WTC Tower One - by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (formerly "Freedom Tower")

[emmeka]

Love it!




P.S. Look at the pictures of the model, on the link. you can see some kind of lift and stairway acess that ascends through the lattice to the sunken 'roofline'. That may be a possible observation point, if not a helipad. as said above.

[Kris]

Here's the digital version of the chart :roll: :

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/12/19/nyregion/tower.jpg

[Kris]

Christian, I think that's the clump of mid-high rises in Brighton Beach. The clump to the right is Trump Village/Coney Island.
Thanks. I assume Starrett City is more massive.

[JMGarcia]

WTC Tower Design Unveiled
Newsday

By Glenn Thrush
Staff Writer

December 19, 2003, 6:23 PM EST


The Freedom Tower unveiled Friday would be among the world's tallest buildings and possibly the safest, but its architect can't guarantee the 1,776-foot Ground Zero landmark would be able to withstand another Sept. 11-type attack.

The twisting, tapered tower design presented to the public at lower Manhattan's Federal Hall is a unique hybrid of skyscraper and sky sculpture, a 70-story office building topped by an open-air lattice of cables and windmills. It is punctuated by a splinter-like spire.

Gov. George Pataki, who has overseen an often acrimonious design process, called the final product "a work of creative genius" that proves "freedom will always triumph over terror."

The building will have a variety of safety features absent from the doomed twin towers, including reinforced stairwells and more exits to make it "the safest building in the world," said David Childs, the project's lead architect.

Yet even with those improvements, Childs said he didn't know if the tower would be strong enough to survive an attack by a fuel-laden airliner, like the 737s that slammed into the Trade Center.

"It's hard to exactly say the level of security we'll have," he said. "We haven't done those analyses yet."

The project could be completed as early as the fall of 2008 at an estimated cost of $1.5 billion. It will be financed entirely by the site's leaseholder, Larry Silverstein, said Charles Gargano, vice-chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site.

Gargano said the Port Authority, whose headquarters were destroyed in the attacks, plans to occupy one-third of building's 2.6 million square feet, providing cash flow from the day the building opens.

Silverstein is locked in a bitter legal battle with insurance companies over payments for the towers. He said the insurers have already guaranteed him enough cash to build the tower but not enough for the four smaller buildings planned in phases over the next decade.

"The money for the Freedom Tower is in the bank," he told reporters.

The final design differs significantly from the proposal by architect Daniel Libeskind, who was chosen in February by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. Gone are Libeskind's jagged, asymmetrical corners and sky-level gardens, replaced by a sleek office tower topped by Childs' gymnasium of windmills and cables.

"I can't think of another building that's really like this one," said Ric Bell, president of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. "It's something different."

Highlights of the building include:

Structural support from two massive concrete supports that run the height of the building and a steel "diagrid" running outside the building, which allows it to maintain a twisted form.

A nest of trusses and cables located above occupied floors that will stabilize the building and create a design that echoes the Brooklyn Bridge.

Wind-harvesting turbines to generate 20 percent of the tower's electricity and to reduce gusts at ground level.

An observation deck and a new space for Windows on the World, the restaurant that used to occupy the top floors of the North Tower.

Extra-wide, reinforced staircases and "areas of refuge" on each floor to allow for speedy escape and rescue operations.

Dedicated stairs and elevators for firefighters, enhanced communication cables for rescue workers and a blast-resistant lobby.

The compromise on the design was brokered by Pataki last week, who mediated an intense, often testy, collaboration between Childs and Libeskind.

Childs, who was hired by Silverstein, is now the lead architect in the project — a fact made abundantly clear by the design materials, which were all printed on letterhead from his firm, Skidmore Owings & Merrill.

Libeskind's team said it is still lobbying to redesign the tower's spire to give it more heft.

"When the politicians and architects and developers have all gone home, I'll still be there making sure that everything that is built on this site is right because it is... Ground Zero," Libeskind said.

The hybrid plan has its critics, including architect Beverly Willis, head of Rebuild Downtown Our Town, a civic group. Willis said she thinks Childs' changes have compromised Libeskind's vision.

"Two-thirds of the building itself is very innovative, but unfortunately the top is a disaster," she said. "There is no design integration between Childs' skeleton, the spire and building itself."

