# New Yorkers whining about new WTC Designs **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [February 5, 2003, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-yorkers-whining-about-new-wtc-designs/152993 "2003-02-05T17:25:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Lux\_Fiat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/bc79bd/32.png) [@Lux\_Fiat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lux_Fiat)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2003, 5:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-yorkers-whining-about-new-wtc-designs/152993/41 "2003-02-06T17:31:26Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Ukulele Ike \* > The [Gaudi design](http://www.npr.org/display_pages/features/feature_935867.html), with background information. Oh, I dig the shit out of that building. Of course, if it’s cricket to like re-task extant designs, then I propose [this one](http://www.mahq.net/mecha/macross/dyrl/macross-attack.jpg). Now _that_ would be a fuckin’ skyline. ---
**Author:** ![jjimm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba8739/32.png) [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2003, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-yorkers-whining-about-new-wtc-designs/152993/42 "2003-02-06T17:43:14Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Aro \* > **And you just _had_ to quote the bit of my post with the typo in it, didn’t you?** Very percepctive of you. ---
**Author:** ![World\_Eater](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f04885/32.png) [@World\_Eater](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/World_Eater)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2003, 5:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-yorkers-whining-about-new-wtc-designs/152993/43 "2003-02-06T17:54:54Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Lux Fiat \* > \*\*Oh, I dig the shit out of that building. \*\* Yeah thats because you live in Boston. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Lux\_Fiat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/bc79bd/32.png) [@Lux\_Fiat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lux_Fiat)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2003, 7:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-yorkers-whining-about-new-wtc-designs/152993/44 "2003-02-06T19:26:17Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by World Eater \* > Yeah thats because you live in Boston. 😃 Wounded am I, wounded I say, that I would be suspected of the desire to inflict suspect architecture on my brothers and sisters in NYC. Honestly, I would live or work in that building in a heartbeat (well, at this point, I’d work in any damn building you wanted, if it meant I was working, but I digress). It’s 2003, and there are no flying cars, and I’m not wearing a shiny silver jumpsuit, and so what if it was designed years and years ago by a now-defunct architect? It looks like the future, in a way that I find extremely appealing. No accounting for taste, of course. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Lux\_Fiat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/bc79bd/32.png) [@Lux\_Fiat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lux_Fiat)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2003, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-yorkers-whining-about-new-wtc-designs/152993/45 "2003-02-06T19:27:58Z")
Of course, I still primarily support my SDF-1 idea. ---
**Author:** ![World\_Eater](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f04885/32.png) [@World\_Eater](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/World_Eater)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2003, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-yorkers-whining-about-new-wtc-designs/152993/46 "2003-02-06T19:29:40Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Lux Fiat \* > \*\*Wounded am I, wounded I say, that I would be suspected of the desire to inflict suspect architecture on my brothers and sisters in NYC. > > Honestly, I would live or work in that building in a heartbeat (well, at this point, I’d work in any damn building you wanted, if it meant I was working, but I digress). It’s 2003, and there are no flying cars, and I’m not wearing a shiny silver jumpsuit, and so what if it was designed years and years ago by a now-defunct architect? It looks like the future, in a way that I find extremely appealing. No accounting for taste, of course. 