You can destroy something in an instant but it will take a generation to rebuild it, and even then it cannot ever be the same.
That may be the ultimate lesson of the destruction and rebuilding of the World Trade Center. The terrorist attacks that took the twin towers down occurred 25 years ago next week, and we have still not finished reconstructing the 16-acre site that the world came to call ground zero. Now, three of the four skyscrapers that are to replace the destroyed towers are finished and occupied; the fourth is finally being built.
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, I thought the World Trade Center would become a martyr, no more to be criticized than Joan of Arc, and that the rules of city-building would change.
I was right on the first count and wrong on the second. It may have seemed for a little while that Lower Manhattan was finished, that supertall skyscrapers were finished, maybe even that New York was finished — there were serious-sounding people who said as much at the time — but none of these things turned out to be true. In fact, the trauma of Sept. 11 was more like a bump in the road, a pause after which everything just kept getting bigger. The injured city came roaring back, somehow energized in its ambitions. The twin towers may be gone, but six new skyscrapers have since been built in New York that are taller, including the 1,776-foot tall One World Trade Center, intended to be the centerpiece of a rebuilt ground zero.
That building, by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, is one of a suite of four towers of descending height that were imagined by the architect Daniel Libeskind, who created the master plan for the reconstruction of the site. Mr. Libeskind never got to make any of the actual buildings himself: His shard-like designs were discarded in favor of those by architects with more commercial experience — Mr. Childs, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki. With the address of 1 World Trade Center, Mr. Childs’s building carries some symbolic weight, and retains its prominence on our skyline, but it is not as good a building as it could have been. The New York Police Department insisted that the first 20 floors be a concrete bunker, and Mr. Childs’s plan to enclose the radar antenna at the top with a sculptural form designed with Kenneth Snelson was dropped at the last minute to save money.
The United States is where the skyscraper was invented — it is one of our greatest contributions to world culture — and the best way to have responded to this horrific assault on the tallest towers in our largest city would have been to have built the most advanced skyscraper ever, to have replaced the World Trade Center with a whole new kind of building that would be both beautiful and sustainable, to show that this country could be at the cutting edge of engineering and aesthetics and livability. That we could not, or would not, do that is what I mean when I say that the rules of city-building did not change.
The twin towers were a product of their time, the mid-1960s, and what has replaced them is still, sadly, in too many ways a product of that same time. We have learned a lot about building cities since the World Trade Center went up, and we did not put nearly enough of that knowledge to use. Most important, we failed to recognize how much of urban life comes from people living and not just working in neighborhoods, and we did not provide for that.
I remember that in the months immediately after Sept. 11, it was difficult, perhaps even impossible, to imagine that anyone would want call ground zero home. It was hard enough for people who lived a few blocks away to imagine returning to their houses and resuming normal life; why would anyone want to live right where such tragedy had occurred?
But we did not understand the extent to which what we might call the healthy fundamentals of urban life would assert themselves, and Lower Manhattan would begin to normalize itself. After all, downtown Manhattan was a different place in 2001 than it had been in the 1960s. Residential neighborhoods had popped up all around the twin towers: Battery Park City to the west, TriBeCa to the north, apartment towers in FiDi to the east — many of them conversions of office buildings. The evidence of what makes a successful emergent neighborhood was on all sides of the former World Trade Center site. And the rebuilt ground zero could also have been another appealing and lively downtown neighborhood, with vibrant street life and people of all ages living there.
It did not happen. True, the rebuilt site is not quite as aloof as the old World Trade Center — nothing could be — but it doesn’t come close to having the energy of the neighborhoods around it, mostly because no one lives there.
The rebuilding of ground zero involved a lot more politics than even the usual New York building project, partly because of its symbolic importance — everyone cared about what would happen there — and also because of the number of players involved. The Port Authority, New York State and New York City all had some say in what would happen, but so did the developer Larry Silverstein, who leased the complex shortly before the attacks, and their priorities were not always in agreement, to say the least.
