| Tuesday, July 16, 2002 |
17:12 - Hrm...
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/07/16/wtc.site.plans/index.html
|
(top)  |
Well, the proposals are in-- six plans for the redevelopment of the WTC site.
Forgive me for saying so, but these are all dreadfully dull and not a bit inspiring. They're wimpy, frail, and look like a big mopey concession of defeat instead of a statement of strength and defiance.
Consistent with that is that you can go to the website and vote for which of the six designs you think is best, not that that will influence anybody's decision or anything. The one that seems to have the lead right now, "Memorial Promenade", is shown at right-- and it's anonymous and indistinguished, and probably won't even be visible from the water.
What were these people thinking?
Granted, these are better than some of those horrifying art-student renditions I linked to a few weeks back. But none of them seems to have provided for any of the uncompromising Colossus-like stance of the WTC as we knew it. Lip service is paid in the "Memorial Garden" proposal to the limp idea of "recalling the old buildings' height through a lattice-work of beams, rising above the habitable floors, as though to suggest the building dissolving into air". But... c'mon, guys. This is lame beyond words.
The WTC2002 idea may have been pie-in-the-sky and impractical, but it had the right idea. It had enormous size, it had technological might, it had visual cues that recalled the original buildings and the design elements of some of the buildings surrounding it. And forgive me, but I thought it looked fantastic. In every sense of the word.
These designs look like the WTC wants to hide among the rest of the buildings so if the planes come flying in again, they'll pick a different target and the Port Authority won't have to lose another investment.
Chalk one up for al Qaeda.
|
|
