002, while an
additional $5 billion is proposed as part of the
much-debated Bush stimulus budget. As the federal budget
deficit climbs, and with war costs unpredictable, it is
not at all certain that the federal government will give
New York all that it needs, when the initial emotion
from the terrorist attacks subsides against a long list
of other national priorities.
Falling
real-estate prices and rising vacancies had begun to hit
New York long before September 2001, as the US economy
started to slow at the beginning of 2000. Since the
attacks, bitter landlord-tenant wars, terrorism
insurance problems and nasty court battles continue to
create a murky outlook for the quick recovery of Lower
Manhattan, which had survived more on hope than market
fundamentals for several decades, despite strong support
from powerful interests.
Some 13 million square
feet of prime class A space had been destroyed and as
much as another 20 million square feet was temporarily
lost as a result of falling debris and fires to
neighboring buildings on September 11. Some 652 tenants
occupying 28.6 million square feet (nearly 2.7 million
square meters) of space were temporarily or permanently
displaced. Yet vacancies, which had been rising in
Manhattan through 2001, did not fall sharply, but
incredibly rose as firms relocated part of their
operation on a permanent basis to the surrounding
suburbs and across the river to New Jersey, to avoid the
dangers and upheaval of having all of their operations
share the same transportation hub and power grid should
another attack occur. The situation is exacerbated by
unending massive layoffs in the financial and corporate
sectors. More than 10 million square feet of sublease
space came on the Manhattan market in 2002. Office
vacancies in downtown Manhattan rose to 13 percent of at
the end of February 2002 from 6.5 percent on September
10, 2001, despite the loss of 33 million square feet.
The vacancy rate now is about 17 percent and still
rising.
There is a serious question whether
downtown Manhattan will ever rebound despite the fact
that downtown rents are now 30-40 percent cheaper than
comparable space in midtown Manhattan, where the market
is also softening. For the first time in history, Lower
Manhattan can compete with the New Jersey waterfront
developments on price. Aside from the cheaper rents,
businesses are also being lured to Lower Manhattan by
government incentives. Governor Pataki and newly elected
Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled programs late last
month that offered grants ranging from $3,500-$5,000 per
employee for companies that commit to remaining in Lower
Manhattan for five years. Business Recovery grants -
ranging from $50,000-$300,000 - are also offered to
reimburse companies for lost revenue during the
disruption. Insurers warned that they may not be able to
offer terrorism coverage without some kind of government
backing or, even if they did, coverage would be limited
and premiums would skyrocket. Once an afterthought in
standard coverage, terrorism insurance has now become a
front-end issue that threatens the core of future
real-estate developments, as well as other industries,
such as airlines, hotels and cruise ships.
The
Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York, a coalition
of New York civic and cultural institutions such as the
Municipal Art Society, League of Conservation Voters,
Guggenheim Museum and Ford Foundation, argues that the
rebuilt site should restore the street pattern
interrupted by the WTC superblock. The street pattern
represents the urban fabric of city life that links the
city as an organic whole. To Australia-based
shopping-mall giant Westfield Holdings Ltd, which holds
the 99-year lease on all retail space in the project,
urban streets are the antithesis of the concept a
shopping mall. Westfield has a bigger market
capitalization - $12.9 billion - than any industry
rival. The Lowy family owns a controlling 30 percent
stake in the company, which is publicly traded in
Australia and owns 108 facilities there, in the United
States and in Europe. From 1960, when it went public,
through 2000, its shareholders received a 34 percent
average annual return on their investment.
The
lease gave the Australian company authority to expand
the large existing retail mall that ran along the street
level of parts of the WTC and, in some places,
underground. Westfield planned to raise the large
pedestrian plaza between the twin towers 15 meters and
add another 18,600 square meters (200,000 square feet)
of shops at ground level. The destroyed WTC mall, a
typical mix of stores selling clothes, books, watches,
toys and fast food in a less-than-pleasant environment,
was one of the most lucrative in the United States. It
generated annual sales of about $900 a square foot, or
three times the national average, from some 250,000
people, mostly captive workers in the towers and
surrounding buildings, passed through its concourses
three times a day on an average work day, during morning
and afternoon rush hours and lunchtime.
The
attacks on the WTC turned the towers into a heroic
symbol of American values. But though largely subdued
out of respect for the victims of the tragedy, there was
also near-universal criticism for its poor design and
planning as well as the high-handed development process
that brought it into existence. Not many who worked in
the twin towers had fond feelings for the architectural
monstrosity.
The WTC was conceived in the early
1960s by the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Development
Association to revitalize the seedy "radio row"
dominated by cut-rate electronics stores. David
Rockefeller, founder of the development association, as
chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, which was
headquartered in downtown, and his older brother, then
New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, who after World
War II had donated the land for the United Nations
Headquarters on the East River, pushed for the project
as part of a grand plan to revitalized Lower Manhattan,
the commercial viability of which ironically had been
challenged by the successful Rockefeller Center in
Midtown built during the 1930s Depression by their
grandfather, John D Rockefeller.
