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July
22, 2002, 12:15 p.m. By Catesby Leigh |
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he World Trade
Center reconstruction project got off to a rocky start last week, as was
to be expected. The six alternative site plans unveiled by the Lower Manhattan
Development Corporation (LMDC) were greeted with intense criticism. The
main source of controversy is that the plans entail creation of eleven-million
square feet of commercial office space. This would duplicate the total
in the destroyed complex. Even before the plans were subjected to hostile
scrutiny at a weekend public meeting in Manhattan attended by over 4,000
people, officials were proclaiming their willingness to reconsider the
reconstruction scheme and its commercial real-estate component.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey owns the WTC site, and it is eager to regain the flow of real-estate revenue. However, many people were surprised to learn that the bottom line played such a significant role in shaping the site plans. The assumption seems to be that the large commercial program — 600,000 square feet for both retail and hotel space are also involved — is incompatible with a design solution for the site that reflects the gravity of the terrorist atrocities and the importance of remembering those who died.
The fact remains that this is an economically strategic chunk of Gotham real estate. Whether or not the LMDC and the Port Authority have the right numbers, the six plans' juxtaposition of office, retail, and hotel space with one or more buildings devoted to cultural purposes does not seem unreasonable at this site. (However, one must hope the memorial will be artistically vigorous enough that it can forgo the documentary crutches of a museum.) Many New Yorkers complain that there should be more residential space, but the six plans at least make a start by providing for such buildings immediately south of the WTC.
What's more, powerful memorials need not take up huge amounts of space — though very bad ones, like the FDR Memorial in Washington, have been known to do so. Indeed, the amount of space that the plans reserve for a memorial and surrounding open space is by no means parsimonious. The real problem with the site plans is not the quantity of space devoted to commemorative purposes, but the quality.
The best way to create public space suited to commemoration of 9/11 is to ditch Le Corbusier's towers-in-a-desolate-plaza paradigm, which guided many a disastrous "urban renewal" scheme in this country after World War II. The obliterated WTC was one of America's colossal examples of that paradigm. Minoru Yamasaki's twin 110-story towers and their adjoining structures fronted on a huge five-acre plaza memorable only for its sterility. And it is precisely the avoidance of construction on the one-acre footprints of the twin towers — a feature of all but two of the plans — that comes close to putting the Corbusian blueprint on life support.
Yamasaki's towers were not aligned with one another, and as a result most of the site plans leave both the towers' footprints and a great deal of adjacent space open. Many family members of the 9/11 dead oppose new construction on those footprints.
But are they right? Could it be that so much open space would prove a hollow gesture? After all, there's a hole seven stories deep where the WTC stood. This is a construction site. There is no landscape to be left inviolate. And in most of the plans, leaving the tower footprints as open space has led to the configuration of an over-large plaza, square, triangle or garden with several office towers fronting on it. (None of the towers in the site plans exceeds 85 stories, which will come as a disappointment to those who argued for rebuilding Yamasaki's towers, or at least something as tall.) As at the old WTC, a sense of the human scale is sacrificed, for tall buildings in such a setting easily assume a remote, forbidding aspect.
And the spaces in these four plans are awkward to boot. In one spectacularly awful scheme, a memorial "square" in the form of an irregular trapezoid sprawls over no less than ten acres, and is enclosed on all sides by a ten-story building, with towers behind it.
On the other hand, two of the plans — for a "Memorial Park" and "Memorial Promendade," respectively — are more classical and less Corbusian in character. The former is focused on a six-acre rectangular park fronting on West Street, and entails a generally symmetrical arrangement of office towers. The park is not aligned in conformance with the twin-tower footprints, and there would be construction on one of those footprints. Moreover, a much smaller park, situated across the street from St. Paul's Chapel, covers a block at the northeast corner of the WTC site. The problem with this Memorial Park scheme is that public spaces are not only unimaginatively configured, but situated on the fringes of the redevelopment area, whereas they would be more welcome in the heart of it. The park facing West Street should cover three acres at most, not six. This would provide an opportunity for a more satisfying distribution of open space elsewhere on the site.
The other classically inspired scheme, the Memorial Promenade, would extend along the West Street corridor, that street being run through a tunnel from its intersection with Vesey Street, at the north end of the WTC site, down to Battery Park. To the north, the leafy promenade would culminate in yet another over-scaled park, but with a more interesting oval configuration in this case. East of this park, the tower footprints would be recalled by small squares whose locations would closely approximate those of the twin towers. The two squares would be separated by buildings, however, and a better sense of enclosure and spatial intimacy would result.
If the final scheme must indeed reflect the twin-tower footprints, the Memorial Promenade must be credited as the only plan that cuts the Gordian knot. The plan is flawed, and the promenade concept has reasonably been questioned in light of the fact that Battery Park City's riverside walk is so near. But this remains the most interesting of the six plans on the whole. (It also garnered the most support at the public meeting on Saturday.)
No doubt it's a good idea to run the freeway-like West Street underground, as four of the plans propose. But above ground, the tunneling might better result in a pedestrian-friendly boulevard that can be lined with buildings, once again permitting a better distribution of open space elsewhere. This is a feature of a fine classical scheme for the new WTC produced by Franck Lohsen McCrery Architects of Washington, D.C. and New York City.
Finally, all the plans involve creation of an intermodal transit nexus extending from the Hoboken Ferry terminal in Battery Park City to the presently labyrinthine Broadway-Nassau-Fulton Street subway complex east of the WTC site. What doesn't emerge in these plans is a new freestanding rail station, as opposed to "transit centers" submerged in commercial buildings. Such a station, which also figures in the Franck Lohsen McCrery scheme, would provide access to the PATH line to New Jersey as well as subway lines. A classical station rivaling Grand Central Terminal in beauty could reinforce the civic dignity and monumentality of the redeveloped WTC complex.
Yes, indeed, there's plenty of room for improvement in this first round of site plans. But the amount of commercial real estate isn't necessarily the main problem.
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Catesby Leigh writes about architecture and fine art and lives in Washington,
D.C.