WTC > paintings

But that is not all.

My thorough reading of the ”Imagining Ground Zero” book made me also discover a whole lot of other opportunities of a different kind, generated this time by the New York Press and sometimes by some individual promoters.

At the beginning of 2002, the New York Times (at the initiative of Herbert Muschamp, architecture critic for the daily) and the New York Magazine (under the leadership of the architecture critic Joseph Giovannini), both launched their own reviews of different visions issued by either professional architects or architecture critics, or individual creators who were concerned by which shape the Ground Zero’s devastated site could take, once rebuilt. 

I discovered that had existed, in parallel, a whole series of individual submissions, most of them being brought to the attention of the Memorial Competition Office. Until 2004, these submissions continued to be made by professionals, or sometimes artists who wished to propose alternative concepts and projects to the seven ones selected by the LMDC Official Committee.
Some among these proposals did respect in their schemes the constraints imposed by the LMDC and the NY Port Authority. Others, which questioned those rules or at leat some of them, proposed some free visions for the WTC renewal, which therefore did not obey those rules at all, or partly.
Which was my project’s case.

I fully encourage all those interested by the WTC Rebuilding Saga to buy and read the “Imagining Ground Zero” and the “A New World Trade Center Design Proposals” books. What is listed above is only a brief summary of what those books tell, and one will be edified by the density of what one will read.
 

I was myself fully edified.
And I did find astounding to witness that James Hanlon (at the time living in New York and being one of the "9/11" documentary film’s authors who had received so much praise and attention), had had all the opportunities in the world to bring to a lot of different people's knowledge the vision that my paintings proposed for the WTC rebuilding.

Again, I am not saying that this project had any particular chance to finally come to reality. Certainly not any more chance or any less than the tens of projects and schemes which had been reviewed by the concerned decisions makers at the time in 2002, or later, and which had not been selected in any competitions of any sort.
But at least all of these proposals had been considered and viewed by the people of New York.
Which had exactly been my original goal, no more and no less, and which had been the reason why I had entrusted my paintings to James Hanlon.  

I must say that these discoveries in 2021 left me with quite a bitter taste. The reading of “Imagining Ground Zero” revived my dismay.

All the listed above public initiatives that flourished in New York between 2002 and 2004 demonstrate that if the man who received my paintings in 2002 had respected the deal expressed in the courier that I had attached to the paintings that he received, things could have been quite different.

“Imagining Ground Zero” shows that the field of possibilities was vast ahead, and that all doors were wide open. But the way things turned out shut those doors, and objectively deprived me forever of the appointment that I had tried to make, at my small level and with my limited means, with the future of Ground Zero.