Posted on 02/04/2003 6:19:30 AM PST by areafiftyone
NEW YORK The agencies overseeing the rebuilding of ground zero were to announce on Tuesday two finalists for the new World Trade Center site.
A small committee comprising the top officials of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which is entrusted with rebuilding downtown Manhattan, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the trade center site, ''reached a consensus'' on the designs during a Monday evening meeting, LMDC spokesman Matt Higgins said. He wouldn't reveal the selected designs.
A proposal that evokes the original trade center with twin latticework towers and another that exposes the foundation walls of the old towers emerged as leading contenders in recent discussions.
A press conference was scheduled for Tuesday to announce the finalists. A final choice is to be made later this month by the LMDC and the Port Authority.
The finalists were selected from eight alternative designs developed by six architecture firms.
A source familiar with the rebuilding effort said a group of development corporation staff and board members who met on Jan. 29 favored proposals submitted by Berlin-based Daniel Libeskind, and by a team of architects known as THINK.
Both designs feature structures rising higher than the tallest in the world, Malaysia's 1,483-foot Petronas Twin Towers.
The THINK team, led by New York-based architects Rafael Vinoly and Frederic Schwartz, proposed the World Cultural Center, whose lacy 1,665-foot towers have been called 21st-century Eiffel Towers.
Libeskind, who designed Berlin's Jewish Museum, proposed starkly geometrical buildings clustered around the foundations of the fallen towers and topped by a 1,776-foot spire.
While no one expects an exact replica of any of the models to rise at the trade center site, officials at the development corporation have said whatever is built there will be based on one of the plans.
Recurring turf battles over control of the site may complicate the decision-making.
Developer Larry Silverstein, who holds the lease to the trade center site, complained in a letter to development corporation chairman John Whitehead last week that the proposed designs do not include enough office space.
Nine proposals for redeveloping the 16-acre World Trade Center site, where 2,792 people died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, were unveiled Dec. 18.
Skidmore Owings and Merrill, the architecture firm hired to design a new 7 World Trade Center, last month withdrew its design for the main trade center site.
The plans for rebuilding the lower Manhattan site and surrounding neighborhood came from seven teams of architects from Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, New York and Los Angeles and were selected from 407 submissions.
A first group of plans, released in July, was criticized as boring and overstuffed with office space.
GAG!! PUKE!!!...etc.
I've seen their proposal, they should THINK a little harder.
World Cultural Center? Why not a giant sign that says "KICK ME"?
and the INS on top of the other.
Recurring turf battles over control of the site may complicate the decision-making.The battle at hand is not over turf but whether there was one incident or two.
and the INS on top of the other.
Perfect!
| Think One of three designs offered by architectural consortium Think, this is the tallest of all nine proposals. In it, three towers (one reaching a dizzying 2,100ft) surround a raised 'skypark' climbing 10 stories into the air. |
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| Studio Daniel Libeskind Daniel Libeskind, designer of Berlin's Jewish Museum, offers a 1,776ft glass tower that contains plants and foliage. The proposal easily exceeds the height of Malaysia's Petronas Towers, currently the world's tallest building at 1,483ft. |
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