One primary lesson from the design studio comes hard for the diligent: The best plans do not always follow the rules. Good students have been taught since kindergarten to color within the lines and to turn in assignments on time; when the brilliant designer in any class saunters in with a scheme that blows the room away, yet violates the program, debate quells. Once a great plan appears, every juror or fellow student can acknowledge the power of the idea, no matter how errant the method: Great ideas attract us with their own energy.

Unlike the design studio, which results in a mere grade, the stakes for the design of the World Trade Center site in New York are enormous and of lasting consequence. Some of the issues may be analogous, however; in particular, how programmatic expectations affect all planning. The designers of the proposed master plan had been tasked by their client, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey with the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), with a riddle that loomed like the former twin towers: produce six independent schemes, each of which must return 11 million square feet of office space to downtown Manhattan, retain much of the actual site as memorial, interweave its architecture with massive infrastructure, and create a new vision for the city under intense public and political scrutiny—all within eight weeks.