|
||||||||
  |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Plans for rebuilt Ground Zero can provide fewer offices
From Phil Hirschkorn
NEW YORK (CNN) -- The agency crafting guidelines for rebuilding at the World Trade Center site has decided to require less dedicated office space for the site than existed before September 11, 2001. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) has settled on new guidelines for the architectural firms appointed to create land-use plans for the 16-acre site, leveled by terrorists flying hijacked planes. Those guidelines, to be announced formally on Friday, instruct the firms to design from 6.5 million to 10 million square feet of office space, CNN has learned. That's 1 million fewer square feet than were in the 110-story twin towers and three smaller office buildings on the site. The LMDC will give no specific dimensions for the Trade Center memorial, but will instruct firms that nothing is to be built on top of the acre-wide squares where the towers stood, known as their "footprints." In addition, the LMDC will ask the design teams to create a hotel and retail shopping space, each ranging from 600,000 to 1 million square feet, thus replacing what was there before. No housing is to be built on the site. The reduction in office space, from a requirement of 11 million square feet to a maximum of 10 million, is a response to the main criticism of the initial preliminary land-use plans unveiled by the LMDC in July, which were panned as being too cluttered and unimaginative. The original office space requirements, imposed by the site's owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, sought to honor the 99-year lease on the Trade Center held by Manhattan developer Larry Silverstein, and to maintain the transportation agency's revenue stream of $124 million in annual rent paid by Silverstein. A representative for Silverstein said he was "supportive" of the new guidelines, which allow for up to 3.5 million square feet of office space to be built immediately off the 16-acre site. The 27 architects and firms that make up the six design teams, appointed last month, will gather on Friday to receive their instructions and visit Ground Zero. "This will substantially reduce the concentration of office space on site, so the memorial is not overshadowed by other uses, and the site can breathe a little more," said a source familiar with the new guidelines. A rethinking of the potential memorial comes a week after leaders of the LMDC and a few relatives of Trade Center victims toured the other September 11 attack sites and some of the nation's best known memorials. The itinerary included Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon, where the two other hijacked planes crashed; Washington's memorials to the Vietnam, Korean and Second World Wars (the World War II is still under construction); monuments to Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Arlington National Cemetery; the Holocaust Museum; and the monument commemorating Japanese-American internment camps during World War II. The tour concluded with visits to Oklahoma City's memorial for its 1995 terrorist truck bombing and to the civil rights memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. The memorials visited ranged in size from less than a acre to seven acres. "It's not about the size of the space, but what you do in that space and how you tell your story," said Anita Contini, the LMDC's vice president in charge of the memorial process, in an interview with CNN. "The most important thing is what are we trying to remember? What do we want people to feel, what do we want them to take away with them?" Beside the memorial's acreage, key questions for the planners are whether it's meant to be a shrine or a school and if a museum should be built. "The simpler the message, the better the memorial will be," said Tom Johnson, an LMDC board member, at the agency's monthly board meeting on Thursday, when the tour's findings were discussed. Johnson, who lost his son Scott, a securities analyst, in the Trade Center attack, said the memorials he visited were more effective when they evoked "a minimum number of thoughts and emotions." "There was no necessary relationship between size and the drama," he said. The design competition for the Trade Center memorial will begin at the beginning of 2003, after the LMDC consolidates the forthcoming land use designs into three possible plans. The goal is to settle on a final plan for the 16 acres by next spring and a winning memorial design by next September 11. "Controversy is good. A healthy debate is important to your process," Contini said in the interview. "All the major memorials had controversy. That's not a deterrent to quality or significance." The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will reveal six finalists for the public Pentagon memorial next week. Contini and the New York families are looking to link their efforts and to honor all 3,000 victims in some way at all three sites. Contini said, "We want all the names to be included -- those from Pentagon and from Shanksville -- because we'll be forever linked by this tragedy."
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
