No sooner had the World Trade Center been destroyed than people—politicians, the press, architects, concerned citizens—began to consider new projects for the site. Ordinarily, any development at such a scale would have been complicated enough, as these things always are in New York. But the ultimate responsibility would have devolved upon the site’s owner and/or leaseholder—respectively, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the developer Larry Silverstein.

No sooner had the World Trade Center been destroyed than people—politicians, the press, architects, concerned citizens—began to consider new projects for the site.

But this project was nothing ordinary. The World Trade Center was destroyed in a gruesome act of terror intended to kill as many people as possible—indeed, to kill many more people than even the vast number killed—and to cripple the U.S. economy. Thus the rebuilding became a matter of intense public concern and press scrutiny. Some New Yorkers felt that the only legitimate response to the terror would be to reconstruct the Twin Towers exactly as they had been. This had an undeniable emotional appeal. The problem was that the World Trade Center had been an architectural and developmental boondoggle to begin with, and there was as much of an emotional appeal to the notion that we could build something much better on the site.

At an early citizens’ meeting convened to discuss the rebuilding, an audience member rose to suggest that we should just hand the project over to Frank Gehry. After all, had not The New York Times and other authorities proclaimed him our greatest living architect? At that point, one knew that this was going to be an architectural three-ring circus.

In Up from Zero, Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic for The New Yorker and the former architecture critic for The New York Times, has pulled the many diverse strands of the far-from-finished story of the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site into a coherent narrative. He attended countless citizens’ meetings and, long after the rest of us had grown bleary-eyed with the whole business, kept up with seemingly every press account of the goings-on at Ground Zero.

While those involved in the rebuilding pride themselves on the “unprecedented” degree of public participation in the planning process, for the vast majority of half-attentive New Yorkers, the whole business has been mysterious. The State of New York placed the rebuilding largely in the hands of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), which was charged with working to satisfy the often conflicting needs and desires of the Port Authority, Silverstein, the 9/11 families, downtown businesses, Mayor Bloomberg, the traumatized public, and—as it turned out—Herbert Muschamp, who was Goldberger’s replacement as architecture critic for The New York Times. The state handed the LMDC a daunting brief. Goldberger makes clear that the LMDC has done as well as can be expected under the circumstances. Such LMDC figures as its chairman John Whitehead and its master planner Alexander Garvin are good and capable men with a real love of New York and with an honest desire to do right by all concerned parties. That desire to do right goes to the extent of their willingness all along to say they have made mistakes and to take the process back some steps. This was what they did when, in 2002, they commissioned a set of studies from the New York architects Beyer Blinder Belle.

At an early citizens’ meeting convened to discuss the rebuilding, an audience member rose to suggest that we should just hand the project over to Frank Gehry.

These studies were never meant to be final, but rather to suggest architectural arrangements that comported with the Port Authority’s and Larry Silverstein’s stated needs. Nonetheless, the half-attentive public, led by the half-attentive press, clamored for the rejection not only of the Port Authority’s commercially motivated redevelopment program, but also of what press and public deemed the dreary, banal aesthetics of Beyer Blinder Belle’s published studies.

Beyer Blinder Belle is a firm that made its name with restoration and renovation projects, of which by far the most famous is Grand Central Terminal. When it comes to their original work, Beyer Blinder Belle is in the mainstream of what some have called a new Manhattan “vernacular” of basically Modernist buildings veneered in patterned masonry intended to make streetscapes in concert with the city’s traditional buildings. At their best, buildings in this new idiom are handsome, but never stirring. The patterning is dull, the veneers brittle-seeming. Only occasionally do architects employ vague or stylized classical devices that raise the patterning to the level of ornamentation. Still, this approach values a kind of elegant dullness, not so different from that of the earlier “glass box vernacular” that devolved from the works of Mies van der Rohe, but in better keeping with the urbanistic imperatives of Manhattan streets.

That this new idiom should be standard in the age of “star-chitecture” galls the cultural trendmongers. Their constant harping has brought to Manhattan works by such international stars of architecture as Christian de Portzamparc, Raimund Abraham, Yoshio Taniguchi, Aldo Rossi, Renzo Piano, Bernard Tschumi, and, if only in the form of a Prada boutique, Rem Koolhaas, and has altered the aesthetics of such local firms as that of James Stewart Polshek. Still, for some, we have had hardly enough of fashionable architects in New York, as most of our commercial developers continue to rely on the tried-and-true as purveyed by Beyer Blinder Belle or Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Ground Zero was the most prominent building site in the world. Certain Manhattan interests would do whatever it took to ensure that whatever got built there would help New York to reassert itself as an architectural trendsetter.

To this end, as Goldberger recounts, Herbert Muschamp did something no other New York architecture critic had ever done. In the pages of The New York Times Magazine, he convened his own architectural competition, made up of all his favorite architects, some of them his personal friends. The idea was no less than to show up the LMDC by presenting “daring” and “edgy” works of contemporary architecture and urban design by the most chi-chi members of the profession.

I admit that I was no more inspired than anyone else by the Beyer Blinder Belle studies. But I was rather sanguine in my uninspired state. For I feared Ground Zero would become a fashion show—which, the LMDC’s best and noble intentions notwithstanding, is exactly what it became. And it was not an architecture critic but a literary critic, Leon Wieseltier, who blew the whistle, though to no avail.

