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. 

What becomes of Louis Kahn when buildings actually know what they want to be?

Time magazine recently selected Steven Holl as the best architect in the United States. 

I have written this letter not because I think that the views expressed are the only way to view the making of buildings but because it is a way; one that is rich in design opportunities, that is applicable to most of our building types and locations, and that the architects doing the everyday buildings of this world should know, if not embrace.

About a year before he died, Louis Sullivan, the venerable Chicago architect who was instrumental in the development of the modern American skyscraper, took as his subject the most famous of American skyscraper competitions: the Chicago Tribune Competition. 

Philip Glass I’ve actually done this a couple of times. I did it once for a new museum in Bonn, Germany where I wrote a piece to fit into that building. You know, it’s interesting.

Okay, where do we begin here?

The editors of Architectural Record asked me to write a piece because of a letter I wrote through email about what I thought should be done with the World Trade Center site.