How do you select a new World Trade Center site design from plans that range from a simple sacred mound to the world's tallest tower? asks one Ball State University architecture expert.
Joseph Bilello, dean of Ball State's College of Architecture and Planning, posed the question after reviewing the two rounds of designs submitted for the World Trade Center site. New York officials hope to select a plan from the latest round in February. How do you balance the development needs of an immensely valuable piece of real estate that also happens to be the sacred site of America's most devastating attack?
"Some victims of the terrorist attack support the meditative or minimal touch approach of a sacred grassy mound, while others would feel that a memorial like that would symbolize that America has lost its nerve," Bilello said. "The difficulty will come attempting to reconcile these varied audiences. It will remain a controversy long after the structure is completed."
The majority of the designs propose constructing the world's tallest tower. One calls for creating a 10-million-square-foot "city in the sky," while others envision multiple towers intertwining as they stretch toward the clouds. Many designs also include memorials to the victims of Sept. 11 with many leaving a void where the original towers once stood.
The wildly different designs make selecting a single plan a "tortuous process," said one New York official. The PBS special, "Skyscraper," offered an inkling into the process of building a signature structure, Bilello said.
The series documented the conception, planning and construction of Manhattan's Worldwide Plaza, a 47-floor skyscraper built in the mid-'80s. That was a rather innocuous building with relatively simple circumstances. Even then, however, the complexity was mind-boggling, Bilello said.
"Selecting a plan for the WTC site is similar to designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., -- trying to honor the fallen soldiers, those who returned and everyone affected by the war," Bilello said. "Complicating these circumstances for the WTC site is that the whole world is watching. What legacy do we want to leave at this critical moment? Can we reconcile the secular and sacred ways that will satisfy everyone?"
This set of designs represents the second round of plans that have been considered. The first set, presented in July, was thrown out after public outcry against what critics called the designs' uninspired blandness.
The latest plans represent designs from the world's top architects. Even then there is a chance that officials may scrap these plans, too, Bilello said.
"They may like individual aspects from different plans and ask for those elements to be incorporated into a single design," Bilello said. "We'll just have to wait and see what they decide."
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