Shockingly enough, the World Trade Center site is turning out just fine

September 12. Can we all agree, despite journalistic convention, that today is the appropriate day to publish an assessment of where things stand at the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan, twenty-four years and twenty-four hours after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001?

The anniversary itself is crowded each year with cardboard speechifying at memorial events and the same still images and horror-show video reels we’ve all seen a thousand times over. For my own part I was guilty yesterday of showing familiar images of both Philippe Petit’s high-wire, strung between the original Twin Towers in 1974, and Agnes Denes’s Wheatfields for Manhattan, planted at their base in 1982, to my Yale undergrads. (I won’t apologize for sharing with them an amazing Balthazar Korab portrait of WTC architect Minoru Yamasaki, which you can see below.) On the day after, with the decks clear, there’s more room to look both back and ahead.

Which is helpful, I think, because what I’m about to write is something that would have struck me as unfathomable twenty, fifteen, ten, and perhaps even five years ago: Despite the grandstanding, backbiting, fraught politics, design compromises, profligate subsidy, and various forms of personal and professional toxicity that have marked the rebuilding process at Ground Zero from the beginning, the final product, as an ensemble of buildings and a collection of ideas about architecture and urbanism, is shaping up to be, and again I’m surprising myself almost as I type, not embarrassingly bad.

I say “shaping up” because there’s still at least one major building to slot into place: the tower known as Two World Trade Center, by Foster + Partners, which has reportedly been shaved from a planned 80 stories to 62, and will occupy the northeast corner of the Ground Zero site, overlooking the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, with Santiago Calatrava’s skeletal transit hub and Three World Trade by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners to the south and the Perelman Performing Arts Center (REX) and One World Trade (SOM) to the west. Foster was hired for Two World Trade all the way back in 2006, only to see his first, rather clunky diamond-topped scheme shelved in favor of a plan by Bjarke Ingels Group; Foster was brought back, this time with a calmer and substantially improved design, in 2020. There are also plans for a mixed-use tower by KPF, Five World Trade, at 130 Liberty Street.

And I say “not embarrassingly bad,” which of course will sound a lot like damning with hedging praise, because the road we’ve all taken to get here, a path littered with abandoned plans, contradictory promises, and design compromises sometimes indistinguishable from utter capitulation, seemed for so many years to be pointing straight to a soul-crushing and incoherent mess.

With a whiplash-inducing set of switchbacks and reversals along the way, of course. First came the preliminary master plan by Beyer Blinder Belle, a firm best known for its preservation work on Grand Central Terminal and other landmarks. BBB’s initial designs for Ground Zero—no more than massing studies, really, and released in July 2002—suggested to Ada Louise Huxtable, writing in the Wall Street Journal, that architecture would “play no more than a marginal role in the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan.”

That prompted U-turn number one, as the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, overseeing the rebuilding process under the larger direction of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site, and in complex collaboration with its leaseholder, developer Larry Silverstein, ditched BBB in favor of an “innovative design study,” a competition by any other name that drew 406 entries and produced seven finalists: Libeskind; Foster + Partners; Peterson/Littenberg; SOM (with Michael Maltzan and others); the quartet of Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey, Peter Eisenman, and Steven Holl; and teams called THINK (led by Rafael Viñoly) and United Architects (with Greg Lynn, Ben van Berkel, and others). What the design study didn’t do was change the basic math at Ground Zero, with Silverstein still permitted to rebuild all the office space, just under 10 million square feet, destroyed when Yamasaki’s towers came down, despite few signs (then or now!) that there was a market for anything close to that much leasable space.

U-turn number two came in early 2003 when Herbert Muschamp, the New York Times architecture critic, decided at the eleventh hour, after having trumpeted Libeskind’s proposal as his favorite, that it was in fact “an astonishingly tasteless idea.” Libeskind, whose team meanwhile was accused of spreading dirt about Viñoly’s early work for the military junta in Argentina, ended up winning this strange architectural bakeoff anyway, despite having no master-planning experience at anything like this scale. Officials rightly sensed that what the public wanted was not planning competence per se but a series of images of future towers that in their very slashing, fragmented forms and aspirational height would suggest something about grief and the possibility of healing. Producing designs in this specific vein was and remains Libeskind’s chief talent.

U-turn number three came when Libeskind’s design for the anchor and most symbolically important skyscraper at the site, known originally, with great subtlety, as the Freedom Tower and ultimately, with great poetry, as One World Trade Center, became briefly a tense collaboration between Libeskind and David Childs of SOM before being handed off to Childs alone. That episode, which included an infamous joint appearance on the Today show in which Childs patronizingly patted Libeskind’s knee and called him “Danny,” was just one tiny slice of a rebuilding process that next year will hit the quarter-century mark, and which along the way also got caught up in George Pataki’s ill-fated run for the GOP presidential nomination; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s back and forth with the Port Authority over the future of the site; Muschamp’s professional and personal crack-up, which sadly was followed by the lung cancer that killed him in 2007; the evolution of Calatrava’s transit-hub design from a soaring bird-like structure to a truncated and value-engineered shell holding a shopping mall over train and subway tracks; and debates over the memorial, ultimately designed by a young architect named Michael Arad in another forced marriage, this one with the landscape architect Peter Walker, and the performing arts center in the site’s northeast corner, first given to Frank Gehry and then to Joshua Ramus and his firm, REX.

