Gotham Gazette

The Place for New York Policy and politics

The design teams chosen to create new plans for the World Trade Center site met for the first time on Friday, October 11 in the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation offices for a day-long briefing. Rebuilding officials gave the architects and designers a new list of requirements and elements to be included in the plans. "Today we tried to clarify what their mission is," said development corporation board member Roland Betts. "We want to go way beyond where we went before."

The teams will spend eight weeks designing plans for Ground Zero. While they will work to find an appropriate place for a memorial, they will not design the memorial itself. "It is an extraordinary, challenging project," said English architect Lord Norman Foster, choked up after visiting the development corporation's room for family members of 9/11 victims. "I think in one sense, the whole thing is a memorial."

The new design rules require a "grand and visible" transit station at Fulton and Greenwich Streets, a promenade over a buried West Street and between 6.5 and 10 million square feet of office space.