Elie Gamburg's architectural thesis project is challenging, controversial

By Linda Myers

Elie Gamburg wants to rebuild on the site of Manhattan's twin towers -- not recreate them exactly but build something that suggests their height and significance, as a kind of tribute to the power of renewal.

Fifth-year architecture student Elie Gamburg poses with a computer rendering of his final thesis project on the rehabitation of the World Trade Center site. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

Before the dust even began to settle at Ground Zero, the fifth-year Cornell architecture student, who is from New York City, was down there, staring into the abyss and imagining the site's rebirth.

On Sept. 11, 2001, a friend who worked in the World Financial Center called him at school and said he'd just witnessed the horrifying collapse of the towers. Once Gamburg determined that family and friends in the city were safe and unharmed, he decided to drive from Ithaca to lower Manhattan with a classmate to see the site firsthand.

"As we drove into the heart of the city along West Street [a boulevard that runs along Manhattan's west side], we could see the destruction," Gamburg said. "We're both normally pretty talkative, but we couldn't say a word."

Two days later, Gamburg decided to make the rehabitation of the World Trade Center site the subject of his final architectural thesis project.

His professors tried to discourage him, he said. Most thought the project was too unwieldy to be successful. One asked him, "Why do you want to bring this upon yourself?" he recalled, and a visiting critic from Yale unkindly called him "an ambulance chaser." But Gamburg was undaunted. "This is one of the rare times that architecture has current-events relevance," he said.

The final thesis project weighs heavily on fifth-year architecture undergraduates in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning. It takes up residence in their brains that final year, consuming their studio time and their lives. The pressure to refine presentations for the big end-of-the-year critique, from a panel of architecture professors and sometimes an outside critic, can evoke terror in the bravest of young hearts.

But Gamburg, immersed in his thesis project, seemed bold, fearless, even galvanized. "It's all about ideas," he said, "but it can be really hard work to figure out how to get your drawings to express them." He compared the process to "a super-complex 50-page math proof that you have to work out for yourself, do all the calculations, and then on Page 34 you realize that you made a mistake on Page 2 and you have to go back and do it all over again."

Gamburg said he wants to get people to surmount their fears about going back to the World Trade Center site. "We need to overcome the idea that we can never build tall again," he said. "Time heals. I think big things can happen on the site, but gradually."

The key notion behind Gamburg's final thesis project is that the structures on the site will grow perpetually and, through that act of renewal, will serve as an ongoing living memorial to the tragedy of Sept. 11. "I'm not trying to design a building but a process of regeneration," he said. He envisioned two new towers that grow by accretion, through attachable parts, and a multilayered ground-level structure, or plinth, that ramps toward the city's waterways and has four underground levels to house retail stores, a city college archive and a transportation hub. "That area becomes a raison d'être for people to reinhabit the site," he said.

Gamburg developed a small-scale, three-dimensional model and hundreds of dramatic computer-aided drawings showing how the structures would look from various angles as they develop over time. At his thesis presentation in Sibley Hall on May 7, he pinned 35 drawings to the wall, explained his concepts and responded to questions and comments from a panel of expert critics. He hadn't slept for two days, but he seemed bright-eyed, alert and excited.

Several professors questioned his notion that a perpetual building also could be a memorial. One pointed out that his tower idea was structurally flawed and not likely to withstand strong winds. But another, Milton Curry, one of Gamburg's advisers, seemed to see possibilities in the ground-level plinth structure.

Days later, Curry said: "Architecture should challenge, not merely reflect, the prevailing culture. To the extent it is possible, our undergraduate thesis program facilitates intellectual engagement with contestable cultural values as a fundament to architectural production. Elie inherited and constructed an unsolvable urban predicament, and however flawed, pursued his convictions admirably."

Gamburg himself has conceded his final thesis project was overly ambitious: "How can anyone, particularly a novice like me, even begin to attempt to reconcile the political, physical, programmatic and architectural realities of the site with the emotional, spiritual, philosophical and metaphysical implications of 9/11?" he said. But he defended the idea of making a flexible architectural statement. A building that's perpetually growing, he said, "becomes an architecture about life. What could be a greater symbol of faith in the future?"