Twin towers – twin cities?

The passage of the project to rebuild this devastated quarter of the city has been somewhat less than united or edifying. Just a few months after the attacks, the then governor of New York state, George Pataki set up the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to allocate USD 10 bln in federal grants to the rebuilding project. Pataki also made the fateful decision that nothing should be built upon the footprints of the two destroyed towers – which would remain, forever, a memorial to the almost 3,000 people who had died. This became a stipulation of the architectural competition that was then held to choose the design of the reborn WTC – a contest that soon deteriorated into a bitter battle between two designs. One was for lattice-like structures suspended above the site of the collapsed towers, housing museums, theatres and conference facilities. The other was for a series of buildings avoiding construction on or above the footprint, but dominated by a jagged central tower