A Real Organic Solution For Ground Zero

7 September 2002 - 1:00pm

The efforts rebuild the site of the World Trade Center are a 'fiasco' but the area is starting to heal itself without the benefit of planning strategies.

"The idea of asking a single firm of architects to produce no less than six different ways of rebuilding the World Trade Centre, then whittling them down to three preferred options, and finally incorporating their least unpopular features into a single master plan could have come straight from the White House staff's modus operandi for explaining plans to effect a regime change in Baghdad to a president with a short attention span...So disillusioned was the New York Times that its architecture critic Herbert Muschamp assembled an all-star team of architects - including Peter Eisenman, Rafael Vinoly, Richard Meier, Steven Holl, Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas, as well as Maya Lin, creator of Washington's Vietnam memorial - to try to show that it could all be done much better...But even without any coherent planning strategies in place yet, the area is starting to heal itself, almost as if it were a living organism, seeking to repair damaged tissue."

Source: The Guardian Unlimited, September 6, 2002
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New Suburbanism is not a new design paradigm that seeks to compete with or discredit principles of New Urbanism. Instead, our perspective represents a broad-based attempt to find the best, most practical ways to develop and redevelop suburban communities.