🙂 \*\* Touché ---
**Author:** ![Skywatcher](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skywatcher/32/254_2.png) [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2003, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-yorkers-whining-about-new-wtc-designs/152993/47 "2003-02-06T20:30:59Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Aro \* > \*\*I was not talking about your opinion on the design, (you can hold any opinion you like about those, however naive) but on your opinion that it could be constructed as you described. > That is entirely wrong. \*\* Looked to me like you were saying it would be wrong to have a building with the same façade as one of the original towers. **anewthought** called you on it and rightfully so, IMO. ---
**Author:** ![CanvasShoes](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/74df32/32.png) [@CanvasShoes](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CanvasShoes)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2003, 1:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-yorkers-whining-about-new-wtc-designs/152993/48 "2003-02-07T01:26:13Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Aro \* > \*\*Good point, and the answer is no. But buildings, whilst looking good to the majority of users is a bonus, have many more things to consider in thier design. You are basing your opinion of the scheme on a single persepctive image, which is of a view you will never even see in reality. Don’t base your opinion on a scheme solely on the aesthetic appeal of a single image of the building. Think about the whole package. \*\* Admittedly, I probably have the least “logical” view of what the “whole package” should look like than anyone else on this board. Not only am I completely clueless regarding architecture, but I’m from Anchorage. Not exactly the “cityscape” type of city (lots of wooded areas, no buildings taller than 10 or so stories with a few exceptions). If I remember right, we’ve got something like the biggest area for a city, with the fewest citizens and very few sky scrapers. imVho though, I think New Yorkers, being New Yorkers, should have first dibs on what they’d like to see as a replacement though. Even if it does involve a lot of whining and pickiness before a choice is finally made. ---
**Author:** ![OxyMoron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/e9a140/32.png) [@OxyMoron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OxyMoron)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2003, 2:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-yorkers-whining-about-new-wtc-designs/152993/49 "2003-02-07T02:59:19Z")
Folks, I’m repeating myself, but only a little: part of the reason so many people hate the winning designs and love the Gaudi is, I believe, because the Gaudi looks great reproduced in about 3" x 4" scale, and the competing designs don’t. But that doesn’t mean they’re bad designs, or that the Gaudi is good. I don’t think anyone’s ever made a decision about a seriously large building based only on a tiny drawing. In older days, you’d get a model several feet high (I just finished [Brunelleschi’s Dome](http://galileo.imss.firenze.it/news/mostra/4/e42des3.html): a 30’ long by 15’ high model was executed in the mid-14th century, decades before anyone could figure out how to build it), and now there are fantastically complete animations that convey much better what a design can do. Conversely, things that look lovely in miniature, or on paper, or both, can be truly awful once built - as I suspect the Gaudi would be. World Financial Center is an example: although the Winter Garden atrium is lovely (no great design thinking there: glassy arches _always_ look great) the buildings surrounding it look like overgrown plastic figurines: inoffensive, and built to stay that way. I mentioned in the other thread that the Think! design is based to a great extent on the Eiffel Tower. It’s instructive to review contemporary opinions: > [@](#): > > A Committee of Three Hundred was formed – one member for each meter of the tower – consisting of some of the most illustrious names in French art and letters: artists Ernest Meissonier, Jean-Leon Gérôme, Adolphe Bouguereau, Antonin Mercié; writers Guy de Maupassant, Romain Rolland; musicians Jules Massenet, Charles Gounod; and, most telling of all, Charles Garnier, architect of the Opera House…[they pleaded]: > > > [@](#): > > > > Honored compatriot, we come, writers, painters, sculptors, architects, passionate lovers of the beauty of Paris – a beauty until now unspoiled – to protest with all our might, with all our outrage, in the name of slighted French taste, in the name of threatened French art and history, against the erection, in the heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower. > > > > […] > > > > Are we going to allow all this beauty and tradition to be profaned? Is Paris now to be associated with the grotesque and mercantile imagination of a machine builder, to be defaced and disgraced? Even the commercial Americans would not want this Eiffel Tower which is, without any doubt, a dishonor to Paris. > > > > […] > > > > Listen to our plea! Imagine now a ridiculous tall tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black factory smokestack, crushing with its barbaric mass Notre Dame, Sainte Chapelle, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the dome of Les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all our humiliated monuments, all our dwarfed architecture, which will be annihilated by Eiffel’s hideous fantasy. For twenty years, over the city of Paris still vibrant with the genius of so many centuries, we shall see, spreading out like a blot of ink, the shadow of this disgusting column of bolted tin. \*Printed in Le Temps, February 14, 1887 \* > > _Excerpted from REVOLUTION THE PARIS EXPOSITION UNIVERSELLE, 1889, by Arthur Chandler; Expanded and revised version January, 2000, by Arthur Chandler_ . [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-yorkers-whining-about-new-wtc-designs/152993.md?page=2)