While the clean up of ground zero continues, talk of what should rise from the ashes persists in abundance. Franck Lohsen McCrery, Architects proposed a master plan for the renewal and reorganization of Manhattan’s financial district. The project includes one skyscraper, One Liberty Square, which the firm intends to be the tallest building in the world.
"Every American and every person throughout the world who respects freedom has a stake in what is to become of the former WTC site and the New York City skyline," the firm wrote. "In responding to the tragedy, the American people have a need for a new beacon of hope to show the rest of the world, and future generations, that the American spirit lives on. Countrymen who lost loved ones that day from the United States and from dozens of other nations, need an honorable place to remember the tragedy, those who lost their lives, and those brave souls who tried to save them."
The firm developed the WTC site proposal at the invitation of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Franck Lohsen McCrery, along with Scottish sculptor Alexander Stoddart, proposed the plan. Among the additions: nine more buildings to surround One Liberty Square, with memorial occupying two city blocks at the head of the square marking the place where thousands of victims died on Sept. 11. At the square’s southern edge statues in memory of New York’s firefighters and police officers will be placed.
Twelve city blocks are planned for the World Trade Center site alone. According to the firm, the reconstruction of the site would allow New York the opportunity to improve access to, from and throughout the southern end of Manhattan.
The firm contends that the former WTC site reconstruction is necessary to make a more livable and workable space: "On a more local level, New Yorkers, businesses, visitors and commuters using and moving about the southern tip of Manhattan every day have a need for better spaces to live and work and improved ways of moving throughout the region."
