reviewed by Stephanie Stubbs, Assoc. AIA

Internationally renowned and respected architecture critic Suzanne Stephens, PhD, currently serving as special correspondent to Architectural Record, has worked with architecture writers Ian Luna and Ron Broadhurst to create a living history of arguably one of the most compelling architecture stories of all times: the rebuilding of New York City’s World Trade Center site after terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, destroyed the buildings and took thousands of lives. In the just-released Imagining Ground Zero: Official and Unofficial Proposals for the World Trade Center Site, Stephens and company offer a beautifully illustrated presentation of ongoing design alchemy: transforming hatred and destruction into firmness, commodity, and delight.

Architectural Record Editor-in-Chief Robert A. Ivy, FAIA, who witnessed the attacks and the collapse of the World Trade Center twin towers from mere blocks away, sets the tone for this history with his thoughtful foreword. He explains the post-September 11 role Architectural Record, which along with Rizzoli International served as the book’s publisher, has played in presenting not only design proposals but also analyses and calls—public and professional—for change. “We were not alone,” Ivy writes. “The entire press quickly realized that a sea change in the role of architectural design as unrequested, unanticipated ideas began to filter into media offices throughout the country . . . It became clear that the question raised by the erasure of the World Trade Center demanded an answer: What should replace it?” Ivy also emphasizes the increasingly important voice the public has assumed in creating what this site should be.

After Stephen’s overarching essay, “Fantasy Intersects with Reality at Ground Zero,” the book reveals the design proposals, in reverse chronological order, by the categories under which they were offered: official proposals, press-generated proposals from the New York Times and New York magazines, the early-2002 Max Protech Invitational Exhibition, and then independent submissions. Considering the body of work as a whole, this order proves to be a great choice: It anchors the reality of the buildable at the forefront, then moves back to the more visceral, immediate responses to defiant attack and horrific tragedy. Grouping by venue source also levels the field among the individual entrants, allowing each to be considered within the context of its group. The author leads each section with an explanation of the context to set the tone for viewing.

Official proposals
This section of Imagining Ground Zero tells the recent history of site development that the architectural world knows well. It begins with Freedom Tower by David Childs, FAIA, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, design architect and project manager and Daniel Libeskind, collaborating architect, as presented by the architects on December 19, 2003. It segues to the memorial competition, for which the winning scheme by Michael Arad, AIA, and Peter Walker, “Reflecting Absence,” was selected from among eight finalists (all shown) and announced in January of this year. Next presented is the spectacular World Trade Center Transportation Hub, by the Downtown Design Partnership of Santiago Calatrava, DMJM + Harris, and STV Group, announced by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey with less fanfare—yet garnering much admiration.

The book steps backward through the Innovative Design Study competition master plan, which ran from December 2002 to September 2003 and culminated in the selection of Libeskind’s master plan. Seven competing teams, selected by RFQ, developed schemes that were very much in the public eye then and are represented in the book, including the entry by Richard Meier & Partners, Eisenman Architects, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, and Steven Holl Architects, with engineers Craig Schwitter/Buro Happold, shown here. One more step back to the first round of the planning process leads us to the first round of the planning process and the summer of 2002, when Beyer Blinder Belle’s six schematic massing studies—worked up to meet the extremely high office-space square footage requirements—were roundly misunderstood but nonetheless universally disliked by the public. The good that came out of the ill-fated initial studies was a sustained public interest and voice in the development of this world-significant site.

These complicated architectural events, unfolding over the past three years, certainly are recent and significant enough for easy recall. Yet it is intriguing to see them presented as a whole in Imagining Ground Zero, and important to examine them as a flow of time, all the more interesting for having been presented in reverse order. And it is astounding to see all that has evolved in three years.

Magazine-generated proposals
Stephens reports that both the New York Times and New York magazines created competitions in response to the (necessarily) vanilla ideas put forth by Beyer Blinder Belle in Spring 2002. Both magazines invited teams to generate proposals that formulated their own programs outside the scope of the client’s need for specific square footages and uses. Both published on the eve of the first anniversary of the attacks.