The 1960s were
the Rockefeller decade in New York. The oldest
Rockefeller brother, John D III, was leading the charge
to build Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on urban
renewal land on the West Side. In 1962, the Port
Authority began plans to build the center. Critics
charged that the proliferation of gargantuan centers
would rob New York neighborhoods of their historical
character in general, and the WTC in particular would
ruin the skyline, disrupt television reception, and
strain city services. However, the project was approved
in smoke-filled back rooms of politics and money, and
construction began in 1966.
In order to create
the 6.5-hectare WTC site, five streets were closed and
164 buildings were demolished. Construction required the
excavation of more than 900,000 cubic meters of earth,
which was used to create 9.5 hectares of landfill along
the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan now know as Battery
Park City. During peak construction periods, 3,500
people worked at the site on any given day. A total of
10,000 construction workers worked on the towers; 60
died during construction, which was considered a fair
record for the 110-story towers, for a death rate of one
worker per floor was not uncommon for New York
skyscraper construction.
The North Tower was
opened in December 1970 and the South Tower in January
1972; they were dedicated in April 1973, as the world's
tallest buildings, a distinction held for only a short
time, since the taller Sears Tower in Chicago was
completed in May 1973. (However, the North Tower's
114.3-meter radio tower technically allowed it to claim
to be the tallest.) The towers were ranked as the fifth-
and sixth-tallest buildings in the world at the time of
their destruction on September 11, 2001.
The WTC
was more than its signature twin towers. It was a
complex of seven buildings with four smaller buildings
and a hotel built around a central nondescript
landscaped plaza. The retail space at the WTC, which was
located below the plaza, was the largest shopping mall
in lower Manhattan. The six basements housed two subway
stations and a stop on the Port Authority Trans-Hudson
(PATH) commuter trains to New Jersey. Some 50,000 people
worked in the buildings, while another 200,000 visited
or passed through each day. The top-floor observation
deck had 26,000 visitors daily, who could see for 70
kilometers on a clear day. From the ground, the towers
were visible from at least 32km out. The complex had its
own zip code: 10048. Though the complex, which opened in
1973, at first was an empty towering white elephant, it
eventually filled up after years of enticing blue-chip
tenants with low rents, which upset competing private
developers.
As the new millennium began,
downtown was riding the late-1990s technology bubble and
the robust debt economy. The area had added close to
70,000 jobs in last five years of the 20th century, and
its office vacancy rate was near an all-time low.
Residential development was booming, with rents and sale
prices skyrocketing, serving yuppies who worked on Wall
Street, new information-technology (IT) and financial
services companies were moving in and the NYSE announced
plans to develop a gleaming new headquarters. The WTC
was enjoying close to its highest occupancy ever.
The September 11 terrorist attacks turned
downtown's dream into a nightmare that may last into the
indefinite future. One year after the attacks, despite
public announcements of unflinching optimism, most
involved in the rebuilding still are privately unsure
whether the area will ever restore the tens of thousands
of jobs and hundreds of companies that were displaced or
lost on that tragic day. An estimated 100,000 employers
were forced to relocate from downtown at least
temporarily after the attacks and not many have
returned, especially survived workers of the WTC who are
still suffering from trauma.
Former tenants of
the destroyed complex have since leased 6.7 million
square feet of new space, but, of that, only 350,000
square feet, or 5.2 percent, has been leased downtown.
The companies now gone from the area include some of the
biggest names in finance, including Morgan Stanley,
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc and CIBC. The return of
major corporations, including American Express Corp and
Merrill Lynch & Co, has filled some of the gap but
far from eliminated it. Downtown has lost some 65,000
jobs since the terrorist attack, more than 17 percent of
the 368,000 people who had been working there before
September 11, 2001. The bulk of those worked for
companies in buildings that were destroyed, but more
than 30,000 jobs also have vanished because of the weak
economy, failing retailers and restaurants and corporate
bankruptcies.
Nor is there much hope for any job
growth in the short term. New York's economy is hurting,
especially its technology and financial services
sectors, on which downtown depends. Even now, businesses
are continuing to downsize, adding to the glut of more
than 4 million square feet of sublease space on the
downtown market. About one-third of the estimated 1,500
small retailers in the area have closed. The NYSE
canceled its new 60-story headquarters project, which
would have received a subsidy of more than $1.2 billion
from the city in the form of free land assembly at a
cost of $450 million, generous construction-cost
contribution and tax breaks. The city's taxpayers lost
$110 million in planning cost and deposit forfeiture on
the aborted deal, which had been criticized for
lucrative subsidies to a gilded trading complex that is
destined to face an obsolescence challenge from
electronic trading in the not-distant future.
Like the late-1990s boom, the next upturn could
inject new life into the area. And today's downtown
office vacancy rate of close to 17 percent is still
lower than it was in the slump after the 1987 crash,
which lasted through the early 1990s. But downtown
Manhattan's growth historically has come from the
expansion of its indigenous businesses, not the
relocation of companies from elsewhere. A big part of
that growth engine was destroyed by the terrorist
attack.
