http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sacred/designs/prelim.

html

The story behind the first set of designs for Ground Zero -and why they were overwhelmingly rejected.

In April 2002, the Lower Manhattan Development

Corporation (LMDC) and the Port Authority put out a
request for proposals for architectural firms to provide
consulting services for the redevelopment of the World Trade
Center site. The firms were required to submit their proposals
by May 6 -- a turnaround of only a few weeks -- and 15
teams of architects responded. The LMDC and Port
Authority announced at the end of May that they had selected
the firm of Beyer Blinder Belle to design six overall "landuse options" or "concept plans" to determine how the streets,
buildings, public spaces and transportation needs of Lower
Manhattan could be arranged in the 16-acre block.
The selection of Beyer Blinder Belle, which was best known
for its acclaimed restoration work on Grand Central Terminal
and Ellis Island, received a mixed reaction. Herbert
Muschamp, architecture critic for The New York Times,
published a blistering article in which he criticized the
narrow timeframe of the process and wrote, "The selection of
the New York architecture firm Beyer Blinder Belle to
design a master plan for Ground Zero and the financial
district confirms once again that architecture will play no
more than a marginal role in the redevelopment of Lower
Manhattan." Steve Cuozzo responded a few days later in The
New York Post, writing, "[W]hat the [architecture critics]
really crave are the far-fetched fantasies that clog the pages
of unreadable design magazines -- not precisely the thing for
the Financial District, generator of $3 trillion in capital
annually and one-fifth of the city's tax revenue."

RELATED LINK
Preliminary Design
Concepts
More on the
preliminary designs
from the LMDC's
Web site.

Beyer Blinder Belle's six designs, which were collaborations

with three other architecture firms, including Skidmore,
Owings & Merrill and Peterson/Littenberg, both of whom
would later participate in the next round of designs, were
released on July 16 and were met with almost uniformly
negative complaints that they were banal, unimaginative, too
similar to each other, and too focused on the commercial
requirements of rebuilding. Robert Campbell, architecture
critic for The Boston Globe, called the plans "shake and bake
urban design; you just shuffle the same ingredients around."
Ada Louise Huxtable, writing in The Wall Street Journal
described the plans as "six cookie-cutter losers. Called
Memorial This and That as a gesture to the universal desire
for commemoration, they are dedicated to maximum return
on the land, while obviously begging the future." Although
the decision to restore some of the streets that were lost when
the original World Trade Center was built was widely
praised, two of the plans (Memorial Park and Memorial
Promenade) did not leave the footprints of the twin towers
open, upsetting many of the families of those who died on
Sept. 11.

Less than a week after the presentation of Beyer Blinder

Belle's plans, a public meeting, called "Listening to the City"
was held in the Jacob Javits Convention Center. An
estimated 4,000 to 5,000 New Yorkers attended the meeting
and expressed their displeasure with the plans. A month later,
on Aug. 14, the LMDC announced that in addition to
feedback from the Listening to the City and other public
events, it had received more than 5,000 e-mail suggestions,
and that it had decided to invite "the most innovative
architects and planners around the world to participate in an
LMDC design study regarding the future of the World Trade
Center site and surrounding areas."
View a slideshow of the six Beyer Blinder Belle plans.