How to fill the void at the World Trade Center site? The answer, provided by seven visionary teams of architects gathered from around the world, lies in towers; towers that are sculpted and even folded slightly as if in prayer position. In the submissions presented at New York's Winter Gardens yesterday, there are towers that kiss in mid-air, while others stand up like soldiers aligned in a military grid. Some are beautiful. Most of them carry a tremendous wallop of architectural ego.

These towers are tall. Taller than the World Trade towers that once stood at the southern tip of Manhattan. The kissing towers by Foster and Partners, one of the teams solicited by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. to provide a comprehensive scheme for the devastated site, measure 1,765 feet high. At 1,368 feet, the WTC towers seem rather squat in comparison. The soaring monument proposed by Studio Daniel Libeskind, the architect of the Royal Ontario Museum's redevelopment in Toronto, measures 1,776 feet.

The monumental scale of the towers dominates in a competition being scrutinized by architects, planners and urbanites around the world. The problem of what to build within the 16-acre WTC site and its surrounding district cannot, of course, be reduced to an architectural beauty contest to be won by the biggest and the boldest icon. The teams were also required to absorb issues of public space in lower Manhattan, reconnection of streets and transportation infrastructure -- this is an urban problem of staggering complexity and golden opportunities. Many other cities, from Berlin to Hiroshima to Warsaw, have grappled with similar challenges of how to fill the void left over by war. But because New York sits at the epicentre of economic and cultural power, this particular problem resonates deeply around the world.

For the world's eyes, Foster and Partners present a crystalline tower described by the London-based team as based on "triangular geometries -- cross-cultural symbols of harmony, wisdom, purity, unity and strength." Public observation platforms occur high up in the air where the two halves of the tower meet or kiss. These links, luckily enough, also provide escape routes from one section of the tower to another.

Atriums within the tower provide tree-filled parks in the sky to help purify the natural air that will ventilate the building. The Foster strategy does not come as a surprise. The firm has produced some masterpieces of technology, including the Commerzbank in Frankfurt, Germany (1997), which is currently the tallest commercial tower in Europe.

A park in the sky figured importantly in the scheme by Think Design. Developed by landscape architect Ken Smith and architects Rafael Vinoly, Shigeru Ban and Frederick Schwartz, the submission includes a 10-block public park that rises from West Street at St. Paul's Chapel to climb 10 storeys across several streets, eventually culminating in a three-acre lawn. The park is intended as a living memorial that floats above New York's street grid.

The American firm Skidmore Owings and Merrill asserted in its response to the design brief that rebuilding at the WTC requires a keen "reconciliation of practicality with vision, of reality with abstraction." The firm's scheme proposes several towers, slightly folded and cartoon-like, that rise about 80 storeys high. The towers are meant to be incubators for intense urban activities. "The future of the global city must provide substantive solutions for increasingly densified space," the team writes in their submission. Sixteen acres of sky gardens are proposed for the commercial and residential towers.

All of the submissions by the designers were laced with emotion, and attempts, some better than others, to explain the cultural and spiritual repercussions of the 9/11 tragedy on the American people. A particularly clichéd metaphor is presented by the American team of Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and Steven Holl for the WTC site. Their scheme includes some useful written insights, such as: "Civilizations are judged in part by what they choose to build.

The entire world is watching to see how New York rebuilds." But the team's rendering provides an architectural assault on the skyline with inter-connected buildings appearing as a heavy and pedantic structural lattice. The horizontal sections are described as fingers -- a clichéd metaphor meant to suggest that the magnitude of the tragedy points to all corners of the world.

The young team assembled under the umbrella of United Architects provides an undulating grouping of towers that appear to be cross-braced on the exterior. Five towers in the scheme are connected on the 57th floor with the tallest tower rising to 112 stories. Visitors are invited to look up at the monumental scale of the buildings from a lower pedestrian walkway.

The seventh scheme, featuring two art-deco inspired tall towers, was rendered by the husband-wife team of Peterson Littenberg. The New York-based team was previously commissioned by the LMDC to prepare an urban-design scheme of the WTC site. That plan was rejected outright by the public during a watershed town meeting at the Javits Center last June.

All seven schemes will be displayed in New York and exhibited to the wider public on the Web site for the LMDC.

Three firms will be selected in the next several weeks and a final plan for the WTC site will be released in February. The public is invited to log their gut feelings about the individual schemes before that happens.
lrochon@globeandmail.ca