Making matters worse, some downtown
tenants that came back are considering leaving when
their current leases expire, despite low rents and huge
government incentives that make occupancy costs in the
Financial District about one-third less than in Midtown
and competitive with some high price suburbs, such as
Westchester County and Stamford, Connecticut. The city
and state have offered special tax breaks and other
benefits customized to the 145 downtown businesses that
have more than 200 employees in exchange for committing
to the area for at least seven years. But only 50 have
accepted, and some of those are retailers and hotels
that have little choice but to stay. The rest are
keeping their options open as they watch the progress on
rebuilding Ground Zero and restoring the vital
transportation systems that were lost. Serious
rebuilding is not expected to begin for another four
years at the earliest and final completion would be at
least a decade away. Most businesses simply do not have
such a long perspective in this business environment of
quarterly earning concerns.
The gargantuan
superscale of the WTC towers and the barricade-like
lower mass blocked vistas and sight lines of closed
streets and sunlight from neighboring areas, interrupted
traffic flow with abrupt bottlenecks, and set the
project up as a fortress detached from the rest of Lower
Manhattan, even from the old Financial District to the
south. Planners and civic leaders now see the rebuilding
as an opportunity to correct this mistake by
reconnecting the site to surrounding neighborhoods and
to restore the torn urban fabric. Within a month of the
attacks, the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York
circulated a memorandum advocating restoration of the
old street grid. The idea also gained important support
from the LMDC planners. Area residents generally favor
reopening the streets as a way of reconnecting
neighborhoods cut off by the WTC.
Meanwhile,
Westfield and Silverstein had a plan of their own to
restore Greenwich Street, a major north-south
thoroughfare to both cars and pedestrians. Some minor
streets, such as Fulton, would be open at least to
pedestrians. But in a concession to the retail
leaseholder, two other restored streets, Cortlandt and
Dey, would exclude cars, and Cortlandt would be enclosed
in glass between buildings. Silverstein also proposed to
elevate the office lobbies of the buildings on the east
side of the site to make more ground-level retail space
available to Westfield.
As part of the initial
official design process, the Port Authority and the LMDC
jointly announced six alternative designs, with the
private leaseholders' proposal among them. Any plan
ultimately backed by the leaseholders will carry
considerable weight, especially if endorsed by the Port
Authority, because these entities are the legal
principals. The six initial design plans for the site
released last July were roundly criticized. As a result,
a new competitive design process was hastily adopted and
the date for completion of the plan has been extended
until the first half of 2003.
The concept of a
superblock is a modern city-planning idea and there is
nothing wrong with it if it is properly linked to the
existing urban structure. Instead, the WTC complex was
dropped like a fortified fortress into an existing
neighborhood without any regard for vital connection and
context of scale and transition. And there is nothing
wrong with skyscrapers except that they cannot be placed
on postage-stamp-size lots and hope to function
properly.
In New York, the sidewalks are 4.5
meters wide on side streets and six meters wide along
avenues. This was an adequate dimension when buildings
were six-story walkups, and sidewalks were public social
spaces where people could sit on benches and chat. Yet
with modern buildings now rising 60, 80 or 110 stories,
the sidewalks remain 4.5m wide, rendering pedestrian
circulation unpleasant and even dangerous, and people
get upset with those who stop to chat or walk too slowly
for the rush-hour flow.
When Mies van der Rohe
designed the Seagram building, he pulled the tower back
from the sidewalk and created the only successful urban
plaza on Park Avenue, which ironically private security
guards used to wave people away who try to sit and enjoy
the noontime sun on the beautiful green granite ledges
lining the sides of the plaza. When the great French
modern architect Le Corbusier visited New York in 1946,
he proclaimed in his When the Cathedrals Were
White that New York "is a city in the process of
becoming", that the New York skyscrapers were too small.
He wanted larger mixed-use skyscrapers set in
superblocks of landscaped parks.
It was not that
Greenwich Street was interrupted that was bad, but the
way it was interrupted without a sense of destination
was objectionable. Park Avenue was punctuated by the
Grand Central Terminal and Fifth Avenue ends
majestically with Washington Park. Separation of
pedestrian movement and vehicular traffic is a
time-tested planning principle, but to work it must be
done in ways where the connecting points between cars
and people become celebrations of the joys of urban
life, which the WTC complex failed to grasp.
In
a scalding condemnation of the original design
proposals, critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in the Wall
Street Journal (July 25, 2002): "I avoid dignifying
these retarded exercises in crushing commercial square
footage and meaningless memorial voids with the term
'concept plans' - that the Lower Manhattan Development
Corporation and the Port Authority have provided for the
rebuilding of the tragically maimed World Trade Center
site are six cookie-cutter losers. We do not need a
necropolis of the urban-renewal mistakes of the '60s.
