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 (named ‘The Freedom Tower’) with an upward-pointing spur on one side. The idea was to echo the posture of the Statue of Liberty – the first sight of New York of the design’s architect, Daniel Libeskind, upon arriving by ship from Poland in the late 1950s. Libeskind had already made a name for himself designing such phoenix-from-the-ashes projects, including the Jewish Museum in Berlin and Złota 44 in Warsaw. The shape of the latter was meant to represent a sail gliding upwards and outwards out of the rubble and decay of the Polish capital’s destruction in the Second World War and the city’s botched planning and neglect during the communist years that followed. Libeskind’s design for the new World Trade Center followed similar symbolic lines. The crash site would be a memorial with gardens and a new transport hub, around which his striking jagged buildings would be aligned to allow a wedge of sunlight to fall onto the memorial site on each anniversary at the time of the attacks. Both his design and its main rival emphasised that this would be public space, as opposed to corporate. But as they say, the best laid plans of mice and men… At town-hall meetings held in 2002, locals rejected a series of plans offered by Libeskind’s team, with the main objection being the number of office buildings close to the sacred site. The plan had even been dubbed in local media as “The Pit”. Libeskind responded with a negative campaign of his own against Schwartz’s rival project, labelling it a Stalinist skeleton. Despite the public preference for the latter scheme, Pataki eventually awarded the project to Libeskind – and so it was his vision that was now set to go ahead. Or not, as it turned out. Larry Silverstein had taken out a 99-year lease on the Twin Towers a couple of years before the attacks. He was effectively able to veto the decision and had already installed another architect for the project, David Childs. Libeskind was compensated and stayed in place as master planner – but his plans were basically side-lined, with only the open space, the transport hub and the symbolic height of the tower (1,776 feet) remaining. Although 1WTC is now, after more than a decade of bitter wrangling, almost ready, the fate of the remainder of the plans is much less certain. Only 7WTC and 4WTC have been finished, while work on 3WTC has been halted at eight storeys due to a lack of funding, 2WTC may never be built and the transport hub remains unfinished. Nevertheless, New Yorkers do seem to be gradually warming to the gleaming spire that now fills the gap in the city’s skyline, and this is going some way towards healing the trauma of the events of that day in 2001. This is a feeling that Varsovians are in a special position to understand, as the deep scars on their once-devastated city gradually disappear – not so much underneath public buildings and space, but under a plethora of commercial developments. Maybe this is the most lasting monument to our defiance towards more aggressive ideologies: rather than having gargantuan vanity projects foisted upon us, we can instead muddle and bicker our way to much more modest, elegant and genuine solutions than anything forced upon us by dictators. ν