Maybe

Dr M once said we need something tall like the Petronas tower so that we got something that we can look up to. Are we alone?
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The Guardian | G2 | Friday June 11 2004 | pages 4 - 5

Tower power

The winning design to redevelop Ground Zero faces mounting opposition from campaigners who want the Twin Towers to be rebuilt. James Westcott on the latest twist in a tortuous tale


On July 4, the ground will be ceremonially broken on the construction site of the new World Trade Centre. "As we commemorate the founding of our nation," New York's state governor, George Pataki, said at a recent luncheon, "we lay the foundation for our resurgence." The Freedom Tower, designed by architect Daniel Libeskind in collaboration with corporate behemoths Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), mimics the posture of the Statue of Liberty and rises to a symbolic 1,776ft.

Not everyone is happy, however. "We are replacing a symbol of world peace and human cooperation with a self-absorbed salute to America," says Robin Heid, executive coordinator of the activist architectural group Team Twin Towers. The Libeskind plan, he argues, is "tone deaf to a monumental degree".

Team Twin Towers was formed in 2002 when Heid, an ex-paratrooper in the US Army, teamed up with Randy Warner, a TV executive based in Los Angeles. They are the biggest of many groups lobbying for the "restoration" of the twin towers as a defiant and therapeutic response to September 11.

Heid insists that the desire to rebuild isn't just a knee-jerk reaction to terrorism, or a response to the frustration that Ground Zero remains a largely empty crater nearly three years on. "Rebuilding is a fundamental, visceral human response. If they knocked down Big Ben, what would they do? Have a design contest? Instead of having a clocktower have two doves twirling around a pole?"

It seems that many people agree with Heid. The Team Twin Towers plan for buildings two storeys taller than the originals has received glowing endorsements from the fiercely rightwing magazine the National Review and from Rupert Murdoch's New York Post. "Americans have always understood the Twin Towers," said columnist Nicole Gelinas. "They were us: stark capitalism, power and beauty without explanation or apology."

The WTC skyscrapers were never much loved as architecture, until now. But a poll in 2002 found that half of New Yorkers wanted them rebuilt, and Team Twin Towers cite other polls that show up to 70% support for rebuilding. The modernism the two blank, monolithic towers represented has become something of a safe tradition compared with the perceived postmodernism of the Libeskind/SOM plan. It's as if what the towers symbolised – power, or cooperation, depending on how cynical you are feeling – can now only be embodied in the II shape.

Another team advocating for rebuilding, Make New York New York Again, have come up with a design that is, by their own admission, populist. "The average person doesn't have to figure out the theories or what the designer was thinking of," says Ken Gardner, gesturing at his model twin towers. "This plan transcends architecture." John Hakala, a partner in the group and an influential lobbyist of the editorial boards of New York's tabloids, says: "Libeskind's building is twisted. It just seems to imply something bent out of shape, destroyed. It might be interesting architecture somewhere else. But for those of us who smelled the towers burning – and I lost my best friend there – it's not right for this site."

Gardner and Hakala inadvertently raise interesting questions about whether any architect could achieve the miracles expected at Ground Zero, while working in perhaps the most complicated and politically delicate building site in the world. Juggling the governor's office, the property developers, the Port Authority, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the mayor's office and victims' families, would seem an impossible task. The supporters of "restoration" have a certain cynical and depressing logic: erase the architect from the picture and replace his divisive, elitist ideas with something popular and economically viable.

But isn't there a possibility that people will be disturbed to see the towers rising again? "That's why they're not exact replicas," Gardner says. They would restore the familiar and now beloved silhouette to the skyline, but would have different detailing and updated safety features. The new towers would have a double steel skin – a tube within a tube – for strength, and six stairwells instead of four for safety. A 500ft mast on the north tower would make it the tallest building in the world.

The Make New York New York Again plan was not submitted to the "innovative design study" launched in 2002 by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the newly created body charged with overseeing the rebuilding. This may have because their model wasn't ready, but Hakala claims other reasons. "The competition was not really a competition," he says. "Anybody who entered was required to surrender all of their intellectual property rights. So there were only about 400 entries, whereas with the major truly open architecture competitions in Europe, there are usually about 3,000 entrants. A lot of really big names said 'We're not going to play by those rules. This isn't what usually happens.'"

Perhaps it isn't surprising that many New Yorkers are disillusioned by the painfully slow and tangled rebuilding plans. Team Twin Towers calls the whole LMDC process, which included town hall-style public meetings, a "mass group therapy session" and a "farce". "Guess what?" Heid says, "therapy's over." But wouldn't rebuilding be the ultimate act of therapy? "Exactly," he says. The restoration advocates claim to have expediency on their side: the twin towers would be "marketable," says Gardner. They also claim idealism: "Rebuilding would be the most profound act of counter-terrorism through peace not war," Heid argues.

Matters are further complicated by the fact that Pataki's announcement came just two days after Larry Silverstein, the property developer who holds the lease on the World Trade Centre site, lost an insurance case in which he tried to claim that the September 11 attacks on the twin towers constituted two separate incidents. He won't get the double payout he was counting on to fund the $8-$10bn redevelopment. With a maximum payout of $4.5bn, Silverstein's landlords, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, are nervous about his ability to pay. "The fact is, Silverstein doesn't have the money to build," Hakala insists.

With such financial uncertainty, "the groundbreaking ceremony is absolutely meaningless," Gardner says – except perhaps as a diversion from the real issue: Freedom Tower just isn't very popular. "You don't see it on a single mug, T-shirt, postcard or pin around the city," says Hakala. "People don't know what it is." Hakala believes that new twin towers would appeal to New Yorkers' pride and to tenants' loyalty and defiance, something Freedom Tower has failed to do in the 17 months since it was announced. Pataki will have his office there, but he might be quite lonely: not a single private sector tenant has signed up so far. With a downtown office vacancy rate of 14%, it's arguable whether 10m square feet of new space is really needed.

Other evidence of cracks in the masterplan for Ground Zero: Pataki can't find anyone to fund the September 11 memorial. Sanford Weill, chief executive of Tishman Speyer properties and Jerry Speyer, chairman of Citigroup, both turned down the offer to chair the fundraising board. "They're too smart to say why," Hakala hints darkly. "But the reason is that they don't want to attach their names to something that's about to collapse."

Hakala and Gardner say that they are having success lobbying top politicians and financiers in New York, and believe they are in with a chance of sneaking into Ground Zero. So are they? A source close to the redevelopment, who did not wish to be named, put that chance at "a million to one".