Dennis Hollingsworth

Rebuild Them

The truth of what happened at the World Trade Center building site after 9-11 keeps trickling out. In my dreams, someday we will rebuild the forms of Yamasaki's original design, perhaps even a little bit taller. New defensive parameters require a 19 story reinforced concrete base, a perfect place to incorporate a better September 11 Memorial within the building. Apparently, office space is too abundant in Lower Manhattan, so the uses can be mixed with residential units and better restaurants and museums in the crown.

A snippet from the article by Martin Filler, New York's Vast Flop
in the New York Review of Books. Read the whole thing:

As the latest studies make abundantly clear, the transformation of the World Trade Center site was hampered to a shameful degree by the intransigent self-interest of both individuals and institutions. As a result, an effort ostensibly meant to display our country's unified spirit in response to an unprecedented calamity instead revealed that communal altruism of the sort that helped America to survive the Great Depression and triumph in World War II had largely become a thing of the past. Although all major construction schemes face tremendous problems, the World Trade Center rebuilding encapsulates everything that is wrong with urban development in a period when, as in so many other aspects of our public life, the good of the many is sacrificed to the gain of the few.

Posted by Dennis at February 20, 2017 5:44 PM