And so we got not the most important skyscraper of the 21st century, but a row of glassy, better-than-average commercial towers by Mr. Childs, Mr. Rogers and Mr. Maki. Mr. Foster’s original proposal, designed at the same time as the others but unbuilt at first because it lacked a tenant, was roughly square, split vertically on each side so that it appeared almost to be a cluster of four smaller towers, and then sliced diagonally at the top so that its crown looked like four diamonds facing the sky. It was elegant and self-assured, and seemed likely to be the most beautiful tower on the site. Recently American Express has signed up to occupy a new design by Mr. Foster’s firm that seems to be a busy assemblage of setbacks and open loggias, not nearly as compelling as the original.
The biggest mistake wasn’t the architecture but the program, which is to say the functions that the new buildings would contain. The twin towers had roughly 10 million square feet of office space and a shopping mall below ground; the Port Authority and George Pataki, the governor of New York at the time, thought that the most efficient thing to do was just to put it all back. The program called for the same amount of office and retail space, to which they would add a memorial, a museum and perhaps some sort of cultural venue.
If the desire to rebuild quickly was one mistake, it is worth remembering that another one was believing that the trauma would never heal, which is why many people felt that nothing at all should be built other than structures to honor the dead. Serious consideration was given to a proposed master plan by a consortium led by the architect Rafael Viñoly that envisioned reconstructing the twin towers as a largely empty skeletal framework, a permanent symbol of loss. The sense of the void was more important than anything that might fill it.
By the time the trauma faded, as trauma does — and as it had to do for the city to come back — it was too late to change the program and build the housing that should have taken up a significant part of the rebuilt ground zero. The state could have wrested control of the site from the Port Authority and Mr. Silverstein and changed the terms of the plan to something more in the long-term interest of the city, but that did not happen. Neither did a proposal by Daniel Doctoroff, deputy mayor in the Bloomberg administration, that the city offer the Port Authority the land underneath LaGuardia and Kennedy Airports in exchange for the World Trade Center site, allowing the city to control the development and build what it most needed, which would have included housing.
To be fair, there is plenty to be pleased about on these 16 acres. The memorial by the architect Michael Arad and its accompanying park by Peter Walker achieve a meaningful balance of commemoration and tranquillity. Mr. Arad’s design — in which the footprints of the original twin towers were excavated, thus making the void tangible, and then surrounded with a waterfall and the inscribed names of those who died — is deeply moving. And the park is a good neighbor to it, if a bit reserved. The Perelman Performing Arts Center by the architecture firm REX has an elegant facade, though a somewhat overactive, tech-driven interior. And it, too, is a bit aloof — windowless, a glowing cube set on a plinth.
And the transit station by Santiago Calatrava, called the Oculus, if more than a bit overwrought, at least demonstrates a commitment to the idea that grandly conceived public space for transportation need not be a thing of the past — even though it also doubles as a very grand entry to the replacement of the old underground shopping mall, filled with stores that should have been on the street (and were mostly too upmarket for the commuters and tourists who actually pass through there) where they could have brought to the neighborhood the urban energy it deserves.
At least the planners put back some of the streets, quiet and bollard-protected though they may be. They understood that the street, not the building, is the fundamental building block of the city, and they had no desire to replicate the enormous superblock of the twin towers with its deadening, chilly plaza that was so windswept that it was often closed off to pedestrians. We did learn something over the last generation about how cities work, even if not enough.
There is another good thing that came out of the long, anguished process. In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, we seemed to be hearing mainly from the most extreme voices — some people saying that it would be disrespectful to the lives lost to build anything at all at ground zero, and others demanding nothing but office buildings, put up as fast as possible. Some even wanted the twin towers reconstructed just as they had been, as if the attacks had not occurred and we had learned nothing from their urbanistic downsides.
Happily, none of these views prevailed. The life of the city must go on. We needed to commemorate and to build new, to refuse to make a choice between these two extremes and instead to find a balance between looking back and looking forward. And for all the angst, for all the compromise, for all the politics, that is indeed what we have done.
Paul Goldberger is a former architecture critic for The Times and The New Yorker and the author of the forthcoming “The Imperfect City: Design, Serendipity, and the Real Life of Cities.”
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