Championing Mediocrity

INCIDENT:
Last week the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation unveiled the designs for three new towers on the World Trade Center site. These towers were designed by no slouches - Lord Richard Rogers (of Centre Pompidou and Millennium Dome fame), Lord Norman Foster (Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate 1999), and Fumihiko Maki (Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate 1993). When you hire some of the most prominent modern architects of our day and pair them with a highly charged and significant site, you should get innovative responsible designs that reflect recent technologies and complex design concepts... Right? But apparently that is not something that you can assume...

Images from the New York Times

MORAL:

Lower Manhattan Development Corporation

New York Times - At Ground Zero, Towers for Forgetting

World Trade Center

There are incredibly complex factors at play with the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site. Everyone wants to have(and probably should have)a say in the process - victims' families, developers, survivors, the architecture community, New Yorkers, financiers, etc. But the biggest factor effecting the quality of the designs is clearly economical. Of course LMDC wants to pack in as much profitable square footage. But to what end? The whole process is frustrating... there was so much hope for something better.