The titles only dimly disguise the fact that the
phalanxes of massed office buildings are the revealed
reality of official intentions. Called Memorial This and
That as a gesture to the universal desire for
commemoration, they are dedicated to maximum return on
the land, while obviously begging the future.
"There is talk of buyouts and other economic
escape hatches, and rumors that the Port Authority may
even cancel that onerous lease, at considerable cost,
freeing Larry Silverstein to act like a hero. Although
it would be naive to think that the process is being
re-scripted in response to public opinion, the protests
may indeed be awakening dormant instincts of civic
responsibility in the face of unspeakable tragedy and
the political shadow of an election year. The city has
suffered a tremendous loss. Profit-as-usual hardly seems
appropriate. What Silverstein had in mind when he swore
to rebuild is too awful to contemplate, now that we have
contemplated it.
"It is fashionable to say that
greed at a grand scale has made New York great. That's a
dismal outlook. Our buildings are great to the degree
that their architecture is great; where the city is
great, as at Rockefeller Center, it is because there are
subtleties of scale and relationships that elevate the
urban experience. If size and square footage is where
all office buildings begin, they do not end there with
landmarks like the Woolworth, Chrysler or Empire State
buildings; they are not memorable for their visibility
(like the twin towers, which were neither
architecturally distinguished nor a trade center), but
for their quality and character. This is not the same
thing as building big with trim.
"Successful,
city-enriching plans are achieved by those trained and
talented specialists who have surprised us ever since
Michelangelo miraculously transformed the impossibly
mismatched grades and buildings of Rome's Capitoline
Hill into the superbly synthesized Campidoglio."
On August 12, Huxtable wrote again: "The
gentlemen upstate and downtown who control the future of
Ground Zero seem to have gotten half the message - 11
million square feet of commercial space plus a hotel and
600,000 square feet of shopping in a blockbuster cluster
looming over what Governor Pataki refers to as 'hallowed
ground' is no one's idea of what to do on the World
Trade Center site except the Port Authority's and those
who hold the leases of the twin towers and its shopping
mall.
"The only interests served are those of
the Port Authority, which owns the World Trade Center
land and buildings, the developer, Larry Silverstein,
with a 99-year lease on the twin towers, and Westfield
America, the shopping-mall developer that operated the
stores beneath them. This is deja vu all over again for
those who remember the urban-renewal destruction of
Lower Manhattan in the 1960s.
"The other half of
the message is taking much longer to get through. This
is the obvious (to everyone else) fact that Ground Zero
is part of Lower Manhattan. You would never know it from
these proposals; it might as well be on the moon. That
understanding should have been step one in the planning
process. The reconstruction of the World Trade Center
site has been conceived in a vacuum, unrelated to the
needs of a downtown that was changing radically before
[September 11, 2001].
"Whatever is built must
function organically with the rest of Lower Manhattan.
The developers' specifications need to be studied in the
context of existing conditions and future needs that
include office space and housing, updated transportation
and communication networks, and the essential revenues
and services to maintain and strengthen the area's
economic base while encouraging a mixed-use community.
Vision is knowing how to make this happen. It means
being able to conceptualize solutions, turning
statistical projections, land-use patterns and legal and
financial tools into real places. It supplies the
connective tissue that brings it all to life.
"Inevitably, market conditions will be a
controlling factor. But the formulaic sterility of all
six proposals suggests that this creative assessment of
conditions and options either never took place, or was
aborted early on. That is why starting with the plans as
they exist now will take us nowhere.
"The Port
Authority and the LMDC failed to identify potential
development sites beyond Ground Zero, including land,
buildings, roads or rights of way owned or controlled by
state and public agencies, opportunities for linkage,
trades, or air-rights zoning transfers, and the list
does not end there.
"These devices are all
available, but both the Port Authority and the Empire
State Development Corporation, New York state's
construction agency, to which the LMDC answers, have
much stronger planning and development tools. They can
override local zoning completely, issue bonds to finance
construction and use the power of eminent domain to
condemn and purchase land. These instruments open the
door to much broader planning possibilities than have
been presented.
"Caught by surprise by the
negative response of a public far ahead of them, and
mindful of upcoming elections, officials are beginning
to look for other answers. Talk has begun about
properties surrounding the World Trade Center site
affected by [September] 11. There is an encouraging
report that the city is offering to trade the land it
owns under La Guardia and Kennedy airports, for which
the Port Authority pays a substantial rental due to
increase shortly, in exchange for the World Trade Center
site, which would bring Ground Zero and its rebuilding
under city control and get the Port Authority out of the
downtown real-estate business and back to the airports
where it belongs. This shows how creative the political
establishment can be when the pressure is on.
"One important message doesn't seem to have been
communicated at all. Just widening the pool of talent -
a concession in the making - is not going to get the
right results; all the talent in the world cannot
produce a plan without a program that offers more
information and wider opportunities than were given to
those who produced what we have seen. The process has
been controlled by the developers' wish list; its only
concession has been to honor the mandate for a memorial.
