SRIJAN 2002-2003(1st Edition)

or imagination. And the new skyscrapers aren't imagined at all, beyond the fact that their height is
limited to 55 stories (roughly the height of the existing American Express building).
Think, a huge team including Frederic Schwartz, Rafael Vinoly, Shigeru Ban and David
Rockwell, couldn't come to any decisions at all, and instead presented three different designs. The
first, called Sky Park, floats a 16-acre park into mid-air, with various buildings huddled in the
darkness below. The last, called the World Cultural Center, is a crazy idea to build a latticework
around the footprints of the original towers, and then slap various cultural institutions (schools,
theatres, whatever) inside the latticework at various different heights. At the exact points in midair
where the planes flew in to the World Trade Center would be a memorial linking the two structures.
Foster and Partners is definitely an improvement on the
previous four. Lord (Norman) Foster knows his onions when it
comes to monumental architecture, and he's designed a
beautiful twisting "twinned tower" which would be a welcome
addition to any city's skyline. He calls it "the most secure, the greenest and the tallest in the world,"
and there's no reason not to believe him. It will be filled with high tree-filled public atriums at
various levels, which will provide stunning views over the rest of the site as well as far beyond.
There could even be funiculars sweeping us all up the side of the building at high speed - what an
attraction, and not just for tourists. Foster has kept the footprints as voids, and placed high walls
around them to set them apart and intensify the memorial experience.
Finally, there's United Architects, a group including Foreign
Office Architects, Greg Lynn, Kevin Kennon, RUR Architecture,
and UN Studio. Somehow, they've managed to transcend all the
problems which faced the other large groups in the competition, and come up with a very strong,
simple and new idea. United Architects, just like Liebeskind, go down to bedrock and build vertical
sacrosanct areas around the edge of the footprints. Looking up from the bottom of their voids,
however, one sees not just sky but skyscrapers too: "the memorial and the development are not
divided, but linked," in the words of Greg Lynn. The effect is a cathedral-like space, where the
buildings carve out a volume of light.
One enters the space walking down a spiral from Greenwich Street, passing various cultural
institutions on the way; to go back up, there are elevators back to ground level and higher still, up
the sides of the new buildings.
There are five of them altogether, each at least 65 stories tall, and each touching on the next at
least once. At street level, there will be huge gaps between the buildings, maintaining street grids and view corridors. But 60
in the air, they converge onto a minimum of five stories of contiguous space: a whole new public area, 200,000 square feet in
in the sky.
stories up
all, high
The American architects have, thus, shown the modern evolution of the human brain which has created the above splendid
models. This has proved that the world is now shifting to the newer and the brighter side which is obviously not only out of harm's
way but also ogle contagious!
Compiled by:
Ajay Sharma,
Pre-Final,
Architecture.
(situ ti) Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting. (nom- o3)