Everything, it seems, has now been called into doubt at ground zero. Governor Pataki decided last week, in response to security concerns, to request a new design for the Freedom Tower. While it will continue irrelevantly to rise 1,776 feet (or more precisely, “to soar,” as the Governor insists), it will no longer be torqued, will lose the spire, probably won’t be faceted, and will alter its position relative to the rest of the site. Other than that – ha, ha – it will be much like Mr. Libeskind’s inspiring vision.

But what will it really look like? No one seems to know – except for me. I bring you news from the future. Call it a morbid presentiment, if you will, but I believe that 7 World Trade, which David Childs designed for Larry Silverstein and which is now approaching completion, holds the key to the future of the entire site.

And what does 7 WTC look like? Well, like every other building in Lower Manhattan, not least because it, like them, was designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill, of which Mr. Childs is now the principle architect. In other words, it will be a triumph of value engineering, of cost cutting measures, of mediocrity thrice mediated.

Though SOM was at the forefront of American architecture half a century ago, several decades have passed since it created a single structure that has risen significantly above the most basic adequacy. This fact, however, has not deterred the governor from assuring us that, “I have no doubt that David Childs will come up with yet another magnificent design that will once again inspire the nation and serve as a fitting tribute to freedom.”

I beg to differ. Readers with long memories may recall that SOM’s proposal for the site was the least interesting, the most brutish, and the most generally disliked of all the proposals put forth at the time. Why, then, did Mr. Childs gain the ascendancy over Daniel Libeskind, who, we had thought, won the competition? Because, according to Larry Silverstein, for whom he had worked previously, Mr. Childs has experience building skyscrapers.

Yet, with all due reverence for the man, it is difficult to escape the impression that Mr. Childs’s main credential for building skyscrapers is that he’s tall. The same could be said for Governor Pataki, most of the New York Knicks, and the indispensable Tommy Tune. Call it the Wagnerian school of architecture: Fafner and Fasolt were chosen to create Valhalla because they were giants. It may be that Mr. Childs has other virtues (a great singing voice?), but none has found expression in any of his completed buildings.

That said, I was not all that sorry to hear that Mr. Libeskind’s torqued tower will no longer become a reality. It was a silly and faddish idea all along. What is disheartening, however, is that it has been dumped on the strength of the Police Department’s contention that its structure would pose a security risk.

Though I am prepared to defer to New York’s Finest in the matter, it seems to me, as a question of common sense, that in the unlikely event that another plane crashes into the building, it will make no difference whether it is torqued or not. As for a truck bomb, what kind of security system would we have if it permitted a truck, loaded with explosives, to come so close in the first place?

This sudden and decisive intrusion of the Police Department in the designing of what was supposed to be the most iconic new building in North America is close to black humor. Yet it is typical of the way buildings are designed in Gotham, and nowhere else. New York is the city where everything takes precedence over good design.

The philistine cupidity of developers, the inveterate insipidity of our elected officials, the paralytic fear of litigation, and now the input of the Police Department all conspire to drag down even the most romantic projects to the level of suffocating mediocrity. This is why, whenever you compare an architect’s work outside the city with what he has created in the five boroughs, you are apt to be surprised at how much better he becomes once he ventures abroad. (Though this is not the case with SOM.)

So what is to be done? One proposal is that we simply rebuild the Twin Towers as they were. No one in the know is taking this seriously, but all the same, there is something beguiling in the notion. Surely the idea is no worse than any of the designs yet proposed for the site, and is, by default, quite a bit better.

As it happens, I have the solution to this problem. No one will heed it, but here it is: Give Santiago Calatrava a pencil and some paper and leave the room. Come back an hour later, and he will have designed for you – in rough outline, to be sure – one of the greatest structures of the new century. He has already designed, to nearly universal acclaim, the transit hub at ground zero, and he alone among living architects has that imaginative mastery of design, combined with an engineer’s knowledge of how buildings work, that can pull off something at once beautiful, useful, and symbolically resonant.

To repeat a point I made on an earlier occasion, if the entire site were placed into Mr. Calatrava’s hands, it would be one of the wonders of the world.