"There is no law that says everything that was
on that spot has to go back there. What is at issue are
revenues, which will be generated wherever the new
construction takes place. The critical mass of consumers
and captive commuters that the twin towers provided has
been a gold mine for Westfield; the location has been
more profitable than any of its suburban malls. Just as
Mr Silverstein has hastened to prepare potential
semi-skyscrapers with the hope of jumping into
construction, Westfield's plans are well beyond the
concept stage; this includes the travesty of a
glass-enclosed shopping street on the reopened old
street pattern. They don't cross streets in suburbia.
That even drew protests from the consulting architect.
"Rebuilding Ground Zero must begin with a
commitment to both physical and symbolic renewal and the
hopes and concerns of those whose losses were so great.
The memorial cannot be separated from the planning
process ... From the ideas being floated it is clear
that whatever form the memorial takes, it will be both
conspicuous and controversial. Style will be an
explosive subject. Its constituency, the bereaved,
already feel shut out of the design process. No one has
dealt with how memorial space should co-exist with
commercial or residential development. A soaring
something has already become the pious fallback for
politicians who are unable, or unwilling to come to
grips with the larger planning problem.
"The
last opportunity to create significant open green space
in Manhattan was the building of Central Park a century
and a half ago. Quite possibly, it will never happen
again. There are new parks of elegance and originality -
Barcelona has built a number of them - but none here.
Paris's recently designed Parc Citroen has changes in
scale and elevation, open spaces and intimate areas,
lyrical, programmed fountains and pavilions that can be
adapted to active and passive pleasures or simple
remembrance and contemplation. Genuine memorabilia could
be incorporated. What could be wrong with a similar work
of landscape art devoted to memory and open to all in
this overcongested, hard-edged city?
"New York
is known for its creative talent and negotiating skills.
This is an unparalleled opportunity for great
city-making, if we still have any idea in the age of
bottom-line building what that means. The city's
land-swap offer is a heartening development. It would be
both ironic and fitting if Ground Zero were rescued by a
beautiful deal."
The Huxtable criticism
energized diverse rumblings of opposition to the initial
designs into a focused public outcry that forced the
LMDC to reconsider its redevelopment approach and to
recommit itself to its mission of protecting and
enhancing the public interest.
Beyond sensible
rebuilding plans, Manhattan's oldest financial-business
district has been fighting for decades to survive the
natural evolution of New York northward. The destruction
of the WTC has posed the biggest challenge yet to Lower
Manhattan in its decades-old struggle to maintain its
status as a premier business location.
Forty
years ago, an earlier chapter of that struggle led to
the birth of the WTC. Planners and government leaders
believed they could stem a flood of businesses moving to
Midtown Manhattan by offering modern space in the
world's tallest buildings. That aim was still not fully
successful at the time of the WTC's destruction.
Downtown is full of potential, but its future
rests not on office development alone. In addition to
the financial center, downtown has colorful ethnic
communities, such as Chinatown, Little Italy, and East
European neighborhoods, a vibrant art scene, educational
institutions and historic buildings, a successful South
Street Seaport to provide a rich urban experience to
residents, visitors and tourists. Its residential
neighborhoods have bounced back some since the attacks
and developers are moving cautiously forward with new
apartment buildings. Ground Zero is rapidly turning into
one of the city's main tourist destinations and will
likely become even a bigger draw once a memorial is
finished.
With $21 billion in federal aid
promised to the city to finance a new commuter rail and
subway hub downtown, dreams to exploit these potentials
fully are closer than ever to reality. Additional funds
are still needed for submerging West Street, which now
cuts the WTC from the Hudson River and numerous other
projects on the wish lists of different groups. Already,
behind-the-scenes lobbying efforts have begun by the
influential Brookfield Properties Corp, a major advocate
for submerging West Street, which not coincidentally
could increase the value of its office towers at the
World Financial Center facing the superhighway width of
West Street. It would be reasonable for Brookfield to
contribute to the cost of submerging West Street from
the expected appreciation of its property resulting from
such public improvement. The promised federal money
might also finance a rail connection to Long Island
through existing subway tunnels, affecting service on
those subways for years and potentially triggering
opposition from those affected. Up until now, when the
unifying spirit generated by the attacks is still fresh,
the multiple government agencies involved in rebuilding
have shown unusual cooperation, but none of the tough
choices have been made among the competing projects and
will not be made for years, by which time the poisonous
weed of politics as usual may resurface.
The
rebuilding process could deteriorate into another of New
York's infamous land-use wars. At Ground Zero, initial
plans made little progress in reconciling the
emotionally charged need for a memorial with the desire
of commercial interests to restore the 11 million square
feet of office and retail space that was destroyed. The
unanimously negative public reaction forced the Port
Authority and LMDC to begin considering ways to spread
commercial development to other downtown sites so that
all of it needs not be squeezed into Ground Zero.
But such enlightened goals may not by themselves
persuade the smart money that downtown is coming back.
