A New World Trade Center – Design Proposals

One of the most important and provocative architectural exhibitions in recent history, "A New World Trade Center - Design Proposals", is currently receiving its only UK showing at CUBE in Manchester.

Architecture gained a new significance in the eyes of the world when New York's World Trade Centre was brutally attacked on 11th September 2001. In the days and weeks following the terrorist attacks, many people, in all professions and walks of life, wondered what they might do to assist the victims, help New York City, and simply move forward.

Recognising the public's appreciation of the correlation between architecture and the culture that creates it, Max Protetch - a New York art gallery owner - launched an artistic response to the attacks: he invited nearly sixty architects and artists, some acknowledged leaders in their fields, others up-and-coming practitioners and theorists, to submit ideas about how the site might be treated. The participants were selected for their imaginations and artistic accomplishments, not necessarily the degree to which their ideas would prove practical. There were no rules, regulations, or requirements, other than a few stipulations regarding the size of the images produced – stipulations that some participants subsequently ignored.

The collective vibrancy of the designs - which comprise of drawings, sketches, models, animations, photos and texts - reflect not only the imaginations of the creators, but also the immediacy of their responses to the attacks. Some of the proposals eschew visualization, relying instead on words, and in one case sound, to express a hope or define a mood. But the proposals are more than personal meditations on recent events. Many of them rethink the skyscraper – surely the emblematically American building type and arguably the nation’s greatest contribution to world architecture – injecting it with new energy and expressiveness. Others look past buildable architectural form to offer analyses of the post-industrial city. Still others concentrate on our daily experience of urban environments, imagining a complex new character for lower Manhattan, and reshaping how we think about cities in the process. Collectively, they also constitute an important historical document. At a moment when technological change is directly impacting both the way architects design and the way builders build, these proposals catalogue a broad swath of contemporary architectural thought and practice. As Max Protetch has stated, "Not only does the exhibition document the architecture community’s responses to September 11th, but it also provides a snapshot of international architectural thinking at a specific point in time.”