Jim Stratton's City Charrette: WTC Proposals Are Only Missing Flying Cars

Seven sets of architects recently unveiled plans for what could be built on the site of the World Trade Center, integrating PATH trains and memorials and skyscrapers.

To me, however, the entire exercise is just a mammoth publicity stunt. Not one of these grandiose projects will be built as designed, and for this we are all very lucky.

The proposals remind me of pulp science fiction covers from the thirties. All that is missing are flying cars, buzzing around monster buildings designed from an artist’s erector-set imagination.

The one proposal which might resemble our Lower Manhattan neighborhood (Peterson/Littenberg) is preemptively dismissed by critics as “seventies retro.”

These critics miss the fact that if the events of 9/11 had not happened, “seventies retro” is what we would still have on the site.

The proposals call for enormously tall buildings, perhaps reflecting the masculine nature of nearly all the architects. The intent, of course, is to restore much of the 13.4 million square feet of rental space lost 15 months ago, and this is not easy to do without tall buildings.

Imagine a 20-story building covering the entire site: no streets, no plazas, no air shafts, just a huge cube of offices. This would give the footage once provided by the twin towers and their companion buildings.

But put a street through this megabuilding and the rest of the structure must rise higher to compensate. Add a sidewalk, a park, a memorial, and the rest of the project must grow again, to net the square footage.

The tallest of the proposed buildings is 2,100 feet, half-again taller than the twin towers. To get to safety, someone in the aerie would have to descend three-quarters of a mile of stairways.

This is not a scenario most potential renters want to hear. CEO’s today don’t want their companies to rise more than 60 stories above the earth, and the mood is not likely to change.

Once burned down to atoms, twice shy.

No commercial space will be built on the site until there is a clear demand for it, perhaps even a confirmed renter in the developer’s pocket. This will not be tomorrow. There is already 17 million square feet of vacant office space in Lower Manhattan, and rebuilding the World Trade Center would nearly double the vacancy.

Business will turn around, of course, but whatever is built on the site will be erected over time, as needed. Developers will be free to ignore each other’s designs when planning their own. Even if one of the current proposals receives overwhelming approval, nothing in the regulations would mandate any developer to follow it.

What must be decided soon, however, is the less glitzy part of the project: the street plan, the electrical distribution stations, and the transportation hub. Note that I do not include the memorial in this.

The old World Trade Center transportation hub was embarrassingly antiquated. Crowds in the shopping plazas were always on collision course. Subway riders leaving the IRT station were usually still in the exit line when the next train arrived.

The new transit hub should be better designed, and hardened against the kind of disaster that befell it on 9/11. These lower corridors will have to be designed and built before anything important is begun upstairs.

Not often mentioned in the same breath with the above are the public amenities and the shopping mall, but to me these are of equal importance.

Concert spaces, art galleries and the like cannot be built early on, of course, but they can be planned for in the zoning. Attaching them to requirements for approval is common in the city, and sites with such amenities should be integrated with transportation in the planning stage.

Nothing will bring people back to a blighted area faster than a good, safe place to shop. The old World Trade Center mall was mammoth and clunky, probably one of the first of its kind. Since that time, architects have had much more experience designing people-friendly shopping malls.

Linked to sidewalk traffic, a well-designed World Trade Center mall could surpass anything suburbia has to offer. A million commuters daily might find shopping easier and faster here than on home soil. (Suggestion: moving walkways, like the ones in airline terminals, could both speed up and simplify pedestrian shopper traffic.)

Once the site is alive again, even if most of that life is underground, there will be more incentive for offices to return.

Forget skyscraper contests. Underground is where the World Trade Center design efforts should go.