Alternative Ground Zero: What Lower Manhattan Could Have Looked Like

Architizer News

Alternative Ground Zero: What Lower Manhattan Could Have Looked Like

September 8, 2011

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Daniel Libeskind, A New World Trade Center

In the months following the 9/11 attacks, an array of competitions, conferences, and initiatives was launched to consider the appropriateness and terms of rebuilding Ground Zero.When, in mid-2002, the Lower Manhattan Development Company (LMDC) released an abysmal set of six initial plans for a new World Trade Center, a reactionary wave of architects entered the fray, each with their own vision to rehabilitate and transform Ground Zero into a thriving urban center once more. Their plans, however loose or conceptual they may have been, promised to offer the city something more than what it would receive a decade later–Daniel Libeskind’s diluted masterplan for a series of equally bland towers (Libeskind’s first ideas for a tower at Ground Zero above). Explore the alternatives to 2011′s Ground Zero.

Foreign Office of Architects (FOA), A New World Trade Center

At the end of 2001, the Max Protetch Gallery (now the Meulensteen Gallery) organized an exhibition of speculative proposals from sixty architects and artists which gave form, in all of its considerations, to a new Lower Manhattan. Many of the participants felt comfortable only submitting conceptual plans and ideas, while others, like recently-disbanded FOA, presented coherent, tectonic (i.e. “buildable”) proposals. Through their shared oddity and theoretical daring, the projects collectively provoke reconsiderations of the nature of public space and urban experience.