Michael Sorkin's ground zero.

We live in a world increasingly dominated by esthetics, which might explain why one of the great unanswered questions two years after Sept. 11 is what to do with the site of the Twin Towers. What should be there, and what should it look like?

These are not idle questions. What we choose to put at Ground Zero will be our most enduring tribute to what happened there. In his slender Starting from Zero, architect and social critic Michael Sorkin offers us his perspectives on both the prospects for reconstructing Lower Manhattan and the process used to select an architect and design for the World Trade Center site. On the first topic, Sorkin is provocative, and his insights first-rate. On the second topic, less so.

Sorkin offers a deserving indictment of the design-selection process, but what he intends as outraged idealism too often comes across as sour grapes. His firm did, after all, put forth its own proposals for Ground Zero, and he is clearly upset that they failed to make the cut. Thus it's hard to escape the idea that his anger stems from more than democratic principle. This is not to say one shouldn't believe most of what Sorkin says. The selection process was almost certainly dominated by business and political elites, and worthy ideas were almost certainly excluded for the sake of financial gain. But Sorkin is not a journalist, and the book does not work well as a journalistic expose. Although it has no shortage of accusation, in too many places the reader wants evidence, and he provides only sputtering, if justifiable, anger.

The author's real contribution comes in his thinking about the Trade Center site itself. He advances the radical notion of leaving Ground Zero largely untouched, an idea that certainly would earn him no fans among the economic development crowd (nor, one suspects, from the site's owner) but which nevertheless demands some consideration, and Sorkin's thoughts on why this is unfortunate are interesting. Along the way, he also thinks usefully about the flaws of the original towers, which were products of a modernist age that has thankfully passed, and warns against re-creating some of their failings-such as providing massive amounts of excess office space in Lower Manhattan when demand for it is spread more evenly over the city.

While far from the last word on the redesign of the WTC site, Starting from Zero is a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate.