On September 11, 2001, Alexander Garvin was on the train from New York to New Haven, Connecticut, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. He got word of the disaster while in a cab riding from the station to the Yale campus, where he teaches in the architecture school. As the day progressed–he had to lead two classes before he could return to Manhattan–he recalls being overcome by “horror and fury.”
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Garvin’s a fan of Daniel Burnham, and is fond of quoting that master planner’s directive: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” His 1996 book, The American City: What Works, What Doesn’t, made him famous–at least among urban planners. “I define planning as a process that generates a widespread and sustained private-market reaction,” he says. “It’s not enough to simply build a highway. The highway has to attract lots of people in their cars, but even if you have all those cars, unless you have a positive impact on the surrounding neighborhood, you haven’t done any planning at all. All you’ve done is build a highway.”
The process of rethinking the 16-acre World Trade Center site has had its bumps–the six initial designs presented a year ago were roundly condemned by New Yorkers invited to comment. But the final design, agreed upon with a lot of public input, is an elaborate scheme by Daniel Libeskind, a Berlin-based architect best known for his Jewish Museum Berlin. The centerpiece is a 1,776-foot-high office tower filled with interior gardens and capped by an observatory and a television antenna.
