Listen
I consider myself slightly more of an optimist than a pessimist. That's the American in me, I suppose. But my optimism is always challenged by my innate skepticism, which may be the New Yorker in me.
For most of the last couple of years, I have been skeptical about the chances of New York coming up with a decent plan to rebuild the swath of New York that was destroyed on September 11th. I'm skeptical of almost any large organization or bureaucratic process achieving aesthetic excellence, whether it's in the private or public sector.
But during the last few months, the most important design choices for Ground Zero have been made. And I have to say I am now shockingly hopeful about the shape of things to come outside our windows here at Studio 360.
The optimist in me looks over at the monstrously clean slate of Ground Zero and sees silver linings. Lower Manhattan , if we're lucky, will be a much better designed place five years from now - a more vibrant and beautiful place - than it was three years ago.
The 300-year-old streets that were erased in the late 1960s and 70s to build the gigantic, bleak World Trade Center plaza are going to be re-created and reopened to people and traffic. That is a great start.
The so-called Freedom Tower is burdened with a lot of corny packaging-1776 feet tall, echoing the shape of the Statue of Liberty, the cornerstone to be laid on the Fourth of July. But it will be a striking and worthy Manhattan high-rise, certainly better than what the terrorists destroyed.
The design for the memorial seems fine, too: a pair of 200-foot-square holes where the twin towers stood, containing waterfalls and reflecting pools, surrounded by a grove of big sycamores and locusts and lindens.
And just a couple of weeks ago, plans for a 9/11 museum started getting underway. There are plans to exhibit pieces of the awful wreckage from that day --crushed fire engines and police cars, sections of the broadcast tower that sat atop one of the towers, the last column removed from ground zero.
But what pushed me from reasonably pleased to genuinely excited was the release of renderings for a $2 billion train station designed for the site by the architect Santiago Calatrava.
The interior of the station will be a light-filled, soaring, 150-foot-high space with a ceiling that can be opened to the sky on nice days and nights.
From the outside, the steel and glass form will resemble some great, glorious white creature taking flight.
This isn't the first time I've been thrilled by the work of Santiago Calatrava. At the World's Fair in Seville , Spain , 15 years ago, I remember seeing a gorgeous new bridge that looked, with its steel cables, like some giant angel's harp. And visiting Spain again 5 years ago, I walked across another supremely elegant footbridge, a tilted white arch over the River Bilbao. Both bridges, I realized only last week, were the work of Calatrava -- who will now build a kind of bridge between lower Manhattan and the rest of the world.
So: the count so far is one potentially great design and two pretty good designs for the World Trade Center site. And I'm looking forward to seeing another Calatrava design, for the redesign of a nearby subway terminal, when it's unveiled later this month.
My optimism is stoked.
But there's also a lesson for skeptics here: the more hands at the drawing board, the harder it is to conjure up great art or design.
The tower and the memorial were the results of big, messy, democratic processes, and the fact that half-way decent design seems to have resulted is impressive. But the best design so far for the Trade Center site, the train station, was the result of just one client, the local transportation autho
