Dull and uninspired. That's the assessment of more than one blogger about the designs proposed so far as replacements for the World Trade Center. Here's Megan McArdle, writing at Tech Central Station (and here's her blog link):

The answers that have been so far offered by the LMDC have been thoroughly unsatisfactory. None of the proposed designs for the site got a reaction warmer than "tepid" from the public; the most you could say for the winning design by Daniel Libeskind was that it might just be the best of a bad lot. The others were high-concept office parks, or disjointed hodge-podges of ideas that nowhere married form and function: the bits that were interesting weren't practical, and the bits that were practical could have been built just as well in Skokie, Illinois.

Not long after that, a Lileks post gave me the idea for some sort of triumphal or commemorative arch.

Now I discover that sure enough, New York actually had one -- the Dewey Arch -- built to celebrate the Spanish American War victory.

Here's a fanciful version of what it might have looked like, had they thrown a real Roman style victory parade:

Of course, this is all fantasy.

Boredom, bureaucracy, and insipid, institutionalized designs will be what we'll get.

I know that classical designs were popular in Victorian times, and I guess the argument can be made that classical designs provoked a "modernist" reaction. But is anything modern now?

Do the ancients still have to be considered boring?