Today, architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) showed off its new design for 2 World Trade Center—a gleaming, 1,340-foot-tall stack of seven glazed volumes—that will replace an earlier scheme by Foster + Partners.
When splashed across newspapers, television screens and Web sites worldwide on December 18, the nine proposals for the World Trade Center site may have looked like a brave new skyscraper world—to paraphrase the headline of December 19th’s New York Daily News—or an exhibition of architectural ego as Lisa Rochon put it in the Toronto Globe and Mail.