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http://www.nynewsday.com/nyc-wtcside0302,0...eadlines%2Dleft

The great Chicago planner Daniel Burnham spoke of the power of a “noble, logical diagram.” Once recorded, he said, it “will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing asserting itself with growing intensity.”

Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for the World Trade Center site is a new noble, logical diagram — one that is sure to need a shield if real estate interests try to torture it with death by a thousand “gnat bites,” as Robert Ivy, the editor of Architectural Record, put it.

The plan, whose hallmarks are a sunken memorial and a 1,776-foot spire that would be the world’s tallest building, is more a road map than a finished blueprint. It inevitably will be changed, as all master plans are, as the economy rises and falls, as interest groups like the victims’ families make their voices heard, and as political actors enter and exit from the stage.

The questions are: Will the change be for good or ill? Will Libeskind’s noble, logical diagram grow in intensity or become fainter and less forceful?

Already battle lines are being drawn over such issues as the amount of commercial space the project will contain, how much retail space will be underground and whether a parking garage and transit center should be located in the area where many of the nearly 2,800 victims of Sept. 11 were recovered.

Also uncertain is who will pay for the memorial that is at the heart of Libeskind’s plan and who will control the rebuilding -- the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site; developer Larry Silverstein, who holds the lease to site; Gov. George Pataki, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, or the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., the city-state agency that ran the design competition.

Danger signs are present. Libeskind’s original design, which called for 7.6 million square feet of office space, proposed relatively slender, beautifully proportioned towers. The new version, which suggests at least 10 million square feet of offices, has skyscrapers that appear much bulkier. Surely that explains why Silverstein, who said earlier that he opposed the plan, warmly congratulated Libeskind Thursday when the architect’s selection was announced.

It was for good reason that Robert D. Yaro, the thoughtful chair of the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York, put out a statement that said: “We must protect the integrity of the design while making development decisions that acknowledge market forces.”

But Libeskind has aces up his sleeve — not just the political backing of Pataki and Bloomberg, but public pressure. It’s the reason we’ve reached this tantalizing stage of the rebuilding process. It’s the reason that the original six dreary designs for Ground Zero were discarded after the LMDC development corporation released them last July.

In comparison to the losing finalist, the twin lattice structures proposed by the international THINK team of architects, Libeskind’s design is far more nuanced.

A series of glassy, angular buildings, it may, at first, seem chaotic. But it actually is an exquisite essay in taking the equivalent of exploded glass shards and reassembling them into a new, and coherent, whole. The quiet symbolism of death and rebirth could not be more powerful or appropriate.

Critics have attacked Libeskind’s plan for literalism — the 1,776 foot spire is an obvious reference to the year of the Declaration of Independence, for example — but they forget that a plan, like a play, needs to appeal on many levels. This one does that, both figuratively and literally.

While it is easy to focus on the record-setting height of Libeskind’s unoccupied spire, which would soar above a 70-story office building, the core of his design reveals the power of depth - specifically, the architect’s inspired notion to preserve a portion of the sunken pit that was the foundation of the Twin Towers.

The pit will serve as the place for a memorial to those who died on Sept. 11 and will be framed by the concrete slurry walls that hold the Hudson River at bay. Like the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, those walls will have an authenticity — and a sense of strength — that is palpable. They will remind visitors that the memorial is as much about resilience as it is about remembering.

Within his chock-a-block district of offices, housing, a hotel, shops and a cultural center, Libeskind correctly puts his emphasis not on massive objects, as THINK did, but on public space, the streets that would be shaped by his buildings and, most of all, the sunken memorial. (FYI: the housing portion is off the 16-acre site but in the immediate neighborhood, hence the use of the term district.)

Yet his angular office buildings don’t simply frame the memorial. Their facades, seemingly sheared off by the explosions that destroyed the twin towers, make them part of the memorial. The whole site, not just the memorial, is sacred, they seem to say.

There are, too, skillfully-worked out nuances, like the public space designed to capture a wedge of sunlight each year on Sept. 11, from the time the first plane hit until the time the second tower fell.

But such nuances may count for little to the real estate developers who like to say that real estate is to Manhattan what oil is to Texas. These barons of the bottom line could break wreak havoc on Libeskind’s plan in any number of ways, from cut-rate office buildings that could erode the power of its shard-like ensemble to insensitively-placed buildings that would disturb the meaning of its urban spaces.

To date, Libeskind has shown himself to be remarkably adroit at the art of political maneuvering; he made his pit shallower, for example, to accommodate a bus parking garage and a transit stop beneath. But the architect’s revised master plan also shows that symbolic flourishes, like the gardens he planned to put atop his spire, may be shrunken. Instead of those life-affirming gardens-in-the-sky, the spire is now crowned with an income-producing communications antenna.

A key question is whether the development corporation will fulfill the promise, set out in its report on Libeskind’s winning design, to create design guidelines that will allow growth at Ground Zero — within constraints that preserve the integrity of Libeskind’s plan. Such guidelines would give Libeskind’s noble, logical diagram added force — and the resilience it needs to withstand the attacks that inevitably will be made against it.

The sexy design contest is over.

Now the real work — and the real battles — begin.