New visions sought for Ground Zero

The LMDC wants more professional input on designs for the World Trade Center site.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- The agency overseeing rebuilding on the World Trade Center site wants to hire five more architectural and urban planning firms to offer visions for commercial use of the 16-acre site and a memorial to the more than 2,800 people killed there on September 11.

The Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corp. Wednesday announced a new timetable for soliciting bids from design firms, a process that will push back the target date for final blueprints until the spring of 2003.

Firms from around the world are invited to submit their ideas -- drawings, models, computer graphics -- by September 16. The LMDC will choose five teams by September 30.

"It doesn't matter if the firms that respond are the largest or the most best-known around the world. We are looking for excitement, creativity, energy," said Roland Betts, an LMDC board member.

EXTRA INFORMATION World Trade Center: Your Proposals  See drawings and 3D models  of the official design proposals for rebuilding at the World Trade Center site.

"We are looking for the best ideas wherever they can be found," said Alexander Garvin, the corporation's vice president for planning and design.

The LMDC had previously contracted one Manhattan-based design firm, Beyer Blinder Belle, which presented six land use schemes last month. The firm, which was assisted by Peterson Littenberg, beat out more than a dozen hopefuls for the original commission, but their plans drew widespread public disapproval.

Feedback from a 4,000-person public meeting found the plans too unimaginative and too cluttered with office buildings.

Beyer Blinder Belle developed more than a dozen plans, but many did not meet office space requirements. "We regret our most creative work from this period was not presented for public review," the firm said in a written statement.

The first designs were inhibited by instructions to replace the 11 million square feet of office space lost when the 110-story twin towers and smaller buildings were destroyed in the attack by terrorist hijackers.

Those specifications came from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency that owns the land.

"We're going to develop a variety of options that will mix commercial and retail space on the site -- that is, move away from to some degree, the 11 million square feet of commercial space and the half million square feet of retail space that was in the original plan," said Betts.

Firms are permitted to envision a range of office space, a number of open spaces instead of just one, and to include cultural institutions and residential housing in their plans.

Beyer Blinder Belle also said if major cultural facilities are to be included in the plans, such as an opera house or a museum, "then the specific users of those facilities must be identified and brought into the process now."

Planners are further advised to include certain favored design elements, such as a mile-long promenade along the western edge of the site and a tall structure that would make the Lower Manhattan skyline distinctive again.

The first six plans called for four to six office towers, ranging from 32 to 85 floors in height, rising as high as 1,500 feet.

The LMDC discouraged planning anything unrelated to a memorial on the one-acre plots where the towers stood, known as the "footprints."

The private real estate agent who leased the Trade Center for 99 years starting last July, Larry Silverstein, wants to rebuild the office space over the next decade to restore 50,000 lost jobs and to revive the economic engine of Lower Manhattan, the nation's third-largest business district, prior to September 11.

After it receives final designs in November, the LMDC will synthesize the best ideas from the five new architectural firms, along with new ideas from Beyer Blinder Belle -- which questions whether the September 16 deadline is realistic -- and Peterson Littenberg. The LMDC plans to unveil three new plans for public comment in December.