NEW YORK: What on earth should be built on the site of the World Trade Centre? And have the world’s architects got a clue?

The Max Protetch show is an opportunity for 50 architects across the world to get themselves — as well as New Yorkers — thinking. Many of these thoughts prove to be pretty wild, more the stuff of sci-fi illustration and computer games than likely buildings.

Larry Silverstein, who fronts the consortium which bought the lease of the twin towers and the buildings surrounding them just weeks before September 11, has said he would like to build four 50-storey office towers designed by the global US firm SOM (Skidmore Owings Merrill), which has stamped its stolid corporate mark on the city since the completion of the Lever building in 1952.

It seems unlikely he would fall for, say, Will Alsop’s design for a pair of new towers twice as high as the fallen twins, one given over to commercial use, the other the world’s loftiest aviary. Or be enticed to build the cluster of seven tendril-like towers designed by Foreign Office Architects, a young London-based firm.

Daniel Libeskind, the Polish-born US architect proposes a cluster of jagged towers that would certainly animate the Wall Street skyline.

They are the antithesis of Minoru Yamasaki’s sleek, corporately anonymous towers destroyed on September 11.

Most of the designs on show aim high, as if defying future terrorist threats. Yet New York has long-built high and showily.

Most of all, though, the show demonstrates the degree to which contemporary architects are indebted to computer-aided design. Many of the proposals look suspiciously like conventional office blocks unwrapped, morphed and otherwise distorted by energetic mouse work.

New York’s Hani Rashid has come up with a complex of interlocking towers that look like roofless, wheel-less car bodies folded around surrounding buildings and Battery park.

There are more sober designs, some aimed at restoring the streetscape to what it was before the World Trade Centre, others fairly conventional clusters of modern downtown buildings.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service