Tenants have been reluctant to consider the area until
an approved plan for Ground Zero with popular support
and sufficient financing is reality. Existing tenants
are discouraged, especially when they see little
progress even on badly damaged buildings on the
periphery of Ground Zero. New tenants shun downtown
because of new security concerns raised by September 11,
and continued security alerts associated with war plans
on Iraq and elsewhere in this era of superpower
unilateralism. Many that were centralizing their offices
before the terrorists struck are now racing to disperse
their operations and shun conspicuous corporate
headquarters. The NYSE, instead of planning a gleaming
new trading floor on Wall Street, is now considering
developing a backup operation outside of downtown and
even outside of New York. American Express came very
close late last year to relocating permanently to
Midtown because it was worried about future terrorism
downtown. It was only after the city promised a wide
range of additional security measures that the
financial-services powerhouse agreed to return to it
downtown location.
Architect Yamasaki and
engineers John Skilling and Les Robertson worked closely
on the twin towers to integrate the towers' design and
structure. Faced with the difficulties of building to
unprecedented heights, the engineers employed an
innovative structural concept: a rigid "hollow tube" of
closely spaced exterior steel columns, braced by floor
trusses extending to a steel central core. The steel
columns, finished with a silver-colored aluminum alloy,
were 47.6 centimeters wide and set only 55.9cm apart,
dominated the design, making the towers appear from afar
to have no windows at all.
Also unique to the
engineering design were its core and elevator system.
The twin towers were the first supertall buildings
designed without any masonry, thus reducing its dead
weight, among other advantages. To prevent the intense
air pressure created by the towers' high-speed elevators
from buckling conventional shafts, engineers designed a
solution using a drywall system of plasterboards fixed
to the steel core. For the elevators, to serve 110
stories with a traditional configuration would have
required half the area of the lower stories be used for
shaftways. Otis Elevators developed an express and local
system, whereby passengers would change at "sky lobbies"
on the 44th and 78th floors, halving the number of
shaftways.
These construction innovations,
designed to combat the wind load, which is generally
acknowledged as the critical force in tall buildings,
contributed each tower's unexpected vulnerability to the
impact of a fully fueled Boeing airliner and the effect
of the ensuing jet-fuel fire on the structural strength
of steel insulated only against normal office fires. The
absence of a top-to-bottom concrete core of elevator
shafts with fire stairs made safe escape problematic, as
the tower could not provide enough time for the
occupants to exit safely through as central core that
would stand even when the office floors collapsed.
Skilling and Robertson are highly respected
world-class engineers. It was not their job to design
against forces of terrorism. That was the government's
job. Thus the collapse of the WTC towers was not a
technical failure; rather, it was a political failure.
Another problem that has not been receiving
adequate attention is the fact that when the WTC was
built in the early 1970s, asbestos was applied as
insulation to steel columns and beams up to the 39th
floor of the North Tower before a ban on the use of the
carcinogenic mineral took effect in 1971. Asbestos fiber
was a common protection against fire and heat in many
products, especially building components, until its
heavily toxic effects became publicly known. The
American Lung Association warns that "if asbestos should
become airborne and is inhaled, it can remain in the
lungs for a long period of time, producing the risk for
severe health problems several years later". The
incubation time can last up to 30 years. Health effects
can include asbestosis, lung cancer and other diseases,
depending on the concentration. It is estimated that
hospitalization, oxygen, medication and home care can
cost a victim $300,000-$500,000 during the course of the
illness.
WR Grace asbestos containing insulation
was used at the WTC. Grace Vermiculite was 2-5 percent
asbestos. A total of 100,000 36-kilogram bags of this
vermiculite were used in the WTC. In addition, 4,150kg
of 20 percent asbestos MonoKote 3 was used. Therefore,
in total more than 91,000 kilos of pure asbestos fiber
from Grace was used in the WTC. Grace filed bankruptcy
in April 2001 over its multibillion-dollar liability
from asbestos lawsuits. Unfortunately, Grace was not the
only supplier.
T&N, formerly the largest
asbestos company in Britain, reached a favorable
settlement with the Port Authority on a $600 million
lawsuit against 37 defendants, including T&N, for
asbestos contamination of municipal buildings, including
the WTC. Further, the Port Authority lost a 10-year
court battle to get its insurers to pay more than $600
million for removing asbestos from its properties,
including the World Trade Center and New York's
airports. The judge ruled that asbestos-abatement costs
by themselves do not constitute "physical loss or
damage" under the Port Authority's all-risk policies.
The collapse of the twin towers released
asbestos into the air for months, yet concerns for the
long-term effect on the health of the population in the
region are curiously under wraps thus far from public
health organizations. Not even the normally inquisitive
press seems to be paying much attention. The official
statistics of the WTC towers boasts 97 elevators for
passengers and six for freight, 181,000 tonnes of steel,
325,000 cubic meters of concrete below ground, 43,600
windows, 19,300 kilometers of electric cables, 319km of
heating ducts, 23,000 fluorescent lights, but nothing on
the amount of asbestos used.
