Rumours have abounded for a number of days but today, confirming predictions, has come the definitive announcement – Daniel Libeskind is the winner of the competition for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. His project “Gardens of World” will fill the great void left by the fall of the twin towers in the attack of 11 September.

The project consists of a tower 541,32 metres high – a symbolic height, 1766 feet, a number which corresponds to the year of independence of the US – and a complex of corner buildings. The losing project in the final was the “World Cultural Center” by the team Think Design, lead by Rafael Viñoly: two towers made from a metal grid structure, just over 550 metres high.

A media battle to the last with the two projects set against each other; in recent days tensions and verbal disputes – Libeskind described the rival project as a couple of “skeletons in the sky” hardly suitable to “affirm the vitality of the city or the courage of America” and in an interview in the Los Angeles Times: “Those Stalinist things in the middle of every Eastern European capital”. “This kind of behaviour is not fair play” according to Viñoly and Schwartz, “Libeskind’s projects transforms a place of mourning into an incredibly kitsch luna park”.

https://www.renewnyc.com

Related contents:
Seven propositions for New York (from Domus 856 February 2003)
Facing up to Ground Zero. Deyan Sudjic on an architectural debate being played out on CNN (from Domus 856 February 2003)