Winston Churchill knew that architecture could change people as he noted, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
Since mid-December a campaign has been going on to see which designer would win the prize of building the new World Trade Center.
Daniel Libeskind’s design with his 1,776-foot tall towers won that prize. His new towers would exceed the world’s tallest building, the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia at 1,483 feet tall.
Libeskind’s design will set a trend in thought for years to come.
Architecture, as Libeskind calls it, is “a civic art, an art of negotiation.” This is pleasing because architecture in the past has been quite inconvenient to the public with its very diverse designs. Diverse in this sense means trying to fit a square into a circle.
New York Gov. George Pataki and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg were won over with the very patriotic themes in Libeskind’s design.
The towers soar into the sky boasting a height of the year of our nation’s birth –1776.
The “gardens of the world” at the top of the towers are a kind of pantheistic celebration of man and his will to rebuild and survive.
The gardens stand above the office space which shows the importance given to life instead of the corporate “all-about-money lifestyle” that prevailed prior to the attacks.
Libeskind took advice from the public in designing the new towers.
This is a change from the elitist art that has been prevalent in the past century.
His design is a more modern design of architecture with its geometrical buildings all having one center.
The center is the “bathtub” or footprint where the Trade Towers stood. Time magazine writer calls it the “Wailing Wall for the 21st century.”
One of the most interesting features of the design is the public squares.
On 9/11 every year a beam of sunlight will shine across one of the public squares from 8:46 a.m. until 10:28 a.m. This was the time of the beginning attacks until both towers had fallen.
This is an awesome gesture using the supernatural power of the sun to signify the fallen victims on 9/11.
The developers will have the final say on the design but Libeskind has brought a remarkable design to the table. It is a design that centers around one point and is aesthetically pleasing to the public eye.
I believe that the monotruth of the design will be looked at harder in the near future. Especially to those who follow a universal pattern to the world properly named the “intelligent design movement.”
Its proper to remember at this point architecture has set philosophic trends in the past and will most likely do so in the future.
What Libeskind, the son of Holocaust survivors, has done is create a design of structure and a design of oneness. It is a design that involves understanding the people as a whole or a simple understanding. It will be a design understood by those in the highways and the bi-ways.

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