WTC: Protecting A Master Plan From The Gnats

“Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for the former World Trade Center site, selected Wednesday, is a new noble, logical diagram – one that is sure to need a shield if real estate interests try to torture it with death by a thousand ‘gnat bites,’ as Robert Ivy, the editor of Architectural Record, so trenchantly put it. It inevitably will be changed, as all master plans are, as the economy rises and falls, as interest groups like the victims’ families make their voices heard, and as political actors enter and exit from the stage. The questions are: Will the change be for good or ill?”