Ten years after the World Trade Center (WTC) attacks, we’re still waiting to see what the site will be.  The city has done some powerful PR to make up for the sluggish construction.  There’s a glossy website, WTCProgress, and detailed previews (here and here) of the memorial, which is scheduled to open on September 11.  And the twelve-foot-high scaffolding around the main blocks shows images of steel workers in Iwo Jima-like poses, and renderings of the new Santiago Calatrava-designed subway station and the SOM-designed office tower One WTC (formerly the “Freedom Tower”), which tourists are taking as the backdrop for portraits.

What strikes me most powerfully now is how empty the central block feels, where the Twin Towers once stood and where the new memorial and museum will be.  In addition to being very, very tall, the Towers obstructed views for pedestrians from just about every direction, creating a not-unpleasant sense of urban congestion.  (One of the saddest facts of post-9/11 downtown was the new, clear views of Cesar Pelli’s World Financial Center.)  The WTC block is a central one and an immense one and it will be entirely flat, since the memorials carve water-filled pits at the footprints of the old buildings.  The winning design is called “Reflecting Absence,” but is this too big of an absence?  And does the site call for an absence?  Surrounding the pools, in place of the endless, hyper-modern plaza of white travertine, will be rows of white swamp oaks.  When I was in architecture school we drew rows of trees in site plans to fill spaces we had no specific ideas about; it was a little drafting trick.  I doubt that rows of trees will be enough to fill this block.  Not after the expressive, naturalistic, season-sensitive plantings at the Highline.  And not at a site so dear to so many.