Remember all the fuss about the rebuilding of World Trade Centre after 9/11? Remember the THINK design, which showed a pair of airy latticework cylinders arising over the twin towers' footprints and incorporated various components of a World Cultural Center? The one where commercial development would have been pushed to the periphery of the site. Remember the winning design by Daniel Liebskind?

Have a quick look here. Well the New York Review of Books has a tale to tell. It was accurately foretold by Ada Louise Huxtable:

[New York is] "a city incapable of the large, appropriate gesture in the public interest if it costs too much....If the usual scenario is followed, the debate will lead to a "solution" in which principle is lost and an epic opportunity squandered. With the best intentions the Municipal Art Society, a conscientious watchdog of the city's urban quality, will announce a competition to determine what should be done with the site. The results will make a nice little exhibition, and discussions and lectures will be held. All this will be ignored by the movers and shakers making big building plans under the banner of physical and symbolic reconstruction. There will be a fuss in the press, with letters to the editor, pro and con. City Hall, in a split political decision between greed and glory, will come out for the builders and a memorial---a monument or a small park, something financially inoffensive in the larger scheme of things."