Rafael Vinoly

Few architectural events have elicited as great a public frenzy as the unveiling of nine new proposals for the ground zero site in Manhattan. But this time the quality of the designs merits the attention. The proposals offer the first visions for the site's future that can both do justice to the memory of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and elevate Manhattan's architectural landscape to new heights.

More often than not, it is the losers who produce the great designs in big architectural competitions. The world's best architects commit huge amounts of time and money to compete for prestigious commissions, and then chafe because selection committees all too often ardently embrace the most banal designs. Nevertheless, some competitions, because of their cultural importance and the vision of their planners, still inspire hope.

Open a new concert hall, and things will go wrong. We don't need Peter or any other principle-producer to tell us that. A fiasco in Philadelphia last December was the latest example, and not all of the problems associated with the opening of the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts could have been helped. Some of them are simply the nature of the beast. But it needn't have been quite so embarrassing.

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown are a dapper, steel-willed couple of architects with courtly manners and tastes more catholic than some people find seemly. These enthusiasms include, but are not limited to, Italian palazzos, Las Vegas, neon, Pennsylvania farmhouses, Shakespearean sonnets, Lionel trains, Mickey Mouse, miniskirts and the mosques of Cairo.

THE NATION GOT ITS PREEMINENT performing arts center through a slum clearance project. That was the name of the New York panel, the Committee on Slum Clearance, that in 1955 was looking for better uses for a chunk of land on the city's West Side. It so happened both the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic needed new homes, and before long another committee, headed by John D.

THE first time he took his future wife, Priscilla, on a date, Ken Smith bicycled her to an abandoned sand and gravel quarry west of Des Moines. "Terribly romantic," she recalled, straight of face. "It was a wasteland," he acknowledged. "Most people would see it as a wasteland. Central Park was a wasteland, you know."

IT'S tempting to think of fall's arts offerings as one of those sumptuous sideboards immortalized in 17th century Dutch still lifes. Just substitute a provocative exhibition for that glistening bunch of new grapes, a potential musical masterwork for that bowl of rosy apples, a likely dud play for that dead fowl lying to one side.