A more jaundiced look  

New York has chosen the Libeskind design for the WTC site. Slate's Chirstopher Hawthorne had some interesting analysis of the design on Tuesday:

Like Muschamp and many other critics, when I first saw a model of the Libeskind scheme at the World Financial Center I felt in it an emotional power that was lacking in the other schemes, which, despite moments of architectural inspiration, tended to be rather cold, even tactical, on the whole. Libeskind's proposal, on the other hand, succeeded as a coherent, artistic whole: It suggested leaving the WTC pit as an unfinished hole in the ground contained by rough-hewn slurry walls, around which would grow a new crop of translucent towers, including a sharply peaked tower with sky gardens on its upper floors. Of all the plans, it alone seemed to achieve a remarkable balance between mourning and our desire to reach back into the sky.

Muschamp himself has identified the proposal's "graphically powerful first impression." But with the benefit of distance, he has begun to take a more jaundiced look at Libeskind's uncanny talent for tapping into emotions like grief and our bewilderment at the range of human cruelty. Libeskind's recent success is directly traceable to his mining of this talent: I can't think of a single Libeskind design that doesn't exploit it to one degree or another. In a building like his best-known finished work, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, these responses seem entirely appropriate to the task. But in a process involving a good deal of salesmanship, as the World Trade Center dog-and-pony show has, these talents are capable of looking suspect, even tawdry. Muschamp is certainly not the only critic to have noted this. In a recent New Republic essay, Martin Filler labeled Libeskind "an entrepreneur of commemoration."