The LMDC chose to conduct a compe-tition clearly modeled on Muschamp’s—down to several of the architects invited to participate. Indeed, the LMDC, with but one exception, followed Muschamp’s aesthetics completely, and as a result paid no heed to the vast diversity of architecture in our time. In riposte, Myron Magnet, the editor of City Journal, asked the Washington, D.C.-based firm of Franck Lohsen McCrery to produce a classical design for Ground Zero. One may well dislike Franck Lohsen McCrery’s design, but that it is serious architecture is undeniable, and such a work should have been presented to the public by the LMDC. The LMDC’s lone exception to the Muschamp canon was to invite the firm of Peterson/Littenberg to participate, though it was a foregone conclusion that their plan would never receive serious consideration. That it was also far and away the best plan seems somehow appropriate. Peterson/Littenberg’s buildings were much in the “new vernacular” mode, but their arrangement among streets and open spaces partook of a “New Urbanist” methodology that sought to reintegrate the World Trade Center superblock into the traditional pattern of downtown streets, which was the single most sensible thing that could be done with the site. Peterson/Littenberg’s plan also forswore showmanship, which one might have thought appropriate to a site of mourning. Yet showmanship was the order of the day as the starchitects duked it out.

The LMDC narrowed the choices to two. One was the “World Cultural Center” plan proposed by a firm called THINK, comprising several well-known architects including Rafael Viñoly and Frederic Schwartz, two New Yorkers who are fixtures on the cultural scene in Manhattan. The other finalist was the scheme “Memory Foundations” by Studio Daniel Libeskind.

Libeskind won. But he soon felt a little less like a winner, as, under pressure of commercial necessities, his plan was much altered, and he had to accept a partnership with Larry Silverstein’s favorite architect, David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Childs had, unlike Libeskind, designed skyscrapers before—indeed, had designed so many he could probably do it in his sleep.

We incline to the belief that compromise in such situations is a bad thing. But here I am not so sure. Libeskind is a serious and talented architect. He was relatively little known to the general public before he won the competition. But he was a star among the cognoscenti, and his Holocaust Museum in Berlin is generally considered one of the most important works of architecture in our time. Before that, Libeskind had become known as one of the subjects of the Museum of Modern Art’s 1988 “Deconstructivist Architecture” exhibition, which put an end to the 1980s vogue for classicized “postmodernism.” Libeskind won the competition, in part, by his verbal rather than his architectural skills. He succeeded, as Goldberger shows us, by making his “deconstructivism” seem somehow the ideal expression of American patriotism. The Israeli architect Hillel Schocken, in a letter reproduced by the mathematician and architecture critic Nikos A. Salingaros in his superb new book Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction, says

I think architects should be barred by law from talking about their buildings! The architecture must talk to the public in a purely architectural language.

I feel strongly that this should have been a requirement of this competition. Libeskind, as Schocken says, “can sell ice to the Eskimos.” Any alteration by David Childs or others of Libeskind’s designs will only underscore the disconnection between his words and his buildings, and that can only be a good thing. And while many people felt that the project should have nothing to do with nasty commerce, which sullies the purity of emotion, in fact the heed paid to commerce may ultimately help humanize Libeskind’s violent forms.

The project for Ground Zero comprises more than just the Childs/Libeskind buildings, which in fact represent only the commercial component of the project. We have in addition a transportation component, a cultural-center component, and a memorial component. Of these, the transportation component appears by far the most promising. This subway and commuter rail station is being designed by the Spanish engineer Santiago Calatrava, who has created works around the world that transcend the structural exhibitionism of their type to exude something like poetry. Based on early drawings, one has high hopes for the transit station he has conceived for the site. The cultural buildings will house varied institutions chosen from among many that clamored for the attention a Ground Zero location would confer. The Signature Theater and the Joyce International Dance Center are slated to occupy a building by Frank Gehry, while the Drawing Center and a museum, the brainchild of Tom A. Bernstein, called the Freedom Center, will occupy a building by the Norwegian firm Snohetta. (The complex will also include cafés, gift shops, and a Pilates studio.) Finally, there is the memorial, for many New Yorkers the most significant part of the project.

Michael Arad titled his work, chosen in an awesomely inclusive competition, “Reflecting Absence.” He is revising his design in collaboration with Peter Walker. The work combines landscape elements with the sort of minimalism that has become de rigueur since Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The real problem with the memorial, and with the entire manner in which the overall project has been conceived, has nothing to do with aesthetics or urbanism, and everything to do with timing. Goldberger notes, as others have, that we have designed and constructed our finest memorials many years after the events commemorated:

But at Ground Zero, the priority of the memorial-planning process was the concerns of victims’ family members, and that led to pressure to find and execute a design quickly. Concern about helping people who had suffered losses in the trade-center attack was a legitimate and even urgent priority for society, but it was not always consistent with the creation of a memorial that would have meaning for those who did not live through September 11, the generations yet to come.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 deserve commemoration. But we have proceeded at Ground Zero as though what happened there was a one-off. It may not be. And that is why we should have waited to think about its memorial.