An article from Time Magazine.

There are many schools of thought on this, and I don't know exactly what should go there either. But I do know one thing: the first thing that needs to be done is to kick out the bastards who hate anything that rises above other things, and despised the idea of the Towers not because there was anything objectively wrong with them, but because they symbolized achievement, mastery of the elements, human skills, and a wealthy civilization. Pretty much the same reasons the terrorists picked them for targets.

...in the stunned weeks after Sept. 11, there was a powerful impulse to simply rebuild the towers, all 110 stories, to show that Americans could not be brought low by terrorists.



Then people remembered that however much we love them in retrospect, the Twin Towers were a botch. At their completion in 1973, they were already anachronisms, products of an imperial Modernism that destroyed human-scale neighborhoods and in their place erected mammoth towers on desolate plazas.



Imperial modernism??

By taking down the towers, Sept. 11 blew a hole through the errors of the past. New York's phalanx of city-planning types and regional thinkers has looked through that hole and seen an opportunity. Right away they started dusting off long-cherished schemes, some of which may very well come true. It's likely that any final plan will envision a major new terminal linking the Manhattan subways with suburban commuter rail systems. It will also probably re-establish several city streets that were covered over by the much despised "superblock" of the Trade Center plaza.



The towers were symbols of "the midcentury arrogance of architects," says architect David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. "What they did to lower Manhattan was an act of vandalism just as complete as Sept. 11." Childs, a well-regarded figure in the architectural world, has been commissioned by Larry Silverstein, the developer, to draw up proposals for the Trade Center site. The Port Authority and L.M.D.C., of course, are shopping for their own design team. How their eventual plans will be reconciled with Silverstein's remains to be seen. But for now the project has Childs thinking big. Granting that very tall skyscrapers are out of fashion these days, isn't there still an impulse, he asks, to see something tall and triumphant at the site? So what about, say, a 70-story office tower with a sculptural steel lattice at the top that climbs to the 110-story height of the original Twin Towers? And what if it becomes more delicate as it rises, suggesting spirits released into the sky?



Why this fake tower idea is less "arrogant" or less of an act of "vandalism" than a tall working skyscraper is not clear to me. Maybe he is being misquoted. Certainly Childs has designed more than one huge skyscraper himself.

Something bigger and better than anything that has ever been build before needs to go there. That's my take on it.