The emergence of David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill over Daniel Libeskind as the lead architect on the World Trade Center site is good news for New York City.

You can tell the difference just by how the two men dressed at yesterday’s photo opportunity. There was Mr. Childs, in a shirt with a button-down collar, necktie, and blue blazer, standing next to Mr. Libeskind, who was wearing a collarless black shirt, no necktie, and his trademark thick black-framed rectangular glasses. The outfits were symbolic of their strengths and weaknesses as architects.

Mr. Childs can inspire the confidence of commercial clients and has a long track record of building office buildings and hotels and of working in New York. If he has a flaw it is that his buildings are sometimes too conventional.

Mr. Libeskind brings a cutting-edge flair — sometimes to the point of weirdness — and is known mainly for a museum in Berlin.

There will no doubt be squawking from the usual suspects that Mr. Childs was imposed by a private real estate magnate, Larry Silverstein, over Mr. Libeskind, who was more or less selected by an elected official — Governor Pataki — after a process of public hearings. It is Mr. Pataki, however, who claimed the political credit for “privatizing” the World Trade Center, having sold a 99-year lease on the property to a group led by Mr. Silverstein. So it is only fair that Mr. Silverstein, who is paying $10 million a month in rent on the Trade Center site, be able to choose his own architect for the buildings he will rebuild with the proceeds from his own insurance money.

So many people died in the September 11 attacks that there is undoubtedly a public interest in what happens at the site, so it’s perfectly appropriate for Mr. Libeskind to be kept on in some consulting role.

But in our view, the public interest is best served at ground zero by responsible commercial development that sends the signal to the worldwide financial community that downtown New York is again open for business, not by avant-garde experimentation that pleases the architecture critics and activist pressure groups but scares away private tenants.

Mr. Childs is no excessively pliant mercenary — he worked with Daniel Patrick Moynihan on redesigning Washington, and briefly collaborated with Frank Gehry on a plan for a New York Times headquarters before withdrawing. A report by Paul Goldberger in the New Yorker magazine suggested that Mr. Childs and Mr. Gehry withdrew from the Times project because it was to be too commercial. But at the moment, an architect with a button-down shirt and a necktie is exactly what downtown New York needs.