Unbuilding the Rebuilding
by Clay Risen

In December, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. treated New York to a second shot at window-dressing the rebuilding of the World trade Center site. Seven teams of architects presented nine comprehensive plans for the site, ranging from Petersen and Littenberg's excruciatingly nostalgic twin skyscrapers to THINK's utopian spire of parks and meeting halls, soaring above the Financial District like 21st-century Eiffel Towers.

Since then, architectural critics and politicians alike have weighed in on their favorite design. Some prefer Daniel Libeskind's memorial tower that rises from the bottom of the "bathtub." Others (as well as the majority of respondents in a CNN instant poll) like Sir Norman Foster's interlocking towers — possibly because, as the highest-soaring of the designs, it satisfies the American public's head-in-the-sand desire to put things back just like they were.

All of the designs, to be sure, are improvements on the six options presented by Beyer Blinder Belle over the summer: six bland variations on a few themes like covering the West Side Highway in parks and the sanctity of the towers' footprints. But for all the ink spilled, there is an inconvenient fact of which no one — not the New York Times' Herbert Muschamp, not the New Yorker's Paul Goldberger — has been willing to make more than a passing mention: Nothing even remotely resembling the designs will be built. Two-thirds of the way through a recent article, Goldberger quotes the Regional Plan Association's Robert Yaro as saying, "It is like putting lipstick on a hog. Nothing has changed except you have a lot of fancy architects on this go-around. They are still designing the same thing, just prettier."

By "the same thing," Yaro means the fundamentals behind the avant-garde facades: commercial square footage, memorial square footage, transportation backbones. Ultimately, the rebuilding of Ground Zero is most emphatically not about giving the site over to the grand designs of a visionary architect, but about making sure that a host of interested parties — the Port Authority, Larry Silverstein (who owned the lease on the Trade Center office space), the Westfield Corp. (which owned the commercial-space lease) — recoup their losses. Sir Norman and friends are just a smokescreen, a way to make the debates over the numbers more palatable to the general public.

But the media have also missed a more fundamental issue that the Powers That Be are hoping the design competition will mask: Nothing will get built for at least a decade, perhaps even 20 years. If nothing else, this should be glaringly obvious from the liberties the LMDC allowed its contestants to take — if we were really looking at anything close to a set of possible blueprints for the rebuilding, would United Architects be able to put forth a proposal for an immense city-within-a-skyscraper?

Again, the desires of the many to bring the site back to order run into the economic interests of the few. Not only is there a real estate slump in downtown New York right now, but given the general global economic climate, no one is going to make the sort of commitment to build millions of square feet of office space until things are once again booming, a process that could take years. Add to that the emigration of dozens of downtown anchor tenants to Midtown and New Jersey, along with the dispersion of many a firm's operations throughout the New York area (a security consideration), and you can see the predicament that Silverstein, Westfield and others are in. Even the New Yorker's Goldberger admits the real estate market in downtown Manhattan won't be capable of absorbing such a large amount of square footage until the city invests in some serious infrastructure upgrades, such as rail links to airports and a transportation hub a la Penn Station — a multi- billion-dollar investment the city can't even dream of making.

Which in turn creates a circular problem. Nothing will get built until the infrastructure improves, but so far all of the planning looks at infrastructure as a part of a comprehensive plan — that is, nothing will get built until it all gets built. Meanwhile, the public will be biding its time, staring at a gray hole in the ground and wondering why no one is doing anything about it.

The answer, then, is pretty obvious: The LMDC must uncouple the transportation and memorial elements from the commercial and office-space elements, and build the former as quickly as possible. At the same time, the transportation and memorial designs have to allow maximum flexibility for the eventual construction of office towers and retail facilities.

This is no easy task. It would require much work back at the drawing board and an acceptance on the part of the public that the site will not be completely rebuilt for a long time. On the other hand, it is the only way to satisfy the need to memorialize, as well as to make it possible to attract investment once the decision to build the inevitable office and commercial space is made.

And for all its difficulties, the task of reconceptualizing the rebuilding process is easier than it might at first seem — after all, we just saw some of the greatest architects in the world turn in masterfully visionary designs for downtown. And they did it knowing that what they submitted had little chance of being realized. Just imagine what they could do if they were given a project that actually might get built.

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.