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NEW YORK (CNN) -- The agency overseeing the rebuilding of the 16-acre World Trade Center site is to unveil seven new land-use plans Wednesday that blend skyscrapers with memorials to the victims of September 11.
The new plans from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. are purported to be more dramatic and varied than the first set of plans, which met with lackluster public reaction over the summer. Seven new teams were chosen in October from hundreds that applied to devise new plans.
A series of presentations is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. ET in the World Financial Center, a group of office buildings next door to the WTC site. The seven new plans will be posted at the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. site.
According to a source, common elements among the plans include:
• Tall office buildings rising as high or higher than the original twin towers.
• More than one tract for a memorial to the nearly 3,000 people killed in the terrorist attacks.
• A pedestrian promenade two-thirds of a mile in length going from the western side of the site to the southern edge of Manhattan.
• A terminal the scale of Grand Central Station that would unite dozens of subway and suburban train lines.
"People wanted to see the skyline restored; the skyline is restored by all seven teams," says Roland Betts, an LMDC board member involved in the design process. "The plans look terrific."
The LMDC has set a February 2003 goal for settling on a final land-use plan, either by tweaking one of the new designs or combining elements of several visions into one.
"I'm really anxious to know what resonates with the public," Betts said.
There will be no repeat of July's electronic town meeting attended by 4,000 New Yorkers. Instead, the LMDC will display the plans at the World Financial Center and online, and invite feedback through public hearings and e-mail.
There will likely be more than one proposal for the tallest building in the world, to exceed the 1,483-foot Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and the 1,454-foot Sears Tower in Chicago, Illinois.
"There are a lot of tall buildings," said one source familiar with the plans. "Some are memorials, some are buildings, some are both."
The guidelines for this round called for 6.5 million to 10 million square feet of office space, as much as 1 million square feet of retail shopping space, and a hotel.
Firms were told to avoid building on top of the acre-wide square "footprints" where the twin towers stood and to build no housing on the site.
A total of 32 design firms, individual architects and artists from the United States and four other countries made up the seven teams.
They included a pair of European firms -- Foster and Partners, from London, which built the German Reichstag building in Berlin; and Studio Daniel Libeskind, of Berlin, which built the Jewish Museum in Berlin and is building the Denver Art Museum.
"It's a project that touched me as an immigrant and as a New Yorker," said Libeskind, who came to America in 1959 with his sister and his parents, who were Holocaust survivors.
The signature of his plan is an office tower with dramatic skyline element rising a symbolic 1,776 feet, 416 feet more than the twin towers. He proposes six acres of memorial space and 8 million square feet of office space.
"It's about freedom, it's about America, and it's about New York, and how does the city move forward in the face of these tragic events," Libeskind said.
Among the better-known American architects involved are Richard Meier, who built the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, and Charles Gwathmey, who built the Guggenheim Museum addition and Morgan Stanley's headquarters in New York. They are collaborating.
"Our view is the entire World Trade Center is a sacred precinct, a place of dignity, a place of aspiration, a place of contemplation, and of hope and memory," Meier said.
The centerpiece of his plan is a memorial square with "fingers" extending into Lower Manhattan to symbolize the tragedy. "These events went beyond the site," Meier said.
His team would make three-quarters of the site an open space and would create multiple memorial sites, including pools of water and representations of shadows the towers cast at the moment they fell. Meier would build a pair of tall buildings standing 1,111-feet, but would not make them twin towers.
Another team is led by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which built the Sears Tower and is designing Manhattan's new Penn Station and the headquarters for AOL Time Warner, the parent company of CNN.
Skidmore is already building 7 World Trade Center, a 52-story tower for developer Larry Silverstein, to replace the destroyed office tower that stood just north of the 16-acre WTC site.
Silverstein had signed a 99-year lease for the Trade Center in July 2001 and pays $124 million to the site's owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He is suing his insurers to collect billions of dollars earmarked for rebuilding.
"We have elevated public space to iconic status," said Roger Duffy, who will present the Skidmore plan. "We imagined in the future, cities like New York will be as dense or denser."
Their plan offers nine commercial buildings, each rising to 1,000 feet, or about 80 floors each, totaling 12.5 million square feet of commercial space.
It also calls for acres of public and cultural space inside the buildings, with open spaces inside at 140 feet, 280 feet, 750 feet, and 1,000 feet to be lit at night. Half of the site would be a reflecting pool. Three acres would be set aside for a memorial park.
The smallest firm competing is the husband-wife team of Stephen Peterson and Barbara Littenberg. The promenade, introduced this summer, was originally their idea.
"It could be the Champs-Élysées of New York," Peterson said.
The couple proposes new twin towers rising 1,400 feet with a public garden as the centerpiece. The footprints of the towers will be incorporated into the garden, which will be a memorial space.
The south tower footprint would be a pool, while the north tower footprint would house an amphitheater with the same number of seats as victims -- 2,792, in the city's latest count.
New York architect Frederic Schwartz, who is rebuilding the Staten Island Ferry Terminal in Lower Manhattan, leads a team with members from Japan, Germany and England.
"It's dealing with the neighborhood," Schwartz said. "I live here. I walk out my front door -- that's where the towers were. But we recognize the global importance of what we're doing."
He said his team's plan balances density and open space. "It's quality and concept, not quantity," he said.
All teams received a stipend of $40,000 for their work.
"This has been an incredible -- every minute -- emotional project," Schwartz said. "You have a great responsibility to inspire."
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