The New York Times has a piece on the World Trade Center site today. Let's just say the current design for the Freedom Tower is a massive failure in imagination and hopefully never gets built. If we as a nation want a symbolic tower, then let's make a symbolic tower not an office building. It's a false start and design by comittee is useless for such an important site.

But this piece in the New Yorker by Paul Goldberger shows how Herzog & de Meuron have been creating interesting buildings that make one question their surroundings. This engagement of uncertainty is what is completely missing from the current Freedom Tower design...unless you want to count the uncertainty of funding. A good idea will find a way to happen and maybe it's wishful thinking but this WTC design looks like it's finding a way to die.

*Update: looks like the deal is going south, let's hope it takes the design with it (then again these deals have a way of being resusicated).