Some have predicted
the end of skyscrapers, as people would be concerned
about their vulnerability to terrorist attacks. Yet more
than a year after the attacks, people continue to go to
work in highrises, and tall buildings continue to be
built around the globe. Four of the nine new design
proposals for the WTC site call for again building the
world's tallest building, taller even than the destroyed
towers. The public is paying close attention. More than
6 million visitors have viewed the proposals on the
website of the LMDC and another 80,000 have seen the
drawings and models of the proposals in person. The
debate is bound to be one of the largest open
architectural critiques ever.
The initial
proposals called for office towers ranging from 32-85
stories - modest heights by Manhattan standards set in
part by the destroyed twin towers. The second-round
proposals are more ambitious in both form and concept.
In addition to featuring much taller structures, most of
the new plans call for 8 million to 10 million square
feet of commercial space - less than the 11 million
destroyed - plus a museum and a transit station. In
addition to debate over the shape, size and scope of the
building plans, there will likely be concerns voiced
about safety and security. The WTC was twice targeted by
terrorists, and the structures that replace the twin
towers would also be likely targets.
Nine plans
for the 6.5-hectare site and its surroundings, offered
by seven well-known architectural teams, were unveiled
in mid-December. Four of the plans proposed the world's
tallest buildings, as the 110-story twin towers were for
a short time in the 1970s.
The second-round
proposals were evaluated against a 43-point checklist,
with an emphasis on what the LMDC calls "workability" -
construction in phases over a decade, their connection
with the neighborhood, and integration with the
transportation infrastructure that is being built first
underground. A memorial to nearly 2,800 people killed at
the site on September 11, 2001, will be the first
project built at street level, after an international
design competition that begins this spring. Towers of
any kind are destined to be the last project built,
depending largely on the market demands for office
space.
Two teams, Studio Daniel Libeskind, the
firm headed by the Berlin-based architect Daniel
Libeskind, and the Think team, headed by the architects
Frederic Schwartz, Rafael Vinoly, Ken Smith and Shigeru
Ban of Tokyo, were selected as finalists and will now
work with rebuilding officials on refinements to their
designs. One team is to be selected as the winner by the
end of February.
Libeskind proposed a 533-meter
(1,776 feet, a height that symbolizes the year of US
independence) tower, with "life-affirming" indoor
gardens filling the top floors. He would leave large
portions of the 21-meter-deep Ground Zero pit open,
exposing the concrete foundation walls that survived the
towers' collapse. He created two large public places,
the Park of Heroes to commemorate the victims and the
Wedge of Light: "Each year on September 11 between the
hours of 8:46am, when the first airplane hit, and
10:28am, when the second tower collapsed, the sun will
shine without shadow, in perpetual tribute to altruism
and courage." These ideas indeed move into the realm of
conceptual art and may make further memorial design
redundant.
Libeskind's plan includes an open pit
on the western portion of the site, where the memorial
to victims would be located. The pit, including the
footprints of the WTC towers, would be outlined by the
concrete-slurry walls designed to hold back groundwater
from what were formerly the concourse and basement
levels of the WTC. The proposal is conceptually
brilliant and executed with inspirational beauty that
one would be safe to conclude that only an architect of
Libeskind's creativity and caliber can deliver. Yet the
program calls for the final design to be executed by
many other architects, whose selection will be based on
factors besides talent. It is doubtful that such a
process can deliver the full quality inherent in
Libeskind's brilliant proposal.
The plan by the
Think team proposed a pair of 500m open-latticework
tower structures, looking like echoes of the fallen twin
towers, rising from their footprints, and housing
plug-in cultural facilities such as a commemorative
museum and a concert hall. The memorial tower structures
would contain viewing platforms near the top and project
beams of lights into the sky at night. The team proposes
as many as eight mid-sized office buildings below.
The Think team imagines New York's rebirth in
soaring towers of culture while Libeskind sees the
foundations of democracy in the concrete walls
surrounding Ground Zero. Each of the designs includes
what would be the tallest structures in the world,
though in both plans, the towers' upper reaches are not
occupied by offices, but by a memorial observation deck
in one case, and a hanging garden in the other.
The Think team proposed a plan based three
components - Sky Park, The Great Room and The World
Cultural Center. The Sky Park is a 10-block, 6.5-hectare
rooftop public park that floats above the street grid,
gradually climbing to 10 stories and culminating in a
cantilevered 1.2-hectare lawn with sweeping views of the
Hudson River and the New York Harbor. The memorial
location is defined by the open squares of the
footprints of the WTC towers and includes the space
above, below and surrounding them. On the park's
perimeter, three large office towers (including the
world's tallest) complete the program in subsequent
phases. The towers are designed as independent buildings
and rise high above the park to redefine the skyline of
the city.
The Great Room is a vast, covered
public plaza connecting all the elements of the program
under an enormous free-span glass ceiling. A soaring
living memorial, encompassing 5.25 hectares, serves as
the Gateway to the City and as the Great Hall of the
Transportation Center - an unprecedented place for
arrival, celebration and civic events.
