O Brave New World!

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For weeks it appeared that Libeskind had the upper hand, until a last-minute push for Vinoly/THINK by lmdc heavyweight Roland Betts, a New York City developer and former Yale roommate of George W. Bush's. After a four-hour meeting last Tuesday in which both proposals were examined over sandwiches, the lmdc's site committee, which Betts heads, voted 43, with one abstention, in favor of Vinoly. But the next day their recommendation was overruled by Pataki and Bloomberg, who had long favored Libeskind's plan. Betts says that's fine. "Nobody was Vinoly or bust," he insists.

Now it's Libeskind or bust. Though born in Poland, he's a U.S. citizen. He likes to remind people that at 13 he came to the U.S. with his parents, Holocaust survivors, arriving on a ship that glided past the Statue of Liberty. For much of his architectural career, he was a teacher and theorist, not a builder. Then in the late 1980s, while living in Europe, he won a competition to design the Jewish Museum of Berlin. His complex building, a zinc-clad thunderbolt, operates in a way similar to that of Trade Center design. Its very lines acknowledge a calamity — in this case the Holocaust — while offering pathways for a story of survival and continuity. It instantly made him a worldwide design star, with commissions in Europe, Asia and the U.S., including a planned addition to the Denver Art Museum in his most explosive style.

Berlin also gave Libeskind combat experience in guiding a controversial design to completion. Now he and his wife Nina are moving back to New York City, looking for a new home "right next to the site." Architects like to keep a close eye on things. By the time of his death in 1926, Antonio Gaudi was living full time on the construction site of his masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. For the record, it's still unfinished.