The most remarkable thing about yesterday’s news conference to unveil the final designs for World Trade Center Towers 2, 3, and 4, was how little real news there was.

The design of a major building typically undergoes considerable mutation in the course of development. This is especially true when the public, awakening from its general indifference to matters of design, takes a special interest in a project, as they surely have with the WTC site. A perfect example is the Freedom Tower, or Tower 1, which was first introduced as a swirling, deconstructivist structure by Daniel Libeskind, and was later reconceived as a stately, balanced exercise in corporate architecture by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Similar revisions were naturally to be expected for Towers 2, 3, and 4, whose initial designs were revealed last September. But yesterday’s announcement contained no such surprises. Even Sir Norman Forster’sTower2,widelycriticized a year ago for its four-rooftop “diamonds in the sky” design, remains steadfastly faithful to its original plan.

The changes that have been made to the three projects are of a subtler and more incremental nature. For the most part, they have less to do with design than with urbanistic concerns about the interaction of these skyscrapers with the WTC Memorial and with Church Street to the east.

In one notable refinement, the western façade of Fumihiko Maki’s Tower 4, a staid example of Japanese minimalism that remains the site’s best design, will run parallel to the footprint of the World Trade Center’s South Tower. The public was also given a more precise sense yesterday of the experiential aspects of the building’s interiors. As minimal as the exterior, these are characterized by high walls composed of uninflected grays, blacks, and whites. Considerable care was given, in this as in the other towers, to providing as full a view of the memorial as possible, while also allowing viewers at the memorial to seedeep into the lobby of the building.

The biggest news for Sir Richard Rogers’s Tower 3, which invokes again the machine aesthetic with which this architect has long been associated, was that a large transparent screen will occupy much of the entranceway. The majestic spacing of the pylons along the western façade looks very promising, though the crisscrossing motif on some of the other portions of the façade is a distraction, lifted obviously from the work of Sir Norman himself. The lobbies look swank and affluent, but they do nothing to advance the tired tradition of corporate impersonality that marks all of the other high-rises in the immediate vicinity of the WTC site.

As for Sir Norman’s design for Tower 2, its most promising element is to be a lobby that was originally intended as a two-story atrium that has now been expanded to three stories. Renderings, which always look fabulous, are notoriously unreliable, but this lightfilled oasis could prove to be a very potent public space. Now, if only he could make corresponding improvements to those diamonds in the sky, which seem gimmicky, inelegant, and unoriginal — allusions to his own Hearst tower at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

As an unannounced coda to yesterday’s proceedings, the public was given its fullest idea yet of the shape of the memorial museum, designed by the Norwegian firm of Snohetta. This promises to be an energetic exercise in deconstructivism — there is greater tolerance, apparently, for museums than for office towers — whose most dramatic element will be a glass and steel cage entranceway. And as Joseph Daniels, the CEO of the WTC Memorial and Museum, announcedyesterday, twoofthemassive girders that adorned the ground level façade of the North Tower will be incorporated into the main entrance of the museum.

jgardner@nysun.com