New York City was amply represented during last night's National Design Awards at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The Landscape Design award went to PWP Landscape Architecture, the firm that won the World Trade Center Memorial design competition (with Michael Arad). PWP Principal Peter Walker thanked Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki and described the last four years as "difficult," presumably for the number of redesigns and challenges with moving the project forward, but he......

If there's something politicians know how to do, it's to convene a committee! The NY Times focuses on how everyone wants new plans to bring the WTC Memorial budget down - there's that much agreement. But the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has one committee working on it...and Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg created another committee to work on ideas! Double the thinking, infinite times the resentment! The LMDC team includes the builder Bovis, whose......

If you want to be thoroughly depressed by the rebuilding process at Ground Zero in a matter of pages, versus a matter of years, Gothamist highly recommends reading New York magazine's cover story about the WTC Memorial and its architect, Michael Arad. It's an exclusive interview where Arad spill his guts about the process, but also gets worked over as one of the many egos in cast of a million egos and billion interests.......

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation announced that the WTC rebuild "would necessarily involve significant traffic, noise and short-term air quality impacts during its construction period." Thanks for pointing that out! Gothamist guesses that it's the LMDC's job to put it on the books that they know these things, but we feel that most people might infer that building an almost 2,000-foot high skyscraper, a new PATH station, a memorial, new plazas, parks, streets, etc., would......

The Times reports that a slew of top design firms have applied to beomce the "associate architect" of the WTC memorial, Reflecting Absence, alongside Michael Arad and Peter Walker. Reporter David Dunlap says this could be a sign that the project is too huge in scope for Arad Walker (or any small team). And let's face it, NYC design firms have been wanting to get into the redesign of the WTC, given the democratic process......

While the purpose of the Times article about selected WTC memorial Reflecting Absence is to explain how landscape architect Peter Walker joined original designer Michael Arad, the real story is about designer and WTC memorial juror Maya Lin. Lin, who designed the Vietnam War Memorial as well as the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, AL, as well as a dreamy Wave Field at University of Michigan, was a supporter of Reflecting Absence. The article......

The design, Reflecting Absence, by Michael Arad and new collaborator, Peter Walker, was selected to be the WTC Memorial. This design incorporate two submerged pools in the space where the towers once stood. Arad, an architect with the City Housing Authority, worked with Walker, a landscape architect who formerly headed the Harvard Landscape Architect Department; the Times has more about both designers. Mayor Bloomberg is especially proud that Arad is a city employee. The......