The New York Times proposals, led by then-Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, began early in Spring 2002 with the four New York architects—Richard Meier, FAIA; Steven Holl, FAIA; Charles Gwathmey, FAIA; and Peter Eisenman, FAIA—who earlier had formed the Downtown Study Group. The expanded scope of their master plan beyond the World Trade Center site preserved most of Ground Zero as a memorial site and divvied up various parcels in Lower Manhattan for design of specific project types by themselves and an additional dozen firms. The New York Times proposal, having closed the West Street Highway, included parcels for housing, such as this apartment tower by Alexander Gorlin, New York City, for West Street between Rector Place and Albany Street.

“Like Herbert Muschamp at the New York Times, Joseph Giovannini, the architecture critic at New York magazine, found that vision was conspicuously lacking in the business-as-usual approach for reinventing the World Trade Center in the summer of 2002,” Stephens writes. Giovannini invited a select group of architects to take three weeks to create a proposal that would include 11 million square feet of office space. Imagining Ground Zero presents six of the proposals, from Morphosis, Coop Himmelblau, Wood + Zapata, Kohn Pedersen Fox, Eisenman Architects, and Zaha Hadid Architects.

Max Protech Invitational proposals
This exhibition, opening a mere four months after September 11, marked the first wave of unprecedented public interest in the resurrection of the Ground Zero site. Stephens writes that “The night the show opened, the participants were stunned by the stampede of spectators and the media. Perhaps it signaled an important stage in the mourning process. Rather than being subsumed by melancholia and staying locked into a sense of loss, New Yorkers were rediscovering their grief (or displacing it) toward rebuilding.”

Of 125 invited participants—architects, designers, and artists—60 created proposals that became part of the exhibition. Stephens points out that it is interesting to follow themes conceived for this very early effort and developed in subsequent competitions and iterations, such as “retention of the Trade Center towers’ footprints in landscaped, transparent skyscrapers, and “the idea of burrowing deep into the ground for memorial spaces. Another common theme was “twin” building or memorial forms, as evidenced by “Asymptote,” by Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Courture, AIA, New York City, shown here.

The early days of “what should we do” and the Protech exhibition saw a number of conceptual schemes proposing that the site be solely devoted to a memorial. One of the most fantastic, developed by architects Jakob + MacFarlane, Paris, and shown here, creates a memorial from multicolored, bending, towers bearing “messages of global significance.” The Library of Congress, which has made the exhibition as part of its permanent collection of the Division of Prints and Photographs, indeed has recognized the importance of these proposals considered as a group, as a record not only of response to the terrorist attacks, but also of architectural practice.

The independents
The last, and somewhat catchall, category of proposals presented documents self-generated proposals and unpremiated competition entries for using the entire site and for a memorial only. Created during the three and a half years spanning September 2001 and March 2004, they offer the most disparate and some of the most talked-about proposals, including Tadao Ando’s 100-foot-tall, shallow-domed tomb memorial. Fascinating are a number of proposals generated and then refined by Michael Sorkin Studio, ranging from a comprehensive redistribution and redevelopment plan for Lower Manhattan created in November 2001 and September 2002’s huge, geodesic “Peace Dome” containing towers, gardens, and a transportation center to removal of the dome and development of the towers within, as shown. The studio also developed another idea in April 2003,that reserved the site as a public park.

The proposals in each category are fascinating individually. They are important intellectually when considered in each group as a collective architectural response at a given time to a given set of parameters. Taken as a collection in entirety, they show the time’s torrent of emotions—outrage, ineffable sadness, courage, desire and need to heal—transmuted through design into the very human need to go forward. Given some time and perspective as we are moving on, we will appreciate even more that Stephens, Architectural Record, and publisher Rizzoli created this living history for us.

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