But enough about beer...



According to the BBC World News, the latest proposal for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site has come from an unlikely source, the celebrated and long-dead Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi. Gaudi's 95-year-old plans for a futuristic hotel roughly the same height as the Empire State Building (shown above) is currently being championed by a group of architects and urban planners who have so far been uninspired by the two rounds of designs already presented. In lieu of an outdoor park or some other such monument dedicated to the WTC victims, the Gaudi building would utilize a cathedral-like interior chamber that was originally intended to be a massive "Hall of Presidents" as the memorial space, thus integrating the new building with the monument in a way that doesn't seem chinzy or contrived. Now I have to tell you that until seeing this design, my gut feeling about the WTC site has consistently been to leave it alone. I think part of my reaction was in response to the fact that many of the proposals submitted so far have emphasized the new buildings at the expense of the memorial, as if our intention in re-building there is to bury the awful truth of what happened two Septembers ago, conveniently paving over the hows and the whys with millions of square feet of office space and "tasteful" commerical and retail development. The memorials proposed in conjunction with these buildings seemed tacked on, almost as in an afterthought. Gaudi's design, in contrast, is its own living shrine - not only to the WTC dead, but to archetypal Manhattan itself, a time when even New York's skyscrapers had their own humanity. Tasteless ideas such as building the world's tallest building or otherwise "replacing" the Twin Towers are a kind of collective denial on the part of their proponents. Short of turning the whole area into a memorial park, I think integrated designs such as Gaudi's are the only way to rebuild without cheapening the human life that was lost there, and I wish the coalition sponsoring the Gaudi revival the best of luck.