Here's a better idea. Time to break the mold. JMHO.
Here's a better idea. Time to break the mold. JMHO.
The newest proposals for Ground Zero understand nothing about New York. | (City Journal) 30 December 2002
Since the World Trade Center bombing, New Yorkers have debated the future of lower Manhattan so passionately and extensively that the discussion at times seems hopelessly complicated. But at its simplest, any plan for the area should try to achieve two things: to help revive downtown as an essential part of New York’s economy, and to do so in a way that better integrates the site into the rest of lower Manhattan—which has been evolving in the last decade into a 24-hour-a-day, mixed-use community.
The latest designs for the site—unveiled as part of an international competition—fail miserably to achieve that second goal and, as a result, endanger the first one, too. Architecturally, the new designs are completely out of step with the New York skyline and street wall, imposing a starkly inhuman, postmodern look on lower Manhattan that is at odds with the rest of the cityscape. And as urban planning, the projects are even less successful. They treat the site as if it were a World’s Fair—making it busy with cultural exhibits, twenty-first-century visions of retailing, and the like—but in the process creating a world set completely apart from the rest of lower Manhattan. Despite the best intentions of the planners to ensure that the site retains a healthy commercial component, their otherworldly, aloof, sterile designs would make lower Manhattan a forbidding place and jeopardize its revival. More
