Group Therapy at Ground Zero
By FRANK RICH

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/04/opinion/O6RICH.html 

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In the case of the new ground zero site plans, the p.c. mode of the moment is to be celebratory. According to the prevailing morality tale, the Port Authority and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, chastened by the disastrous response to the first round of designs last July, may yet be the new Medicis. Under their banner, some brilliant architects (and most of them are brilliant) have delivered visions that, as the project's slogan goes, allow us to "remember, rebuild, renew." But how can anyone, however gifted, devise a plan that will at once acknowledge the worst attack in our country's history, rebuild 10 million square feet of office space for which there is no discernible market and renew Lower Manhattan? As the gallant architects themselves would be the first to concede, it's literally a dream assignment. You might as well try to mate a giraffe with a beaver. 

......... the cocoon of Utopia. 

........... Somehow the designs' antiseptic delineation of the trade-tower footprints, their earnest gardens of peace and tolerance and their unbroken faith in the regenerative power of skyscrapers have the cumulative effect of muting the savagery of what happened on 9/11. Or so it seemed to me. Whatever the explanation, the conflict between the anguish aroused by the real ground zero and the pristine plans for its renewal was, as Mr. Giuliani said, confusing.

.......... no grand renewal is likely to happen there for years...............You can't build the tallest building in the world downtown when Lower Manhattan already has 17 million square feet of vacant office space. The plans on view at the Winter Garden are placebos. ....

..........the on-site ground zero memorial.........It took 57 years after the Civil War to get a Lincoln Memorial. It wasn't until nearly a decade after America left Vietnam that we had Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Everyone, including Mr. Giuliani, would like to see a ground zero memorial as powerful as Ms. Lin's, but it's hard to imagine she or anyone could have created so permanent an expression of that war in its immediate aftermath. You can't sew up a wound that is still festering. 

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