Frank Gehry and the Norwegian firm Snøhetta have won commissions to design the two cultural buildings at Ground Zero, completing a slate of designers for the site that conspicuously does not include master planner Daniel Liebeskind. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation announced that Gehry would design a performing arts building for the Joyce Theater dance company, and Snøhetta would be responsible for a complex housing the Drawing Center museum and the still-gestating Freedom Center. Gehry, most famous for Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, is the architect of curvaceous, rippling buildings that make expressive use of stainless steel. He has several New York City projects in the works, including the Chelsea headquarters for the Internet company InterActive Corp. and a Brooklyn basketball arena for the Nets. The Oslo-based firm Snøhetta has never designed anything in the United States, but its library in Alexandria, Egypt, with its hieroglyph-ornamented facade resembling a massive Rosetta stone, shows the firm has experience in reconciling memory, symbol and cutting-edge design. Absent from the final list of Ground Zero architects is Libeskind, who had hoped to design at least one of the buildings on the site and who was on the short list for the cultural buildings.