Madeline Wils, chairwoman of Community Board 1 and an LMDC board member said, "It's a handsome design... I like the way that the tower rotates and torques around, and makes it look flexible, which relates to me about this community. I like the latticework. I love the idea of using windmills."

As Libeskind and Childs smiled side-by-side at Federal Hall, a tiff between Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Pataki seemed to grow from the governor's appearance with Katie Couric on Friday's "Today" show.

On Thursday, when Bloomberg's staff learned of the governor's planned TV appearance, they complained and were added to the program, only to have the mayor pull out at the last minute.

"We had a community meeting on bias incidents this morning," said Bloomberg spokesman Ed Skyler. "The meeting ran long and we decided that it was more important for him to meet with the community than to appear."

Staff writer Graham Rayman contributed to this story

[NYguy]

David Childs' own design for the Freedom Tower rose 2,000 ft to the top - 1,776 to the top of the windmill structure and 2,000 to the top of the lattice structure that contained the antennas. I have a scan of a small photo from the NY Observer, so it isn't a very clear picture. But in the rendering, you can see the difference in the upper half of the tower...


http://www.pbase.com/image/24310756/large.jpg


At the top of the twin masts sits the observation platform (1,776 ft). It's not hard to see how the 2,000 ft lattice structure on top could have been redesigned to form the asymetrical spire the tower now has...

http://www.pbase.com/image/24310759/original.jpg


http://www.pbase.com/image/24310753/large.jpg



The renderings were created by Mr. Childs’ staff at the behest of his client, Mr. Silverstein. They show the torqued body, the bank of windmills encased by the cabling structure rising to 1,776 feet, and an open lattice system of antennas rising above the cables to reach 2,000 feet. The renderings are dated Aug. 12, 2003, less than a month after Mr. Childs and Mr. Libeskind agreed to collaborate on the design of the tower.


http://www.newsday.com/media/photo/2003-12/10685603.jpghttp://www.pbase.com/image/24310756/medium.jpg

[ZippyTheChimp]

It looks better without that spike, but there is too much open-air structure. Assuming the building evolves, I prefer the newer version.

[billyblancoNYC]

I thought it said offices to 70, 71 and 72 restaurants, and 73 observation.

Is this wrong?

[Zzed]

can someone explain what the purpose is of the 400 feet of latticework added onto the 73 story tower? any idea of the extra cost that imposes on the building?

i can only think of four reasons:

1. to support the wind turbine: can the power savings really justify the cost?

2. to support the antenna: does it really need such a such a massive structure?

3. to claim WTB: even that is debatable.

4. to give Child's some work to charge to the project? -

[ZippyTheChimp]

If you look at it as adding 400 ft of latticework to a 73 storey building, then it doesn't make economic sense, but that's not what happenned.

Forget Foster, twin towers, or anything that big. It was never going to happen. If this was an ordinary office tower development, we would be getting a Bloomberg or BofA. The latticework allows them to build a tall structure and solve the problem of what to do with the added height. In this case, it reduces operating expenses and provides income from the TV broadcasters.

I have no interest in whether or not a building is officially the WTB. If it needs to be that to satisfy aesthetics, then it should be; but if it is surpassed a few years later (as the twin towers were), does that change the appearance of the building?

[maxinmilan]

I completely disagree with H.Mushamp's article in NYTimes (A skyscraper has chance to be nobler...); I guess the D.Childs apport has totally destroyed the D.Libeskind visionary idea of his former master plan. Libeskind had the chance to give a piece of architecture full of poetry, full of grace; the building shape was very innovative, the idea of the garden-in-the-sky was great, 'cause was really a metaphor of life, that life that could come back again in that space - the sky- where the death had come. The spire had a more powerfull meaning, was slender and perfectly integreted into the building. The "scars" into the building facedes were metaphor of the sorrow and of the tragedy happened her in 11/9. Now we have a building with the only original idea of lattice of cables which is -strictly speaking- not a very original idea (do you remember THINK project ? At least THAT was very original 'cause the lattice framework was not an addition but the idea itself of the all project...) and an odd spire completely separated from the body of the scraper. It's better than nothing sure: the idea to have a quotation of tha Statue of Liberty'arm is wonderful and has to be preserved. But it should be better designed. Finally we should really consider this story for what is it: there was an international competition, a winner (Eurpean and this I think was not well accepted by the critics...) and a project ready to be built. Then arrives D.Childs with the absurd history that Libeskind didn't have the skill or the experience in bulding high. But even M.Yamasaki, the architct of the Twin Towers, didn't have the experience to buld such structures. But he was the architect chosen: so to help him there were Emery Roth & Sons who gave him all the help to make his idea real. And this was what had to be happen. You win an international competition against architects like Eisenmann, Foster and many others... and then arrives like a perfect deus ex machina mister Childs and you are forced to change your idea ? Don't joke. I hope Libeskind will have other chances to build in Berlin or in Europe or even in Chicago, where the power of money and the political intersts are less strong.

