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Part of the problem (as an outsider) is that the US has little experience with forced reconstruction of cityscapes.
I know that there were a number of places that had to be reconstructed after the Civil War, but throughout Europe and Asia people have been rebuilding after wars for millenia - I can walk out of my house and go past 1,000 years of buildings in a 10 minute walk - and some of them wee destroyed in what these days would be called "terrorist attacks".
The issue is WAY more evocative and emotional in the States than it seems to be here.
The approaches that have worked in the rest of the world include:
Rebuilding what was there before
Dresden is an excelent example of this - they used old archives and so forth to try to reconstruct the destruction that the RAF and USAAF gave them.
Building to replace the old function in a modern structure
Coventry - look at the new Cathedral. Built to put the conflict with the Nazis behind us. Done in the modern style that was popular at the time. Moving forward, and using German expertise in parts.
Making a memorial
Hirroshima. Many parks, gardens, temples and so forth at the epicentre of the worlds first military atomic explosion.
Personally I think that the bravest thing that the designers could do would be to clear the area, make a garden of contemplation and a museum or some sort (such as the "Memorial" in Caen, commemorating the huge losses of life of WW2, the holocaust and the D-Day landings - on all sides, not just the allies), and to clinch the deal, put a cathedral, a synagogue, a mosque, and a few other temples on the site.
Grow beyind the conflict, don't entrench it into generations of warfare and tyrany. There is no tyrant worse than last seasons victim.
"The Germans killed the Jews, and the Jews killed the Arabs, and the Arabs killed the Hostages, and this is the News" - Roger Waters, When the Wind Blows, OST.
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