Well, I doubt if anyone would really force someone to work there. After all, it’s common practice (at least here) to ask people if they mind working with folks from other countries/ethnic backgrounds. I imagine that no matter what goes up, one of the interview questions will be, “Would you have a problem working at the site of the WTC?” Considering that some folks are going to be paranoid enough to believe that terrorists are going to crash planes into whatever’s built on the WTC the moment it’s completed. :rolleyes:
What’s wrong with one or two tasteful mediumish towers/buildings with a memorial garden in front? I fail to see the logic behind the drive for “We must make them BIGGER!”
SpazCat, it’s the whole, “Well, the first version obviously wasn’t good enough, so we’ve got to make it better!” Remember, they didn’t simply rebuild Steve Austin, they made him “better, stonger, faster.” It’s the same thing. Folks try to overcompensate for a failure. (Not that the WTC design was a failure, it performed better than expected. Remember, those buildings weren’t designed for such an event, and yet, they lasted for some time afterwards, and didn’t immediately crumble.)
And, personally, to a non-New Yorker, such as myself, the NYC skyline seems naked without those buildings. Yeah, they weren’t all that pretty, I’ll admit, but they belonged there, dammit! Now, every time I watch something filmed in New York, I look for the Towers, and point them out if they’re there. IMHO, until the Towers are restored, at least exactly as they were, there’s somethign wrong in the world.
Really? The buildings always stood out to me as not belonging there. Although I never knew the city without the WTC, it always seemed like a cold, sterile “Logan’s Run” block transplanted into the middle of an Art Deco city.
And I couldn’t put my finger on it before, but I think my biggest problem with putting up something massive and even bigger than the WTC towers is that the buildings themselves weren’t the most important part of what was lost. Sure, we can say, “Screw you, we can replace these buildings even bigger than they were before,” but really, who cares? Of course we can replace buildings; that’s not in question. We can’t replace 2700 people.
That’s not being defeatist; it’s just acknowledging that rebuilding the towers or some other huge building won’t make everything right again. So why not move the emphasis away from replacing the buildings to improving the lives of people in the city? Making something that better fits in with the city instead of being massive and oppressive? Shift the emphasis away from buildings and to the people living & working in those buildings?
Sol Grundy, if I had a choice between having the buildings intact or having the 2700 people alive, I’d chose the people, even though I didn’t know anyone who died.
Part of the reason why people want the buildings to be put back as they were is because we can’t restore the lives of those who were lost. It’s a way of saying, “Well, if we can’t have them, at least we can have things back the way they were before this happened.”
As Max put it, “If they took out the White House, would the country want some stylish replacement, or the same building?” We’d all want the White House back, because to our minds Washington DC wouldn’t be the same without it. NYC just isn’t the same without the WTC. Even with a rebuilt WTC, it won’t be the same, but sometimes, humans need to be able to pretend, and with an identical WTC, they’ll be able to pretend all they want.
Just for clarity’s sake: I wasn’t implying otherwise, that you or anybody else who wanted the buildings back the way they were, were being callous about the people killed.
And I guess the difference between the White House and the WTC, at least for me, is that I never saw the WTC as a symbol of New York, where the White House is definitely a symbol of the presidency. The Empire State Building and Chrysler Building and Statue of Liberty say “New York City” to me, while the twin towers were always unremarkable unless they were mixed in with the rest of the skyline. Obviously, many people do recognize the WTC as a symbol of New York, both to want to see it rebuilt and, unfortunately, to have chosen it as a target.
SolGrundy, didn’t think you had, just felt it needed to be said as too much of the discussion around the WTC centers around the memorial and the buildings and not on those who died.
Why rebuild massive buildings there at all? The city doesn’t need the office space they would provide, at least not in today’s New York economy.
I want to know about the logistics of how these huge skyscrapers would work. If you construct something even bigger than the WTC, how do people get into and out of the building every day? What kind of commuter’s Hell On Earth are you creating? What happens if there’s another terrorist attack (or some other emergency, like an earthquake or fire) and you have to evacuate the building quickly? As it is, 3000 people couldn’t get out of the WTC quickly enough.
In the case of the mile-high skyscraper, I think that the guy was imagining that people would live in the building. Sorta like the ancient Chinese guys who were born on the Great Wall, spent their entire lives guarding it, and were buried inside of it 
Did someone hear a squeak?.. Naah, it was probably nothing. Carry on.
Diceman, I’d wager that the reason most of the nearly 3000 who died didn’t get out was because of the intensity of the fire on the floors below them. IAC, designers have now been taking such things into consideration (and given that less than 3000 out of a total number of around 50,000 occupants of the WTC died, I’d say that the original designers did a pretty good job, considering that the Towers were hit with far larger planes than they were ever designed against), remember that in the years since the Towers were built, engineering has come a long way. Much of what was innovative in the original WTC has now become commonplace. Additionally, I’d imagine that NYC does need the office space, since the Towers had as much office space as the entire city of Atlanta according to an NPR report.