Finalists of WTC design competition announced in New York

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, February 05, 2003

Finalists of WTC design competition announced in New York

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Two plans featuring the tallest structures in the world have been picked as finalists in the selection of a design to rebuild the World Trade Center, officialswith Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) said on Tuesday.

The two finalists are Berlin-based architect Daniel Libeskind's plan, called "Gardens of the World," and "World Culture," one ofthe three proposals submitted by THINK, a New York consortium of designers headed by Fred Schwartz and Rafael Vignoly.

Libeskind, who designed Berlin's Jewish Museum, proposed starkly geometrical buildings clustered around the foundations of the fallen towers and topped by a 1,776-foot spire, while the THINK team, led by New York-based architects Rafael Vinoly and Frederic Schwartz, proposed the World Cultural Center, whose twin lattice-work towers embedded with cultural centers.

"These designs best satisfied the rigorous set of criteria thatwe set forth," said Roland Betts, head of the LMDC's planning committee.

"They have the audacity to suspend buildings mid-air, and on the other, to make meaning of the void,"he added.

The two finalists will be asked to revise their designs to resolve certain concerns of rebuilding officials, then the master land-use plan will be chosen by the end of the month. A separate design competition, expected to be completed by September 11 this year, will decide the specifics of a memorial to the World Trade Center attack victims.

Nine proposals for redeveloping the 16-acre site were unveiled on December 17. The plans for rebuilding the site and surrounding neighborhood came from seven teams of architects from around the world, and were selected from 407 submissions.

A first group of plans, released in July, was criticized for being boring and for allowing for too much office space. However, last week, developer Larry Silverstein, who holds the lease to theTrade Center site, complained in a letter to the LMDC that the second round of designs did not include enough office space.

Although both finalists allow for office space in a variety of buildings in and around the site, including soaring skyscrapers, neither plan would replace all of the office space lost in the September 11 terrorist attacks.

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