PLANNING FOR THE WORST.

Those impersonal formulations--Sorkin and Zukin's "bromide", Huxtable's"pressure"--imply that the project'scramped horizons were baked into theprocess. The war onterror and the World Trade Center havethis in common: They are profoundly contradictoryworks-in-progress, confoundingattempts to distinguish betweenachievement and surrender. The WorldTrade Center campus was supposed to becomean acropolis devoted to America'shighest aspirations, a representation ofresilience, creativity, and life as an answerto fanatical nihilism. "Everywhere thebromide is retailed that to rebuild somethingbigger, taller, and better than ever isthe only way to respond to the terrorists."(Sorkin suggested that the destruction ofthe financial hub should lead to a more"polycentric" city, with commercial nodesscattered throughout the boroughs.) In distributing blame so widely yet specifically,Sorkin and Zukin strongly suggestedthat nameable individuals had madeidentifiable mistakes, ceding vision in thename of short-term goals. [Extracted from the article]