Penn-Led Team Wins WTC Design Competition
PHILADELPHIA - A design by the Daniel Libeskind team, which includes two professors at the University of Pennsylvania, has won the international design competition to rebuild the World Trade Center site in Manhattan.
Libeskind, a Penn professor of architecture, and Gary Hack, a professor of city planning and the dean of Penn's Graduate School of Fine Arts, are the principal designers for the scheme. Their design was chosen from among an original 435 plans submitted.
PHILADELPHIA - A design by the Daniel Libeskind team, which includes two professors at the University of Pennsylvania, has won the international design competition to rebuild the World Trade Center site in Manhattan.
Libeskind, a Penn professor of architecture, and Gary Hack, a professor of city planning and the dean of Penn's Graduate School of Fine Arts, are the principal designers for the scheme. Their design was chosen from among an original 435 plans submitted.
Hack, who chairs the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, said the visionary project is the kind in which GSFA wants to be involved.
The School "has a commitment to being engaged in the most important issue of the day, and this is the most important issue at the moment," he told The Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn's student newspaper.
"We at Penn are so proud of Daniel Libeskind and Gary Hack for their extraordinary accomplishment in creating such an inspirational concept for the World Trade Center site," said Judith Rodin, president of Penn.
"Their work is grand testimony to the strengths and leadership of our Graduate School of Fine Arts. All of us living today and all those who will follow us will be inspired by this remarkable work."
The Libeskind-Hack 16-acre design arranged the buildings so that each Sept. 11 a ray of sunlight will illuminate the site from 8:46 to 10:28 a.m. The scheme also would include the world's tallest building, a spire rising 1,776 feet with the "Gardens of the World" at the top. It would retain a memorial space 30 feet below street level adjacent to the retaining wall that is now part of the excavation of the pit.
