Panel announced to select firms for WTC concept plans

The LMDC says it has received "hundreds of submissions" since the request for qualifications (RFQ) was released August 19. The deadline to respond to the RFQ is 5 p.m. EST today. Visit www.renewnyc.org for the RFQ.

The panel will narrow the field of candidates to 15 to 20. By early October, the LMDC will select five teams, each of which will receive a $40,000 stipend, to prepare concept plans.

The six panelists are: Toshiko Mori, Eugenie Birch, Richard Swett, FAIA, Kinshasha Holman Conwill, Terence Riley, and Michael Van Valkenburgh.

Mori is an architect based in New York and the chair of the architecture department at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Birch is chair of the department of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania. As a U.S. Representative from New Hampshire from 1990 to 1994, Swett was the only architect in Congress in the 20th Century. He was U.S. Ambassador to Denmark in the late 1990s.

Conwill was director of the Studio Museum in Harlem from 1988 to 1999 and is currently an arts and management consultant. Riley is the chief curator of the department of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Van Valkenburgh is a landscape architect based in New York and Boston, and is the Charles Eliot Professor of Practice of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University.