Reimagining Ground Zero

I would like to see the street grid that existed before the WTC was built realized anew and filled with low human scaled buildings designed by many architects. The foot print of the twin towers would be left as open space through which people walked and vehicles drove in vibrant pursuit of life but always reminded as they passed through the space and saw the outline embedded in the side walks and streets and defined by the spaces cut from the buildings that surround it of a great tragedy both human and architectural. Underground at each Twin Tower footprint would be museums, theaters and memorials to the victims of September 11, easily accessible to the surface above but connected to the Fulsome Street transportation complex from below. This would be a memorial that would speak to many generations to come while creating a place where people would love to live and work and visit. For me it would be especially wonderful to stand in such a piazza filled with life and memory and be able to see nearby a magnificent perhaps twisted tower that surpasses the two towers I loved so much: surpassed not in height but in sheer architectural and engineering mastery.

The reasons:
Imagine traveling to the most efficient and populated transportation hub in the world: the Fulton Street transportation center near ground zero. There you are directed through an underground city thru Rafael Vinoly’s transit hub to the memorial sites to 9/11. Attached to these memorials are exits that move tens of thousands of people up to the streets above each day. You emerge above ground into one of two plazas with access to the financial district, the seat of government, vibrant neighborhoods, schools, parks and museums. A grand open space filled with New York life and new architecture. You are surrounded by a dozen or so 8, 16 and 20 story buildings all designed by different architects but cut through as with a giant cookie cutter leaving the air once occupied by the WTC twin towers empty of structure while their foot prints would be filled with life. The memory would not be made by something we build but by something that is gone forever like a negative structure always visible in its absence but always absent.

The greatest tribute to the hearts that stopped there on Sept 11, 2001 would be the 100”s of thousands of hearts that would beat there every day. And what for architecture? Imagine visitors saying: “Look a building by Steven Hull and over there is one by Richard Meyer and there is how we get to Mya Lin’s center in the river” “ Come with me around the corner. There is a thin little building by Binh Vinh. You do remember the fall of Siagon don’t you” Absent would be the Albert Speer like memorial spaces designed by a single mind and imposed on more space than a single mind can grasp. Absent would be the grand unified structures that impose on visitors and in 100 years are forgotten. The buildings that should crowd around the negative architecture left by the memory of the twin towers should be designed and redesigned by several minds to work not memorialize. These many structures would be dedicated to the function and beauty that makes people productive and joyful. Here people would be happy to work and grateful to live and eager to play. Ground zero would become a place everyone wants to visit and a place that hurts to leave - like the Piazza Navona. And what about that grand new tower twisting into the sky near by? Someday I will sit in it’s “Windows on the World” restaurant, looking out and slightly up and remember standing with Anne 30 years before on the very top of the South tower. On that very crystal cold March Sunday morning we saw the earth curve.