Dennis Hollingsworth

To Live is to Struggle

Here's a good summary of what's happened since 9-11-01:

Five years after Sept. 11, 2001, ground zero remains a 16-acre, 70-foot-deep hole in the heart of Lower Manhattan. High above it, a scaffolded bank building, contaminated during the attack, hulks like a metal skeleton, waiting endlessly to be razed.
The wreck that still stands tall and the pit that still sinks deep sum up the troubled history of ground zero. A site of horrific tragedy whose rescue and cleanup operation was a model of valiant efficiency, ground zero turned into a sinkhole of good intentions where it was as difficult to demolish a building as to construct one.

So let's struggle past this catatonia regarding the site of the World Trade Center. A tower of Babel brought down at the drawing boards. Five years of lapsed imagination in the various thousands of redesigns (some less than the others), and I think we can say that no one design has eclipsed the original feat, fact, and legend of the WTC towers.

So let's rebuild the towers with a beefed up Yamasaki design strategy (a fortified core and tube) and take design liberties with the internal volume which was over determined anyway in terms of the quantity of commercial office space. When the first plane hit, many of the upper floors were somewhat vacant. It seems natural, the incorporation of the post 9-11 architectural program within the historical skin -the formal shape and volume of the World Trade Center.

Posted by Dennis at September 12, 2006 6:41 AM