[JMGarcia]

The ratio of the cabled area to building is too big in Childs' August version pictured here. Also, the two concrete cores are too pronounced for my tastes. The building looks like a shot gun in a bird cage. I dislike how the building tapers within the cableing thereby making the cableing come much further down the building rather than seeming to start at the top of the building as in the newer version.

http://www.pbase.com/image/24310756/large.jpg

My ideal for all this to raise the cabled area to 1776 on the current version allowing the building to twist and taper further. It seems to need a little more twist IMO and get slenderer. Finally it needs to angle in to a beefier spire. I'll see if I can manage draw my idea later

[Gulcrapek]

...and send it to the LMDC.

[JMGarcia]

...and send it to the LMDC.

Forget the LMDC, all the care about is being able to say it is 1776 feet high. Politics first and all that.

If I like how it comes out I'll send it to Libeskind and Childs.

[Clarknt67]

it's f-ugly!

The 400 feet of nothing on top is testament to our new-found cowardice, as surely as the Twins were a testament to our brashness and arrogance.

They could have at least put the windows on the world and/or the observation deck on the top.

I don't like the taper, I just find it unattractive.

The spire is ridiculous and ugly. It looks to me like a weapon.

Which I suppose is fitting as they're a big part of the American reaction to 9/11, cowardice and violence.

[Jasonik]

JMGarcia on the Childs Freedom Tower-

The building looks like a shot gun in a bird cage.


Clarknt67 on the Childs/Libeskind Freedom Tower-

The spire....looks to me like a weapon.



The primary US weapon is trade.

I think we should at least cloak this overt gesture in a bit of elegance and refinement. The quick and dirty metaphor needn't be present.

[Clarknt67]

The primary US weapon is trade.


Thanks for helping me frame it in a better light. I'll do my dest to look at it this way.

But the spire does look like a bayonette (as other posters first mentioned) and that DOES weight on my mind.

After all, The Onion had a parody of a TV program listing grid shortly after 9/11. One of the entries in the TV program guide said: "Fox News: a nation looks around for someone to hit."

Pretty much sums up my perspective on domestic policy, and hence, if we have a bayonette on our "new symbol" of America, I guess it's appropriate..

[NYguy]

The ratio of the cabled area to building is too big in Childs' August version pictured here. Also, the two concrete cores are too pronounced for my tastes. The building looks like a shot gun in a bird cage. I dislike how the building tapers within the cableing thereby making the cableing come much further down the building rather than seeming to start at the top of the building as in the newer version.


I disagree completely. Whether its 400 ft or 600 ft, its going to look the same - its not office space. Child's extra cabled area at the top of the larger tower was topped by the antenna/lattice structure that compensates for the extra cabling area.

[JMGarcia]

The ratio of the cabled area to building is too big in Childs' August version pictured here. Also, the two concrete cores are too pronounced for my tastes. The building looks like a shot gun in a bird cage. I dislike how the building tapers within the cableing thereby making the cableing come much further down the building rather than seeming to start at the top of the building as in the newer version.


I disagree completely. Whether its 400 ft or 600 ft, its going to look the same - its not office space. Child's extra cabled area at the top of the larger tower was topped by the antenna/lattice structure that compensates for the extra cabling area.

