Towering ambition: architects vie to fill Ground Zero void

The pain of loss and destruction in lower Manhattan ceded for a few hours yesterday to the thrill and promise of urban rebirth and civic imagination – seven teams of architects from around the world unveiled startling visions of what could rise from the rubble left by the terrorists.

Their plans shared a common theme of honouring, with multiple memorials and open spaces, those who perished. But otherwise, they diverged dramatically. One envisaged a floating park with 2,800 lights representing the victims. Others featured structures that would be the highest in the world. Nearly all incorporate multiple gardens, in one case running the height of a soaring and narrow needle.

Norman Foster, the one British entrant in the competition, presented a dazzling blueprint dominated by "twinned towers" a glass-sheathed and highly sculptural skyscraper that would divide into two parts but "kiss" at three points to create public space and observation decks. He also incorporated two sunken and lifeless "voids" that occupy the footprints of the twin towers that collapsed in September 2001.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, LMDC, created to oversee the rebuilding of the 16-acre site, will now conduct a breakneck six-week appraisal period before a finalist is chosen at the end of January. Public reaction will be crucial, although plans for open hearings have yet to be fully detailed. Officials have the opportunity to pick a single winner or a combination of the different designs.

"These are designs not only for our time but for all time," commented John Whitehead, chairman of the LMDC. "They must transcend the present, to speak to our children and to their children ... to send an immortal message." All the plans allow space for memorials. Those will be conceived separately in a parallel competition for memorial designs.

Four of the plans proposed creating the tallest building in the world, including the Foster towers, outstripping the 110 storeys of the former towers and topping Malaysia's 1,483ft Petronas Twin Towers. One design recommended a 2,100ft skyscraper, while another called for a 1,776ft tower topped with a sharp-ended spire.

In one of the most ambitious of the nine proposals, a team called Think, led by Italian architect Rafael Viñoly, advocated a soaring pair of circular open lattice-work structures, almost helix-like scaffold-towers, punctuated by public spaces, including performance areas, at different levels in the sky.

Another group, United Architects, proposed a blue-glass wall of multiple and fluid glass towers – higher than any building now standing – that join at the 60th level to create a single contiguous public space running through all of them. The image is of a giant and space-age cathedral of glass.

The scope of the plans reflected a yearning from New Yorkers for buildings that do more than simply replace the lost office space but which excite and inspire. An earlier round of plans, unveiled in July, was greeted by dismay as being boring and insufficient to meet the challenge.

The response prompted the LMDC to launch the new competition, now nearing completion. The seven teams presenting yesterday were chosen from 407 submissions from around the world. They are from Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, New York and Los Angeles. The teams' leaders amount to a pantheon of the world's leading architects: Richard Meier, Steven Holl, Rafael Viñoly, Peter Eisenman, Greg Lynn, Norman Foster, Charles Gwathmey, Daniel Libeskind, Ben van Berkel and Shigeru Ban.

Critics worry six weeks is far too short a time to make a choice that will mould the skyline of the city for generations to come and become a new symbol of the city and its regeneration. Not since 1947, when a design team convened to settle on a design for the United Nations headquarters, has the city had the opportunity to redefine itself so profoundly to the world.

"New York has given itself a priceless gift," Herbert Muschamp, the respected architecture critic of The New York Times wrote yesterday. "It has opened the minds of government officials to the idea of contemporary architecture. Thanks entirely to public pressure, our great city has taken a giant step toward reclaiming a place of world leadership in the civil art of building."

What will transpire in the next six weeks will be, as Norman Foster put it, an "incredibly, immensely important" debate over which of the plans will best meet the demand for civic inspiration as well as practical demands to provide the right combination of public and commercial space. The final choice must echo the souls of the dead and allow tribute to be paid.

In that regard, families of the victims will have one of the most important voices in the selection process to come. For example, while they may warm to the park spaces envisaged by Norman Foster and, in particular, to his two sunken voids, with walls rising into the park, they may balk at his "twinned tower" design, which most closely resemble the old twin towers that were destroyed.

Daniel Libeskind of Germany, the visionary behind the Jewish Museum in Berlin, proposed keeping the retaining walls of the foundations of the old World Trade Centre exposed to public view. Beside a tall tower, a second needle would rise even higher, filled with gardens, as "a constant affirmation of life".

Richard Meier underlined that the competition marked the "most meaningful architectural project in this city's history". His main structure would look almost like a noughts-and-crosses grid with gardens on the roofs of the crossing sections.

A park of trees, with subterranean running water with 2,800 candles or lights, would extend to the water's edge of the Hudson river and onto a floating public park for 5,000 people. In his plan, the footprints of the old towers would be reflecting pools of water on top of glass.

One single message seem to emerge from the nine different plans put forward: that despite the nervousness still lingering from the shock of the 9/11 destruction of the twin towers, New York City is not about to give up its love affair with the skyscraper.

But in choosing a final blueprint, the city faces many dilemmas. Does it want to reclaim the honour of having the world's tallest building? Should it embrace architecture that is stunning and utterly modernistic, or is a more mellow approach more apt, with an emphasis on ground-level gardens and buildings more fitting with its urban history?

And, lastly, which of these plans is viable financially?

Immaculate conceptions: Proposals from seven practices to replace the World Trade Centre

The latest set of architectural and masterplanning solutions to New York's devastated World Trade Centre site are not, as might have been hoped, the Magnificent Seven. They are ­ just like the first wave of confused offerings ­ yet more immaculate conceptions in search of a meaningful birth. They are thoughtful, absurdly grandiose, and depressingly unremarkable.

In most cases, scale seems to be the problem. Bigness has been equated with architectural gestures of defiance, but at the expense of something that is already big and beautiful enough as a sign of prosperous democracy ­ New York's riveting skyline. There is clearly a need for an iconic redevelopment, something that not only demonstrates lusty vertical perseverance, but which salves some of the psychological damage caused by the loss of the twin towers.

Lack of subtlety in the form of glass-and-steel hyperbole simply cannot be the right approach. On those grounds, the extraordinarily cross-braced vertical grid of towers proposed by Richard Meier and Partners fails decisively.

Nevertheless, two of the proposals featuring extremely tall towers do seem to offer interesting solutions. The Tokyo-based THINK team has created two beautifully latticed ghosts of the Twin Towers, more of a memorial than a pulsating hive of commerce. If they have enough money-generating density then this may be an appealing alternative.

Britain's Norman Foster, has gone for extreme height with his two towers. What makes them intriguing, and much less of a visual hammer-blow than Meier's bastion, is their variable profile. If New York decides in favour of bigness, this is clearly the best design. It's also certain that Foster, whose office mounted its own inquiry into how the tower collapsed, will have looked closely at safety.

By Jay Merrick