At the top of the world

Years from now, when the world's tallest building stands on the World Trade Center site, onlookers will have Penn faculty to thank. Penn architects Daniel Libeskind and Gary Hack were announced as the winners of the international competition for the new design of the World Trade Center in New York City. Hack is the dean of Penn's Graduate School of Fine Arts and chairman of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission. Libeskind is the principal architect of Studio Daniel Libeskind and a Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture for Penn. "These are the best in the world, and everyone is excited about this proposal," Regional Plan Association President Robert Yaro said. The idea of the project --which Libeskind named the Memory Foundations project -- was the brainchild of Libeskind, Hack, Libeskind's architecture group in Berlin, as well as a landscape architect from Harvard University. The plan was preferred above all others because it was considered "visionary," according to Yaro -- creating a powerful and moving setting for a permanent memorial -- while still being something that could successfully be built and made to work. And Hack said this historic, grand-scale project is just the sort of endeavor that Penn's architecture school strives for. "The school has a commitment to being engaged in [the] most important issue of the day, and this is the most important issue at the moment," Hack said. The project concentrates on this new symbolic space in Lower Manhattan, added Yaro, who is also a Penn affiliated expert in city planning. It intends to represent both the city's mourning for the victims and its rebirth. Spread across the 16 acres of Ground Zero, the project arranges the buildings so that on Sept. 11 of each year, a ray of sunlight will illuminate the site from 8:46 a.m., when the first plane hit, to 10:28 a.m., when the second tower fell. "I'm not sure who came up with [the idea].... The way it works on a team is that ideas come out of dialogue," Hack said. "We wanted to create an area like Stonehenge, with ancient celestial devices." "Our idea is that our building will tell the story of the event in perpetuity," Hack added. The plan also includes the world's tallest building -- a spire rising 1,776 feet with the "Gardens of the World" at the top. The winning project was one of the 435 submitted to an independent and "multidisciplinary" jury, according to City and Regional Planning Department chair Eug‚nie Birch. Of those, nine teams were chosen -- three of which involved members of Penn faculty -- and were given to the government agency Lower Manhattan Development Corporation for consideration. When his design was chosen as one of the nine finalists, Libeskind asked for the consulting expertise of Hack -- one of the top site planners in the world, according to Yaro. "The partnership was successful, bringing together pragmatism and vision," he said. Two finalists were then selected, and Memory Foundations was chosen as the winner. "We are very excited about this choice," Yaro said. "This is like the Super Bowl of architecture." The design allows for streets to intersect the site, dividing it into blocks. Each site will then be sold to private companies and constructed according to the owners' needs. "Libeskind can only suggest what to do," Birch said. "He and Hack will work on the details of the conceptual plan." Birch is also a member of New York New Visions, a group composed of professional communities that came together in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. She was also on the independent committee that started the selection for architectural plans. The plan for the memorial will be finalized this year on the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. The commercial development, on the other hand, will take longer to finish, depending mostly on the acquisition of this new market space. Yaro predicts that it will take "a decade to build out."