Its a matter of personal taste I guess. I also think the cabled area is going to be less than substantial looking. It doesn't appear to be any denser than those on the Brooklyn Bridge and that seems quite ethereal to me.

http://hometown.aol.com/sailc34/myhomepage/brooklyn%20bridge.jpg

http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/fa267/19th/brooklyn1.jpg

[DougGold]

can someone explain what the purpose is of the 400 feet of latticework added onto the 73 story tower? -

It's very simple. They wanted to claim to be building the world's tallest building, but actually didn't want to do anything of the sort due to short-sightedness (or cowardice, if you asked me). To be honest, I don't think this would qualify as the world's tallest building. You can shove latticework and/or a spire on any building and say it's taller, but it really depends on when the actual building ends and where you can physically go. It's really a shame that this building, instead of being a sign that NYC is strong, says that we're afraid.

[Ninjahedge]

It is basically stupid.

Why the hell did we need another obnoxiously tall building in downtown to prove that we could build up again. I agree that the latticework "headpiece" is a bit overboard, but also, why do we NEED an 1800 foot tower?

And the name "Freedom Tower" >shudder<

Couldnt we have used something different than that overused PR tagline? I am reminded of the Patriot Act and Freedom Fries when I hear that.

Question, I have not looked into the full design on this, but is this teh proposal that had the smaller set of buildings arranged around the "park" with a taller tower at one end?

I liked the building arrangement in that one, but looking at the size of this boehemoth(sp) I don't see any room for much of anything else!

[NYatKNIGHT]

Just in the last few posts people have argued it's too tall or too short - strong opinions that vary greatly.

This building is a compromise, so no one wins.

[JMGarcia]

Whether its an office building or something else, the site definitely needed something quite tall to aesthetically fix the downtown skyline. It probably could have been aesthetically fixed with anything over 1100-1200 feet. IMO it would also need to taper to be the best fit into the overall skyline view. But that's just my tastes in thing.

As far as the name goes, I find it no more lame than the "Statue of Liberty". Why is the word Liberty any less hoakey than the word Freedom?

[Kris]

The French (and Latin) root.

[JMGarcia]

Having a French root makes a word less hoakey? We should discuss what "root" means in Australia maybe. ;)

[Kris]

Animation (http://www.sunspot.net/news/custom/attack/nyc-freedom-animation,0,5950503.quicktime?coll=bal-home-headlines)


A Good Work in Progress

By Mark Ginsberg

The recently released Freedom Tower is a well thought out design, and a lot of issues have been addressed. That said, there are a few things that still need to be developed. Given the early phase of design the building is in, there will be plenty of chances to make these improvements.

There are a lot of things about this building that I like. The idea of creating an open space with cables that resemble the Brooklyn Bridge is a good one, the building relates to the street grid in a way that makes sense, and the glass wall is going to have a texture that will pick up light differently throughout the day, which will mean that the look of the building will vary at different times. One of the clearest messages is that people want a new icon to replace the twin towers, and I think this will do that. At 1,776 feet tall, you’re going to see it from everywhere.

This building is tall enough to be graceful. The problem with modern office buildings is that you need a large floor size, which makes it hard to design an elegant skyscraper. In general, the tenants for “class A” office buildings want a 30,000 – 40,000 square foot floor plate, which results in buildings, even if they’re 40 or 50 stories, that look short and squat. They’re not as graceful as the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building, which have much smaller floor plates.

The most ambitious aspect of the building is the area containing wind turbines in an open-air frame made of cables. Would you normally build a space like that for wind turbines? I don’t think so. But if you have the space, the idea of putting wind turbines in a place like that is a good one. Technically, it’s not a gamble; cable structures are a proven technology, and wind turbines are a proven technology.

I and many others feel the need to set an example by building a sustainable or green building. The wind turbines provide 20 percent of the buildings energy at peak times, and even more at night. As a symbolic statement about the need to reduce our dependency on oil, it is strong. It is also unusual to have a large section of a building that is basically empty. I think there’s a certain poetry in that. It’s an office building, but there’s also a void in the building that will remind us what we’ve lost.

The design isn’t perfect. I think that the asymmetrical spire on the top isn’t very well integrated into the rest of the building design. I’ve heard David Childs talk about an artist redesigning it, and I think it can be fixed and resolved. But right now it is a weak point.

There are also questions that have not yet been addressed. No one has talked much about the building at street level: What does it look like from the street? How are the entrances arranged? What does it feel like to walk by it? It’s not that I think these elements aren’t going to be good, it’s just that we don’t know.

