Donald Trump and I agree on few things, but I very much like his proposal to rebuild the world trade center essentially as it was. I know that he is a showman and is using this to get ratings for tonight's Apprentice finale, but it's not his idea anyway--people have seriously talked about doing this since September 12 of 01.
Imagine you live in Colorado Springs. Everyday you wake up and look out your window and see Pike's Peak. When you get lost driving around, you look towards Pikes Peak and know you are heading west. When your tourist friends come to town, you take them to the top of the mountain and they get headaches and eat hot mini-donuts up there. Then imagine terrorists blow it up and it is now a whole in the ground, a former graveyard. A huge part of your orientation with the physical world is thrown out of whack. And imagine that after almost four years of hokey designs approved only by politicians, with a big gaping whole still sitting there in the ground, someone comes along and says, "you know what, I think I'd like something more like a mountain there. I miss it. I need it. I'll pay for it and build it in less time than these ass-scratching politicians can," well, I think I'd listen to that.
3 comments:
But isn't it economically stupid, since who's going to rent all that space?
Honestly, I don't know enough about the technicalities of large commercial buildings in NYC to say definitely yes or definitely no, but anecdotally I can say that there are very few, if any, empty skyscrapers in Manhattan.
The same scare tactic was used when the Empire State Building was being built, and for the first year or two, there were a lot of empty floors, but it quickly became one of the most desirable addresses in the city, a wild success.
At least the guy dreams big.
Big but ugly. That's the other problem. Not that I think Liebeskind's design was all that. It was overly symbolic and too delicate. But surely a real competition could get something both interesting and practical built there.
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