The World
Cultural Center, built above and around the footprints
of the WTC towers, but without touching them, two open
latticework structures create a floating "site" for
development of the Towers of Culture. Within these
soaring structures, distinctive buildings designed by
different architects are phased to complete a program of
innovative cultural facilities: the memorial (from the
footprints of the original towers to the top of the
highest platform in the world), the September 11
Interpretative Museum, a performing-arts center, an
international conference center, an open amphitheater,
viewing platforms and public facilities for education,
arts and sciences reconstruct the skyline of the city
with the icons of the Public Realm. The towers emerge
from large glass reflecting pools that bring natural
light to the retail and transit concourse.
The
Think team proposal is in essence a three-dimensional
urban design framework, so strongly structured that even
different architects of uneven talent cannot ruin the
overall plan.
The two finalist designs can be
viewed at the LMDC
website.
Officials from
the LMDC, the Port Authority and the offices of the
mayor and the governor vowed that while the final
winning design would require modification, changes would
not alter the design's central vision. The office
buildings that will be constructed there over the next
10-12 years could look significantly different from the
renderings created by the winning team. That is because
these two plans, unlike some of those that were
rejected, have the memorial, rather than office towers,
as their centerpiece. The architects themselves have
acknowledged that the design of the office buildings in
their drawings are merely massing outlines and subject
to change.
The final site plan will include
parcels where office buildings will eventually be
located, including the size and shape of each building's
footprint and the anticipated height. But the specific
design of the office buildings will depend on when they
are built and by which developer. Silverstein, who holds
the 99-year lease on the site, sent a letter to LMDC the
very day of the finalists' announcement, asserting that
the lease gave his group the right to rebuild the site
as the group sees fit and to choose the architecture
firm that will design it. The LMDC responded that it
"had a number of consultants looking at all the issues
that were raised in that letter and we came to different
conclusions".
The Port Authority and LMDC have
clashed in recent weeks over priorities for the site.
The Port Authority has been primarily focused on
infrastructure, encompassing everything from the layout
of a new transportation complex to the location of truck
ramps into the basement levels of the site. The LMDC has
been more interested in esthetics, including which
architect's concept makes a more desirable impact on the
skyline and on the memorial. The LMDC maintains that it
will continue to oversee and guide the redevelopment
process.
The Regional Plan Association, a
planning advocacy group, rightly criticized the planning
process as one that seemed to have been made up as it
progressed, not so much as improvisation with clear
conviction, but more as bending with the political wind
of public opinion, which is not a sign of leadership. So
far, public opinion happens to be in the right
direction. There is no telling, with the other-directed
record of the LMDC so far, that if public opinion should
turn the wrong way, as Parisians turned against the
Eiffel Tower, whether the LMDC would be able to stand
the heat and stick to its conviction.
At the
Paris Exposition of 1889, Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923)
demonstrated the dynamism of French creativity by
unveiling his Three-Hundred-Meter Tower, known simply as
the Eiffel Tower in modern times, amid vocal hostile
establishment reception. Thomas Edison (1847-1931) paid
an admiring visit to Gustave Eiffel in the great
engineer's tower in 1922. The historic occasion of the
great inventor paying homage to the great engineer would
be recorded in motion pictures, the then-novel medium
just invented by Edison. The show of support by the
great inventor helped save the Eiffel Tower from demands
from critics for its demolition and gave France and the
world a monument of great beauty in perpetuity.
The problem of the design of the memorial is
superhumanly difficult. An international competition
will not by itself guarantee success unless the question
of what the memorial should represent is properly and
clearly framed. Obviously it is a memorial to all the
innocent victims and the LMDC mission statement mentions
vague notions of American values, democracy and freedom
under attacked, sounding almost like banal jingoism.
While the definitive specific political or
organizational identity of the attackers has yet to be
established, it is generally assumed by US authorities
that al-Qaeda was the responsible party. Yet the
principal goals of al-Qaeda as espoused by the broad
movement are narrowly focused on driving US armed forces
out of Saudi Arabia and elsewhere on the Arabian
Peninsula and Somalia, and not a clash of civilizations
as claimed by Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington. So far,
no group has openly claimed responsibility or taken
credit for the attacks or enunciated the political
objectives behind the terrible acts. Blaming terrorism
on evil is too simplistically convenient. The fact is
that the tragic events of September 11, 2001, seem to
have started indiscriminate, endless cycles of violence.
A memorial needs to radiate universality that
represents all humanity by transcending individual
tragedy and transient political disputes.
Next: Building on the lessons of
history
Henry C K Liu is chairman of the
New York-based Liu Investment Group. He is also an
architect and urban designer, recipient of Progressive
Architecture Awards in both Architecture and Urban
Design, and was head of the Graduate Urban Design
Program at the University of California at Los Angeles
and a visiting professor at Columbia and Harvard.
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