The Battle For Ground Zero, Part 82

So, the site plan for the Ground Zero reconstruction is still up in the air, which means that the master plan still isn't set in stone. As it stands, the Freedom Tower is set to go up beginning early next year and Sir Norman Foster has been chosen to design the second office tower to go up on the site.

A key premise of Mr. Libeskind's plan is that office towers will ring the memorial like a "three-dimensional spiral," descending in height from the Freedom Tower, or Tower 1, to the southernmost building off Liberty Street, Tower 5. (In this array, 200 Greenwich Street is Tower 2.)

Originally, Mr. Libeskind wanted every rooftop to slope toward the memorial. In the October 2003 draft of the guidelines, he even proposed a formula with precise ratios to ensure "increasingly canted profiles."

By February 2004, that exacting formula had been replaced with this injunction: "Each roof should inflect toward the memorial and the slopes should increase beginning with Tower 5's roof as the shallowest and Tower 1's as the greatest."

A November 2004 development agreement softened the idea further. "Each tower top should acknowledge the memorial in a meaningful and appropriate way," the revision stated. "For example, each roof could inflect toward the memorial and the slopes could decrease, beginning with Tower 1's roof as the greatest slope." Since then, the Freedom Tower has lost its sloping roof altogether.

At a news conference concerning 200 Greenwich Street on Dec. 15, Mr. Silverstein was asked whether the building would follow the design guidelines. He replied that it would follow the master site plan; a different document that lays out building locations and footprints. And he added, "Rooftops are not part of a master site plan."

What does this say about the master plan and Libeskind's design? Simply that nearly every single aspect of the plan has been abandoned or highly modified by others because of practical, security, and engineering concerns.