Despite all that, the rebuilding process has given us not one but two exquisite works of vertical architecture: Fumihiko Maki’s well-tailored Four World Trade Center and the crisply elegant and understated Seven World Trade, a collaboration (this one far happier than the others) between SOM’s David Childs and the glass artist and designer James Carpenter. It has threaded the Lower Manhattan street grid, a casualty of the original World Trade Center’s massive wind-swept mega-plaza, back into the neighborhood. It has produced a memorial that is over-scaled but also moving and, in its grove of swamp white oaks, a fine piece of landscape architecture and everyday urbanism to boot. And it has lately delivered a performing arts center that—for all its misplaced references to SOM’s Beinecke Library at Yale—is handsome and pragmatic, not to mention an effective foil in its compact, cube-like form to the towers that surround it.

To walk around and through the site now is to understand that a severed limb has been successfully reattached to the body of Lower Manhattan, and that the scars of that complex piece of surgery, though plentiful, are beginning largely to fade. Compare this scene to the collection of bland, bloated, and utterly placeless towers at Hudson Yards, a mere three miles north, and you begin to understand just how much has been accomplished, despite very long odds, at Ground Zero.

How do we explain this gradual improvement? Surprisingly enough, some of the credit surely goes to Silverstein Properties, which after the One World Trade debacle, and not withstanding the back-and-forth on Tower 2, made a point of choosing architects for the site carefully and managing them with both sensitivity and firm direction. (Larry Silverstein himself, who is 94, published an unsurprisingly self-serving memoir, The Rising, to mark last year’s 9/11 anniversary.) Some also goes to the Bloomberg administration, which despite not having direct control at Ground Zero managed to ride herd on the rebuilding effort for more than a decade. Writers and critics including Huxtable, Paul Goldberger, Charles Bagli, David Dunlap, Philip Nobel, Elizabeth Greenspan, Karrie Jacobs, and many others held public officials, developers, and architects to account. Libeskind, though he behaved poorly by many accounts early in the process, both before and after losing the Freedom Tower job, stayed committed to the larger rebuilding effort and even repaired some fractured relationships with the site’s key players.

It was while I was preparing those slides for my class yesterday that something clicked into place for me. I was looking at a photorealistic bird’s eye image that slips a rendering of the latest version of the Foster design for Two World Trade in among the completed projects at Ground Zero. It struck me that the gentle arc of towers tracing the edges of a shaded memorial with sunken pools marking (more or less) the footprints of Yamasaki’s original behemoths, was, if I squinted just a little, a pretty fair and well-executed approximation of, and maybe even a thoughtful improvement on, the original Libeskind plan, shorn for better and worse of its slashing dissonant edges. This is not exceptional urbanism by any stretch—as a place, these sixteen acres are still less than the sum of their expensive parts, though that equation may change over time—but something closer to the pretty-good variety. Still, I never thought we’d come close to reaching even that point. And I certainly wasn’t alone among WTC watchers in that pessimism.

In this case not-so-bad feels like a minor miracle.

I’ll finish, as a public service, by ranking the completed projects from best to worst, in terms of architectural intelligence and in their suitability to the site and its complicated history. Note that I am cleaving the memorial from its less accomplished sibling, the mostly underground 9/11 museum. I welcome your thoughts about how this list might be reordered, but please know in advance that you are mistaken. 

1) Seven World Trade, SOM with James Carpenter, 2006. In a fairer world the restrained excellence of this tower would have set the tone for a remarkable larger ensemble of buildings. That, um, didn’t happen. Still the GOAT at Ground Zero.

2) Four World Trade, Fumihiko Maki, 2013. Elegant, precise, never showy. One of the better office towers built anywhere in the last fifteen years. (Note that there’s a pretty substantial gap between these first two buildings and the projects that follow.)

3) National September 11 Memorial, Michael Arad and PWP Landscape Architecture, 2011. Over-scaled and also the victim, with several other projects on this list, of brutal value-engineering, the memorial has fine detailing and a moving choreography and is enveloped in a humane and shady grove by Peter Walker.

4) Perelman Performing Arts Center, REX, 2023. Not without its flaws but largely redeems a wildly difficult site, which includes a tangle of below-ground infrastructural connections.

5) Oculus Transportation Hub, Santiago Calatrava, 2016. Deeply compromised and obscenely expensive but still a moving design if you catch it from the right angle on the right day.

6) Three World Trade, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, 2018. A rather bland, even sublimated version of the trademark Rogers diagrid. Not bad, but generally lacks the courage of its convictions.

7) National September 11 Museum, Davis Brody Bond, with an entry pavilion by Snøhetta, 2014. Someday this country will decide that a minimalist memorial doesn’t always have to be accompanied by tragic-heroic literalism (in this case, twisted I-beams and crumpled fire trucks). We haven’t reached that day yet.

8) One World Trade, David Childs/SOM, 2014. Should be the finest work of architecture at the site given its size, budget, and prominent location. Instead it’s the worst: stolid and ill-proportioned, with zero poetry. Beware critics who Slate-pitchingly praise it.

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