No matter what their shape, the buildings that are chosen to rise from the ashes of the World Trade Center in New York are going to be a Phoenix twice over. They will certainly represent the spirit of the United States rising triumphantly over adversity, but they also will signal an important renewal of the spirit of architecture.

Surely there has not before been such public engagement with the design of a building. Newspapers and magazines all over the world are carrying, not just news about the progress of the design competition, but also comment on the place of building design in the modern cityscape, the poetics of buildings, the suitability of buildings as memorials and a host of other often quite abstract questions.

New York is a city whose population is more engaged with architecture than others are, so it is not so new for them, but many in the US and elsewhere are reflecting for the first time on what buildings are to us.

Tens of thousands of people have visited the models, drawings and videos of the latest designs in the Winter Garden, part of the World Financial Center, a block west of Ground Zero, and many more have expressed preferences in polls and e-mail surveys.

For people who haven't been paying close attention, let me quickly summarise the story to this point. After 11 September, 2001, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation asked six prominent architects to submit designs for a complex to replace what had been lost. It was probably too early to do that, for in trying to balance the commercial need to replace 11 million square feet of lost office space with the need to commemorate the three thousand lives that were lost in the Twin Towers, the architects went into a collective creative spasm. In July of last year, when they unveiled their designs, there was swift and merciless condemnation. One New Yorker summed up the prevailing reaction by saying “they all look like Albany”.

The criticism prompted a search for new designs - even the New York Times architecture critic got into the act by holding a kind of building beauty pageant in the Times Magazine.

The LMDC decided they had to try again. This time, the competition was opened up to international architects. Seven architectural firms offered up nine new design concepts, which were unveiled in December. The press conference at which they were described was quite an event - it was covered live by NY television stations and attracted a huge press corps from all over the world. It allowed the public a rare opportunity to watch how seven of the best architects in the world make their pitch.

Architectural critic Martin Filler, writing for The New Republic, described it as “an instructive - not to say highly revealing - experience…even for seasoned architectural observers, who savoured the telling details that can subliminally influence a client's selection of an architect.

“There was a touch of comedy: here were some of the most self-important alpha males on the planet (only one of the day's dozen speakers was a woman) in the unaccustomed, imploring attitudes of Fuller Brush men. To witness some of the leading architectural figures of the day in open contention was an even bigger treat. As Brian Lehrer of WNYC gleefully put it, the mano a mano event was ‘an architecture slam, a battle of the bands'.”

And to the relief of the organisers, the designs were creative and challenging - well received by a re-engaged public.

The designs unveiled were only concepts - because of the false start, the LMDC had to put much too tight a deadline in place to allow for finished designs. The reason for the rush is more than a simple commercial desire to put the site to work again. If the City of New York wants to use emergency funds to repair the subway stations damaged in the terrorist attack, work must begin fairly swiftly.

Just what is going to happen from here seems a bit of a mystery. Best guess is that any day now, (it may have been done by the time this article is published) the LMDC is going to announce that it has chosen two of the concepts for a closer look, prior to making a final choice sometime in the spring. My own hope is that at the very least, one of the two designs they choose will be that of Berlin-based Daniel Libeskind, the man who designed Berlin's Holocaust Memorial. It doesn't seem to be the most popular with the public, but it seems to me to be the best-conceived by a distance.

Mr Libeskind's design is a memorial in the sense that he intends to preserve the 70-foot deep pits and the rough slurry walls (the subterranean foundations that kept river and ground water out of the site, which was originally landfill) that were exposed in the clean-up. That will make for a powerful reminder of the enormity of September 11, but it will be difficult to accomplish because of the vast infrastructure that will have to be restored around the buildings. It will be interesting to see how he intends to connect up a building whose footings are seven storeys below street level. Rising above the pits will be a tall, (at 1,776 feet it would beat Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers as the world's tallest structure) slender, almost crystalline spire that seems designed to be seen from the water, as an inbound immigrant might see it as part of experiencing the New York skyline for the first time. The spire is surrounded by buildings, many of which are without conventional roofs, in the sense that they are cut off at the top at an angle, giving the complex the same kind of reaching-for-the-sky quality that Picasso achieved with his Spanish civil war memorial, Guernica.

Three of the other designs also stand out - London-based Foster and Partners put up a pair of huge, multi-faceted structures that touch each other and fall apart as they rise. Meier, Eisenman, Gwathmey and Holl suggested quite an elegant, though stiff, set of connected buildings that look like a giant H extended to a third leg and given depth by a fourth, freestanding. Mr Meier designed the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. And a group of six architects calling themselves Think submitted a pair of glass-over-a-spider's-web-of-steel cylinders that are designed to cover and protect the footprints of the felled towers.

Of course, underlying all this activity is the understanding that none of these projects might ever be realised - the Manhattan real estate market is weak, financing is uncertain and the ability of politicians to work with the leaseholder to control the design process is unclear. But even if nothing comes of all this work, what a glorious go at it has been had! That brings me to a related point - made in a perceptive, passionate article written by Andrew Trimingham last year in the Bermuda Sun - what is to be done about the mess that we are making of the City of Hamilton? If Minister Terry Lister is getting a group of Government and private sector people together to talk about work permits, wouldn't it be worth getting that group, or perhaps another tailor-made to the subject, to spend a little time thinking about how to stop the construction of buildings that look as if they've been made of gingerbread and sugar, then left out in the rain? Mr.Trimingham complains that “at the moment the City of Hamilton is little better than an obstruction to the movement of traffic in the Island and holds little or no attraction for the tourists who park next to it in their more attractively equipped cruise ships”.

“A visionary government”, he says, “would face up to the Hamilton reality, encourage lot amalgamation, reward small city landowners with tax incentives for becoming shareholders in new buildings designed for the new economy, and reward apartment building in the city to reduce traffic coming into and leaving Hamilton. It must encourage realistically long-term leases to encourage serious commitment to new building.

“If we continue to follow the path of least resistance and look firmly backwards at a past now more dead than moribund, if we continue to allow more and more ribbon office development west of the city or anywhere else outside the central Pembroke valley, we will strangle the old city in traffic even as it dies of economic malnourishment.”

Part of the problem is that all proposed new building in Bermuda seems to be measured against and modelled on the design of traditional Bermuda houses. But as an architectural metaphor, it doesn't work. A Bermuda house is a building whose proportions work very well at two storeys, but really cannot be taken much beyond that without becoming a parody of itself.

The City Hall seems to me to play at the very outermost boundary of this phenomenon, sometimes going a bit over the edge.

If the City Hall is on the edge, some of the more recent additions to the general Hamilton area are right over the top. They look as if the head of Sir George Somers had somehow been stuck by mistake onto the top of Jayne Mansfield's body, then dressed in a pink, furry bikini.

Geoffrey Scott was a writer, editor and architect active in the early 1900s. He achieved lasting fame as the architect and garden designer of the famous Berenson villa, Villa I Tatti.

In an influential book called ‘The Architecture of Humanism', he wrote that “this meticulous observance of ‘pure' styles is a mark of failing energy in imagination; it is a mark, also, of an inadequacy in thought; of a failure to define the nature of style in general. We cling in architecture to the pedantries of humanism, because we do not grasp the bearing upon architecture of the humanist ideal.”

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