New World Trade Center is fine but it could have been great

The Twin Towers underperformed as office buildings and stunk as architecture.But no one who knew them will ever forget them.

Millions of New Yorkers — and millions upon millions of Americans — miss their iconic, double thumbs-up thrust into the sky.If the new World Trade Center represents a “lost opportunity” to New York Times architectural sages who preferred apartments at the site, it’s a different brand of disappointment to Americans who wanted something better than a contemporized and somewhat more humane replacement for the commercial complex terrorists destroyed.After the infamy of 9/11, we deserved an architectural Midway — the great US naval triumph six months after Pearl Harbor that marked the beginning of the end for Japan’s Pacific Ocean dominion. We instead got a new, highly functional World Trade Center but without the visual passion and majesty it was our right to insist on after the atrocity of Sept.11, 2001.We deserved a new set of twin towers taller than the originals but graced with superior, 21st Century glass curtain-wall design.  Or we deserved a single, triumphant spire taller than any in the world, including the 2,722-foot-tall Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

That super-skyscraper was designed by an American architect, Adrian Smith.Why couldn’t he have been tapped to do the same at Ground Zero, where the Twin Towers once reigned as the world’s tallest buildings.The emotional hunger remains unsatisfied, not only for victims’ loved ones but  for many of us who wanted a bolder, more definitive response to the slaughter of 2,997 human beings.To understand how and why we have a new World Trade Center that’s much better than the original, yet lacking spirit and soul, let’s revisit  the political and media climate that dominated after 9/11.For five years after the attack, we were made to feel selfish and insensitive even for wanting a replacement of any sort on teh hallowed ground.

Critics in government, in learned architectur...