Plans for the three new buildings that will stand next to Freedom Tower on the World Trade Center site were unveiled in New York this week.
The story of the rebuilding of Ground Zero has been marked by painful protraction and unseemly haste.
The designs are a curiously sterile mismatch and a perfect cipher for the problems of building on the world’s most-high profile site.
They fit loosely into Daniel Libeskind’s original conception of a set of spiralling towers winding downwards from the 1,776ft Freedom Tower. Libeskind, the radical European intellectual, was slowly and humiliatingly removed from the scheme in favour of Larry Silverstein’s favoured architect, David Childs of US corporate giants SOM.
The subsequent commissioning of Foster & Partners, Richard Rogers Partnership (both of the UK) and Fumihiko Maki (Japan), three architects who have successfully straddled art and commerce, was shrewd but the three egos have produced individualistic towers that sit awkwardly as an ensemble.
Foster (Tower 2) returns to his Argyll sock motif with the diamond shapes of the steeply sloping roof. Rogers (Tower 3) returns to the diagonal bracing he has been employing since his Pompidou Centre in Paris in the 1970s while Maki (Tower 4) sheaths his block, the slickest of the three, in a diaphanous net curtain of glass.
The ensemble wraps around the square holes demarcating the footprints of the collapsed towers, ultimately to be filled with cascading water to create reflecting pools (but this is a far cry from Libeskind’s original and powerful muddy voids).
However, the key view is the approach from the water in which the towers rear up in a straining, and not entirely successful, effort to reproduce the monumental power and visceral impact of the Twin Towers, which had become engrained in the world’s consciousness and continue to cast their long shadow half a decade after their shocking destruction.
The danger has always loomed over Ground Zero that it would be developed piecemeal, too fast and too commercially. That danger looks about to be realised.
