I'm currently working with Rafael Vinoly's firm, though not on the WTC project, instead a giant medical research campus outside DC for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a cool $500 million semi-underground facility described at hhmi.org.
Vinoly's on a roll, just having won a competition for a $gadzillion Kennedy Center makeover (the firm has long got most of its work through competitions not by kissing asses at dinners and enduring rot gut confabs). Rafael's not a vanity architect, humorous about his evanescent celebrity, and says nothing's going to be built at WTC for 20 years, so fucked up is its politics (he escaped Argentina's/CIA's death squads, thinks Bush/Cheney are oily scum). The publicity is welcome, and worth far more than a piddling fee for putting up with vile NYC infighting and backstabbing going on among architectural circles, and nobody knows who is going to do the final design, but it is unlikely to be the current celebrated doofuses who are useful only to divert attention from the backroom riggery by Rockefeller's Port Authority and Silverstein's fronting for capitalistic socialism. Vinoly's and Schwartz's design for a symbolic aircraft stabbed into both towers is gutsily disrespectful of towering architecture as a flag waver begging for assault.
