Final Design Chosen for WTC site

NEW YORK (Feb. 26) - A cluster of sloping, angular buildings with a 1,776-foot spire that would be the tallest in the world was chosen Wednesday as the blueprint to redevelop the World Trade Center site, The Associated Press has learned.

Architect Daniel Libeskind's design beat a plan by an international design team known as THINK, which envisioned two 1,665-foot latticework towers straddling the footprints of the original towers, said a source familiar with the selection. An official announcement is expected Thursday.

The choice of the soaring design, which pays homage to the year America declared its independence, was made by a committee of representatives from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the offices of the governor and mayor.

Both Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg favored the Libeskind plan, an important factor in the decision, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

LMDC Chairman John Whitehead telephoned Libeskind with the news, the source said, telling the architect his ''vision has brought hope and inspiration to a city still recovering from a terrible tragedy.''

Libeskind, who is based in Berlin, declined comment. The source said he told the LMDC chairman that being selected is ''a life-changing experience.''

Deciding what to do with the 16-acre site in Lower Manhattan has been wrenching at times. Relatives of the nearly 2,800 people who died at ground zero called for memorials with a sense of respect and grace, while business officials and others said the city cannot afford to lose too much office space.

The Libeskind design called for 70 stories of offices, with airy ''gardens of the world'' beckoning tourists above office level. It included five starkly geometrical towers and several smaller cultural buildings around the foundations of the fallen towers.

The plan, which may undergo revisions, also called for a Park of Heroes, and a memorial encompassing the footprints of the fallen towers. The spire was designed to house a garden all the way to its top, and not office space, because ''gardens are a constant affirmation of life,'' Libeskind said in December.

Developer Larry Silverstein, who owns the lease on the trade center site, said earlier this month he was not satisfied with either plan.

Howard Rubenstein, a spokesman for Silverstein, said Wednesday he ''has great respect for the architect,'' and looks forward to working with him to ''get this project moving.''

The design competition was launched after an initial set of plans, released in July, was derided as boring and overstuffed with office space. Nine proposals were unveiled Dec. 18.

The two finalists each featured buildings surpassing Malaysia's 1,483-foot Petronas Twin Towers, the tallest in the world. The World Trade Center towers stood 1,350 feet tall. A small number of telecommunications towers would still be taller than the Libeskind spire.

After the two finalists were chosen, both were asked to revise their designs to make them more easily realized. Libeskind, whose original design called for a memorial 70 feet below ground, reportedly changed that to 30 feet, allowing for infrastructure and transportation underneath.

Lee Ielpi, whose firefighter son died in the Sept. 11 attack, praised the design because it preserved much of the sunken area within the twin towers' foundation.

''That land was consecrated by the blood of the people who were lost that day,'' Ielpi said.

The final plan could be altered to accommodate victims' relatives who don't approve of plans to build parking areas at the base of the 70-foot pit, the source said.

Libeskind, 57, has said he included the sunken space because he was inspired by the immense slurry walls that hold back the Hudson River - what he says are the most dramatic elements to survive the terrorist attack. He wanted visitors to be able to visit the hallowed ground in a quiet, meditative space.

Other revisions to the plan were not disclosed Wednesday, but Libeskind's design as presented in December called for a museum in that sunken space, near where he envisioned a memorial will be placed.

The LMDC was created by Pataki and former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani after Sept. 11 to oversee the rebuilding of the trade center site and downtown Manhattan. The Port Authority owns the site.

Like I said, they are already changing the design. Many more changes shall come quickly. Hopefully it will become better looking. This rendering is already an improvement.

A NEWER LOOK FOR NEW WTC

By WILLIAM NEUMAN

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February 28, 2003 -- The scarred foundation of the World Trade Center shielded behind glass, a memorial pit 30 feet below street level, and a spindly spire with a 110th-floor restaurant - those are among the new twists in a rejiggered plan unveiled yesterday by winning Ground Zero architect Daniel Libeskind.

But even with the changes to his original design, many questions remain about the future of the scheme - including which agency will hire Libeskind, who was praised yesterday by Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Pataki at a press conference officially announcing his selection.

Among the changes from his original proposal:

* The edges of the jagged office buildings have been softened.

* The memorial space - now 30 feet below street level in the Ground Zero pit, instead of sitting 70 feet deep at bedrock - is shown covered with grass, instead of starkly gray.

* The 1,776-foot-tall spire - the world's tallest - would contain a restaurant on the 110th floor, replacing the destroyed Windows of the World.

One of the elements that is likely to raise eyebrows is the design's preoccupation with the decaying concrete wall of the WTC basement. This wall, never a visible part of the Twin Towers, was hidden for months after the 9/11 attacks until excavators cleared the debris.

But Libeskind wants to put the wall on display as symbol of the durability of American democracy.

In fact, Libeskind wants to encase it behind viewing glass in a climate-controlled space.

Who pays Libeskind could ultimately determine what gets done downtown - depending on whether it's the Port Authority, which owns the trade-center site, or the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which has a more advisory role.

"This all has to be ironed out," said PA Executive Director Joe Seymour.

"Daniel will have to have input on the memorial competition, and we want to have Daniel's input on designing [the Ground Zero rail terminal] . . . This is a vision. Obviously, everyone hopes the majority of it will be upheld."

Trade-center leaseholder Larry Silverstein criticized an earlier version of the plan, but he praised it yesterday.

"He says the Libeskind plan is exactly what was required and is a perfect site plan," said Silverstein's spokesman, Howard Rubenstein.

Libeskind pleased Silverstein by increasing the office space on the site to cover all 10 million square feet lost on 9/11.

Perhaps you are right about the "pit", but we never can tell until we walk into something and feel it viscerally, as with Maya Lin.

I don't know what to say because I adore Frank Gehry although I worry he is overdoing his style, I'd like him to stop now or his buildings will start to become less precious. I think the Guggenheim Bilbao is total genius, and as you know, it put that town on the map, made it into a tourist attraction. Think how many local lives were improved through one building. The return on the cost is incalculable, and goes down through generations.

You may be right about the costs of the hanging gardens. I know nothing about this kind of thing, I just react aesthetically. The new space museum at the Museum of Natural History for exampe was probably horribly expensive but it is so inspiring, and it makes that one of the great museums of the world if it wasn't already. And that's what NY is about.

And something needs to be done about NY. I am thinking of leaving it myself. It has such a pall over it. A friend came in from Vancouver, and we went shopping etc. She hasn't been here in a while, she used to love NY. Well, in Barney's, I was stopped from taking pics of her w/ my digital camera, the same in the Radio & Television building lobby, then we saw garage attendants with radioactive/bomb sensors going over every single car including under the cars, that were waiting to park, and NYers don't even walk like they once did. This used to be like "roadrunner" city, everyone was on speed, rushing to get where they had to be or wanted to be, full of crazy energy. Now there is just a resignation and an emptiness. Something needs to be done and I think this is an attempt to do it. Whether it helps, who knows. NYers are in shock from going from the world meccas, the multicultural center of existence, to trying to adjust to the fact that they may be forever and ever the prime target of terrorism. It just doesn't work--you can't have both in one. As my friend commented, there has to be a price adjustment. The prices for meals are still ridiculous, and the city feels too dangerous and too depressed to make a case for spending that kind of $.

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