Sometimes we actually do acknowledge poets to be legislators of the world. One of those rare moments may be here. As early as tomorrow, officials of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation are expected to choose one or two designs for the next phase of planning the future of ground zero. What if the decision were up to you?

Which poet would you choose? What design, if any, attains the level of poetry in the ancient Greek sense: the connective tissue that binds stray pieces of memory, experience and anticipation into a civilization's fabric? What rhyming couplet might even transcend the separation of death?

Public officials will be criticized no matter what they decide. People protested the Eiffel Tower, too. If it were up to me, I would pick the pair of latticework towers proposed by the Think group. It is a work of genius, a towering affirmation of humanism in modern times.

The Think team -- whose principals include Shigeru Ban, Tokyo; Frederic Schwartz, New York; Ken Smith, New York; and Rafael Viñoly, New York, and as consultants, Arup, London; Buro Happold Engineers, Bath, England; Jorg Schlaich, Stuttgart, Germany; William Moorish, Charlottesville, Va.; David Rockwell, New York; and Janet Marie Smith, Baltimore -- have titled their proposal the World Cultural Center.

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It calls for two frameworks of steel lattice to be erected in approximately the same locations as the original towers. The new structures would straddle the footprints of the old towers without touching them, to respect the sacral dimension of the two squares. They would form the infrastructure for a vertically organized complex of cultural and educational buildings, including a conference center, concert hall, library and an interpretive museum about the events of 9/11.

The towers have a Jack and the Beanstalk quality, as if they linked the earth to an aerial world high above. The individual buildings of this sky city would be designed by different architects. The plan also designates four areas as potential sites for one or more separately designed memorials: two below ground level, contained within the footprints, and one in each tower at the penthouse level. The framework itself appears made up of stars connected at their points: symbols of birth or resurrection.

This is a work of abstraction. It does not impose literal meanings on the viewer. Yet implicitly it embodies the theme of metamorphosis. From towers of steel, the World Trade Center has shifted shape, first into towers of light and now into towers of air. Memory is their invisible structural core. The exposed metal framework of the two structures evokes the origins of tall building design in engineering works of the 19th century. They suggest that the urban center, too, is changing shape, still in transition from the industrial city of a century ago to today's cultural crossroads. The towers themselves would be integral to this progress. They would help lift New York out of the provincialism that has afflicted its cultural life in recent decades.

I agree with those who feel that New York would gain by restoring the totemic image of the twin towers to the skyline, if not in their original form. Think's proposal is the only one of the new designs that would accomplish this. Perhaps for that reason, a nighttime rendering of the project has been the overwhelming preference of foreign newspapers and magazines. Perhaps they are trying to tell us something.

Concept, however, not image, drives Think's design. The plan's fundamental strategy is to secure investment in the public realm during the limited period that federal dollars will be available to rebuild Lower Manhattan. The towers themselves would be for noncommercial uses. In the present era of architectural tourism, however, it is reasonable to assume that they would benefit New York's economy.

Construction would be phased, starting with the two tower structures, the memorial and new parks. Commercial development would be added around the perimeter of the site as the market demands. But the elevation of the public realm is the design's most emphatic statement.

It is a powerful polemic to make at a time when city planning and civic amenities have become increasingly privatized. Making the concept work would be a challenge, especially in an era of heightened concern for building security. New circulation systems would have to be devised to ensure public access and prevent the towers from becoming fortresses.

But this is a legitimate challenge for the city to take on at this moment in urban history. And it is a cultural challenge as well as a technical one. Think's design recognizes a need for new forms of social space amid urban density. Let's go up there and see what they might look like, the design proposes. What have we got to lose but our boredom?

One of the greatest strengths of the Think project is its potential to expand the concept of culture to include the public realm. Too often, especially in urban developments, ''culture'' is shorthand for some consumerized version of high art: a museum, a concert hall. In the contemporary city such boundaries don't hold up. Infrastructure is culture. Engineering is culture. So are sustainable design, street life, the expectant atmosphere in airports, the work of window dressers and especially the relationships among these overlapping categories of experience.

The thresholds between public and private space; the transitional areas between transportation systems; the irregularities in the cityscape that occur where, for example, Broadway slices through the Manhattan grid: these are part of a city's spatial texture. There is no reason to believe that cities have exhausted their potential to realize new types of public space. Who says landscape since Olmsted has to be all downhill? Why can't it go up, up, up?

The beauty of the matrix idea is that the building's program is not locked into a particular set of uses, so it can evolve. Think turns into an asset what had been considered a handicap for the teams working on this round of designs: the lack of a real client with the authority to prescribe a specific program and the power to make it stick.

The Think group claimed much of that authority for itself. But it has paid close attention to wishes expressed by the survivors of the attack, the families of those who were lost, the local community and the public at large. More important, the design is sufficiently flexible to include, in institutional form, the educational process that has been unfolding globally for the last 17 months. If this plan moves forward to the next stage of development, the architects and public officials should begin by analyzing this extraordinary story. Then they should build upon it.

Like Wall Street, or the Pentagon, ground zero is a metonym. Initially its meanings were almost strictly emotional: shock, anger, fear and pain. Soon the connotations began to expand. The term now signifies a complex pattern of actions undertaken by individuals and groups around the world who seek to comprehend the deeper historical meanings of 9/11. This pattern has become a phenomenon in itself. It recalls an idea that in the 20th century was called the open university or the museum without walls: a network of learning, a free-floating space open 24/7 and accessible to all. The price of admission is curiosity, periodically boosted by the desire to survive.

The topic is ''Globalization and Its Discontents,'' to borrow the title of a book last year by the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz. It is as complex and diffuse as the communication that sustains it. Educating ourselves about globalization is a poetic undertaking. We are seeking to make coherent pictures from pieces of history, science, economics, art and politics circulating through the atmosphere since the end of the cold war.

The ground zero design process has also been an adventure in public education. Last year many New Yorkers learned what a building program is. People learned to recognize retrograde architectural aesthetics as a byproduct of cultural isolationism. They learned how to derail an official design process that was headed toward disgrace.

By rights, the official design process might have embraced the task of educating the public in the larger issues of globalization. The process might even have taken on the task of educating the officials responsible for running it. Better late than never. These two learning tracks have now converged. The public has, in effect, created the program for ground zero. It has created a school.

Think has created a schoolhouse: an open, flexible framework to support the pursuit of ideas. The framework itself is an eloquent statement of the values that should guide that pursuit. We are an open, modern, enlightened, humanistic democracy, these soaring structures announce. And we can do even better than retaliate against attack by enemies. Each time we look up at the sky, we can remember that our values are more resilient than theirs.

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