By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 19, 2002; Page C01

NEW YORK -- Rafael Vinoly, a world-renowned architect of grandly simple yet unpredictably vaulting megastructures, talks of buildings that "articulate" themselves, that "generate meaning." Structures must propel a notion, he says. In the case of the fallen World Trade Center towers, he talks of how the "sacrifices" of the nearly 2,800 dead can become the "basis of a generosity" that translates into structural form; how the "moments of heroism" at the twin towers are architecturally transformative.

His team's design philosophy document was simply titled "THINK." One word, emblazoned over a document sent to the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. this fall, intended to stimulate a city trying to rebuild. And it stuck. Vinoly and the other designers in his team of architects now are known simply as the THINK team, with a design philosophy that reads, in part, "pragmatism and realism are not the enemies of imagination, but the source of its capacity to effectively induce physical and cultural change."

The Uruguayan-born and Argentine-bred architect, with offices in New York as well as Buenos Aires and London, stood before New York City yesterday to explain the designs his THINK team has presented. As usual, he wore one pair of glasses, had another resting on his head, and another dangling around his neck. Vinoly and his colleagues were among seven high-powered architectural teams vying to redesign and rebuild the 16-acre swath of Lower Manhattan that terrorists leveled last year.

But even before yesterday's unveiling, Vinoly agreed to sit down with a reporter earlier this week to reflect on the process that has engaged him and many of the sharpest architectural minds in the world. Though the development corporation's rules forbade him from revealing the substance of the designs presented yesterday, he provided a snapshot of the collective challenge of tackling such an unprecedented task -- with all the world watching the fate of this hallowed and historic site.

Vinoly, who lives in New York, did not visit Ground Zero for more than a year after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. He was not among the legions of architects and urban planners who began churning out drawings of a new site in the days immediately after the crisis. Nonetheless, he describes his engagement with the site this fall as a journey for him personally, and the design process in general as an epoch-making one for his profession.

"It's an extraordinary chance to really contribute to a healing process that has to go beyond just revenge," he said, chatting for more than an hour at his Lower Manhattan architecture headquarters, Rafael Vinoly Architects.

"There are very few moments in architectural history in which what you're doing has a direct connection with the generation of meaning. . . . So like building a cathedral was in the 13th century, or like building a public plaza was in the 15th century, or like building a Crystal Palace was at the end of the Industrial Revolution, it's this type of thing."

He is known for transforming space into the unexpected. Inspired in part by his own musical training and a father who was artistic director of an Argentine operatic theater, his cello-shaped Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, with its barrel-vaulted plate-glass roof, conjures a huge glass jar to house precious specimens. His Tokyo International Forum, situated on 6.7 acres, includes an inverted dome ceiling that reminds one of a giant ship's hull of glass and steel.

Each project, he says, began with a conjuring, an imagining of form and meaning. And so it has been for Vinoly and his three principal design partners as they considered the dramatic story of Ground Zero.

"The vision that we have of this site, this problem, this event, or that we will have a decade from now, will be very, very different," Vinoly said in his deep Argentine accent. "And part of the difference is precisely how you conduct this process of mourning together with the need for reconstruction. This is a project not only of the tension between remembrance and redevelopment, but it is a project of renewal."

It's a symbiosis. Remembrance and redevelopment, he says, "need each other. But they clearly have different requirements of space and generation of meaning. . . . So you put all of that as a conceptual framework, and from there you can almost analyze any part of the project. Visual symbolism. Access. Structural connotations. The whole thing."

The THINK team rendered the trade center site in three different models -- more than any of the other teams that presented designs yesterday. (Actually the team made six models, but did not unveil its scale models of Manhattan and the new buildings it proposes.)

The team is made up of Vinoly, architect Frederic Schwartz, structural experimenter Shigeru Ban and expressionist landscaper Ken Smith. Each man brought his firm and staff on board, creating a team of nearly 60 people, though Vinoly, 58, serves as its leader.

The team has labored nonstop since early October, largely under a cloak of secrecy. At Rafael Vinoly Architects, the staff even papered over the street-level windows, so passersby would not see the models under construction.

They have run through some 30 design renderings and a dozen models in a grueling process that included sessions of artistically disciplined brainstorming, as well as "lots of fighting," Vinoly says playfully. And the rush to deadline felt "like murder," he says.

But it's done, for now. And once again, the ball is in the court of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which commissioned the designs. After its resoundingly rejected foray into trade center designs earlier this year -- when New Yorkers of all stripes, laymen and practitioners alike, rebelled against a perceived over-commercialization of the site -- the development corporation has given the seven teams far more leeway to be creative within certain perimeters.

They were to produce a distinctive skyline while still preserving the footprints of the fallen twin towers; to add cultural elements and public spaces to the site, such as a museum or performing arts center; and still preserve the underground transit center of commuter trains and subways that once served the trade center.

The teams will be winnowed down, eventually, to a smaller number who will design the site in earnest. A separate design competition for the World Trade Center memorial is to begin in the spring.

But all this creativity is unfolding against a backdrop of municipal tension and confusion over the competing development agendas of several players. The office of Mayor Michael Bloomberg has its own ideas about Lower Manhattan redevelopment, as does the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the land where the trade center once stood, not to mention Larry Silverstein, the real estate mogul and trade center leaseholder who in effect owned the twin towers. Beyond the decision-makers, the families of the trade center victims also have a strong voice in the process; they were primary advocates for the preservation of the twin tower footprints, which was a key feature of all the plans presented yesterday.

Last but obviously not least is the question of the budget. Setting aside the commercial buildings that presumably will finance themselves, how much are city, state even federal officials willing to fork out for the development of the public spaces? On that, the development corporation gave the architects no clue. But the Vinoly team attacked the budget problem anyway.

"It's a very difficult dilemma, defining a design for which you have no budget," Vinoly says. "If you say there is cultural infrastructure and there are public spaces, how much is there to pay for all of that? They claim that you're supposed to think irrespective of that, that it's commensurate to the critical nature of the project. On a different level, if you're really thinking of it not as an exercise in intellectual discourse but basically as a plan, you need to study what happens with different levels of funding for those components.

"That is something that we felt was our contribution to the process, which is to show three schemes that correspond to three different levels of budget."

He described them simply as a minimalist approach, a moderate approach, and an approach that he calls "the most pertinent one, simply because if I asked you or any of your readers whether the public deserves a larger budget." He laughs at the obvious answer. "On that level, it seems like a no-brainer," he says, assuming the public would opt for the "most pertinent one."

"It's very well studied and it's priced out, but it is a very significant number. It's close to a billion" dollars. "And I think that is an extraordinary proposition.

"So the three are very inspirational, I think, but they can do different things."

Should his team be included in the final design process, he knows his professional life for at least a decade would be consumed by this megaproject. That is the goal, he says, "to continue in the journey."

"The whole thing is incredibly exciting. It's totally mind-blowing. You can't think of anything else. . . .

"This is not a moment for professional speculation. That's what I think is so critical -- not only Wednesday, but weeks or months after that. If you don't get this thing right, then it is a failure at a cultural level of our system, and by that I mean not only our system of government but also our system of participation, our culture, our discipline."

© 2002 The Washington Post Company