Lord Foster unveils radical WTC memorial design

Lord Foster, the UK's most famous living architect and the man responsible for nearly 50 per cent of steel frame-and-glass skyscrapers in the world, today unveiled his radical proposal for the World Trade Center site.

Shortlisted among six worldwide architects after the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation trounced all previous plans as "dreary", Foster and Associates is confident it will be awarded the contract for what it has called "The You're Either With Us commemorative building".

Lord Foster — sporting a loud tie and conservative blazer as is his trademark — was on hand to pull the blue velvet cover off a scale model of his vision for Ground Zero™, and the world got its first glimpse of what may become one of the planet's most important landmarks.

"It is a unique site, enormously symbolic as the start of a new era in civilisation," Lord Foster told reporters. "It is in turns a celebration, a memorial, a harkening and an emblem. We feel that our design tackles, embraces and comforts not only the deep pain but also the hope and determination of a great nation and of the world at large."

The design's main feature is a steel frame-and-glass skyscraper, the same size as the previous towers and placed in between where they stood. It is surrounded by four smaller but identical steel frame-and-glass towers, interconnected by lawns and paths.

"I wanted to capture the beauty of the previous buildings as well as reflect what had happened to them, but without overwhelming the people that will have to use them," Foster continued. "After working on it for months, I had a sudden brainwave. That's when the idea for a steel frame-and-glass tower with a round bit on top of it struck me."

Critics have praised the design, with one calling it "the most innovative thing I have seen since Foster's own steel frame-and-glass skyscraper design for the Swiss Reinsurance building". Another said he had seen nothing more starkly original since the steel-frame-and-glass skyscraper Hongkong and Shanghai Bank — another of Foster's successes.

If Lord Foster does win the contract, he will be able to start work within months, insiders say, with the ingenious steel frame-and-glass design for the London Opera House almost completed and the unusual steel frame-and-glass Venice Biennale building having already achieved final approval.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation may seek a compromise however, as the German government did when Foster was awarded the contract to redesign the historically significant Reichstag building in Berlin. Foster's original conception would have seen the building torn down to make way for a profound steel frame-and-glass skyscraper. But after objections, the façade was to stay and Foster designed instead a steel frame-and-glass dome for the top of it.

Standing on the steel frame-and-glass Millennium bridge in London, affording stunning views of the Thames and the new steel frame-and-glass Greater London Authority building on the South Bank — just two more of Lord Foster's remarkable achievements — the great man himself revealed to us his visionary ambition.

"When I was a young man, I would walk across Westminster Bridge and survey the great city of London. It was all in deep, rich coloured bricks, quarried stones from across the kingdom, glowing warmly in the sunlight. Victorian strength, Elizabethan complexity, Edwardian finality. As I considered this, I promised to myself: 'I shall leave my own mark on this rich and varied city. I shall introduce the wonders of shiny steel and reflective glass. People shall be able to see within the buildings, at least when the sun isn't blinding them. Everything shall be see-through and shiny and in perfect symmetry thanks to cheaply produced prefabricated modules produced off-site and reassembled into a certain shape. Above all, it will appear clean, clinical and without human warmth.' I feel I am achieving that aim."

Important decision makers meanwhile have denied that they are purposefully ignoring the most obvious design for the WTC site. The construction of a state-of-the-art museum with slanted sides to recall the infamous picture of the WTC's leaning girders has been dismissed as "naïve".

"You can't put a price on a human life," said one developer. "But if you could, the value of this real estate is definitely worth more than 3,000 times that figure."