When the first set of plans for the World Trade Center site was unveiled back in July, public reaction was that the process had been hijacked by the Port Authority, which wanted 11 million square feet of office space crammed onto the site to preserve its revenue stream, which is mainly used to subsidize projects at New Jersey.

Now that a second set of plans is out, and this time, the process has been hijacked by architects. Only an architect, after all, would be so disconnected from reality as to propose to build — as four of the seven teams of architects have — the world’s tallest building at the World Trade Center site. May they and any bureaucrat who approves such a monstrosity be sentenced to an office on the top floor. One of the teams that avoided trying for the world’s tallest building ended up instead with a structure that looks like the set for the TV game show “Hollywood Squares.”

While plenty of architects with clients are disconnected from reality, an architect without a client is virtually guaranteed to be disconnected from reality. Yet clientless architects are exactly what the seven teams whose plans were released this week are. While the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation commissioned the plans, it doesn’t have the money or the authority to actually build any of the buildings. Some of the plans put forth this week didn’t even have rough price tags attached.

The LMDC seemed to be trying to avoid the complaint from the previous round, that the buildings were too humdrum. Fair enough. But amid all the excitement about fantasy architecture, it is worth asking the question: who is to build these buildings, and with whose money?

There are several possible answers. The first is Larry Silverstein, the developer who held a long-term lease on the Trade Center before it was destroyed on September 11. Depending on the outcome of a legal case pitting Mr. Silverstein against his insurance companies, Mr. Silverstein may have as much as $7 billion to put toward rebuilding. He also has an obligation to pay rent to the Port Authority, which owns the buildings. If it is to be Mr. Silverstein’s money that is used to build these buildings, then it would make sense for him, and not the LMDC, to design the buildings, in consultation with whatever architect he chooses. It will be Mr. Silverstein, in this scenario, who will have to find tenants willing to pay rent.

Another possibility is that Mr. Silverstein may strike some compromise deal that leaves room for another developer or many other developers to build some of the new buildings on and around the Trade Center site. In that case, those developers, investing their own capital or that raised in the capital markets, may well want to design their own buildings and hire their own architects.

Another possible answer is that taxpayers will build and pay for these structures, either through the federal aid for rebuilding or through the Port Authority, which is ultimately owned by the people of New York and New Jersey. In this case, the taxpayers might wonder why their tax dollars should be spent subsidizing avant-garde architecture that will end up competing with private landlords. Government has many functions — assuring public safety, providing a rule of law, helping the poor. But building and designing office buildings strikes us as a diversion from those essential activities and as a matter better left to the private sector.

The architecture critic of a national newspaper complains that the private sector isn’t interested in good architecture. But the critic’s problem is with capitalism and the real estate industry. Suspending capitalism in this case seems a bit far to go to satisfy a critic and his coterie of architects. Private sector jobs are already fleeing New York, in part because of the city’s tax and regulatory regime that is hostile to business. Letting a politician-created development corporation or authority choose the design of the biggest new downtown real estate project in years sends the wrong signal to the businesses that once made downtown New York the world’s financial capital.