Lower Manhattan, New York
The World Trade Center, while a major presence on the skyline and the node for Lower Manhattan, created and reinforced many significant urban problems. Offering little functional diversity, it promoted the isolation from surrounding fabric and from Battery Park City. By not integrating public transportation systems, it fostered the creation of a major on-grade highway. The buildings themselves were not distinguished architecturally or urbanistically. Our project proposes to address these urban issues in the following ways:
- Increase population density and consolidate commuter traffic by creating a major train station linking existing subway and PATH lines to new Metro North and LIRR terminals within the same complex, and the Station to above-ground transportation
- Facilitate pedestrian traffic and re-introduce skyline view corridors along both axes without re-establishing the traffic-inviting street grid
- Depress the Highway express lanes below grade; reinforce east-west pedestrian link to the World Financial Center, Battery Park City and Hudson River
- Extend Greenwich Street south to Vesey Street; create a park at the intersection of Greenwich, Vesey and West Broadway
- Relate new buildings to the scale of existing urban fabric by breaking down the apparent mass of the new complex
- Group the mass of new buildings in the center of the site to create open space and establish diagonal visual links