It is not unusual at this stage of design for there to still be concerns that have not been addressed. In architecture, you typically start at the large scale and work down. There’s a long way to go, meaning that there is plenty of time to answer these unanswered questions. However, the schedule is being compressed, for political reasons, to have the design ready for the cornerstone to be laid by the third anniversary. That doesn’t leave a lot of time.

Mark Ginsberg is the President of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.


Stick With Libeskind

By Beverly Willis

As the first building scheduled to go up at Ground Zero, the Freedom Tower offers a glimpse into the future of the site as a whole, and whether it will work as an urban area. The tower is an impressive building, one that combines Daniel Libeskind's vision with David Childs' innovative use of structure. Childs' use of cables that enclose windmills over a thousand feet in the air, for example, will help create a building that can become a symbol of New York City. But Freedom Tower is not a complete success. It must be brought more closely in line with what Libeskind originally proposed.

Libeskind envisioned a tower that was thin and graceful, with a sloped roof and a spire that mirrored the arm of the Statue of Liberty. While Childs' earlier designs violated this vision by making a bulky, twisting tower much larger than Libeskind wanted, the recently released plan brings it more closely in line with Libeskind's concept, cutting the height of the building back down, for example, to 1,776 feet.

But Libeskind intended the spire to be something that soared like the arm of the Statue of Liberty, starting at the base of the building and running up all the way through it. It was an integral part of the building's form. To me, the spire that Childs has designed looks like a dunce cap, an appendage simply slapped onto the edge of the roof

It would not be too difficult to take the top third of the building, the 30-story skeletal form that includes the windmills, and shape it so that the spire really becomes part of the building architecturally.

Most importantly, for the World Trade Center site to be a successful urban design, all the buildings must work together to create a whole. That is why Rockefeller Center works so well. Its buildings are a family that relate to each other as part of a whole; there is a design consistency that creates the ensemble. You look at any building in the project and you say "That is Rockefeller Center."

If we want people to go to Ground Zero and say "That is the World Trade Center," we need to adhere to the design principles developed for the overall site. Such coherence is how great spaces are made. Without it, you risk chaos.

Yet Childs appears to be disregarding Libeskind's master concept for the site. I couldn't help but notice that in the model that accompanied the new design for Freedom Tower, the shorter buildings on the site have really been bulked up, apparently abandoning Libeskind's vision.

If true, this would be disappointing. Childs has done some impressive things with his design. But as admirable as some of these innovations are, unless they are molded into a bigger and grander concept -- Libeskind's concept -- they will fall flat.

Beverly Willis, an architect, is the co-chair of Rebuild Downtown Our Town.

www.gothamgazette.com/rebuilding_nyc

[NYguy]

By Beverly Willis

Libeskind envisioned a tower that was thin and graceful, with a sloped roof and a spire that mirrored the arm of the Statue of Liberty. While Childs' earlier designs violated this vision by making a bulky, twisting tower much larger than Libeskind wanted, the recently released plan brings it more closely in line with Libeskind's concept, cutting the height of the building back down, for example, to 1,776 feet.

But Libeskind intended the spire to be something that soared like the arm of the Statue of Liberty.....To me, the spire that Childs has designed looks like a dunce cap, an appendage simply slapped onto the edge of the roof

............Childs appears to be disregarding Libeskind's master concept for the site. I couldn't help but notice that in the model that accompanied the new design for Freedom Tower, the shorter buildings on the site have really been bulked up, apparently abandoning Libeskind's vision.

If true, this would be disappointing. Childs has done some impressive things with his design. But as admirable as some of these innovations are, unless they are molded into a bigger and grander concept -- Libeskind's concept -- they will fall flat. [


She'll get over it.... :roll:

And how can she not know that Childs isn't designing the other buildings?

[NYguy]

More on the Freedom Tower design from David Childs (Downtown Express)


Childs said in addition to the restaurant views out the side windows, diners will be able to look up through a slanted glass ceiling – another element of Libeskind’s original plan – and see the wind turbines and the glass spire designed to suggest Lady Liberty’s torch. The elevators going past the turbines and up to the observation deck will pause at 1362 and 1368 feet, the heights of the original two towers, said Childs. Light shows marking special days and commemorating each Sept. 11 would emanate from the spire.

Yes, the observation deck!

[DougGold]

Wait. So there's an observation deck at the top of the latticework? Has anyone seen any stories that point out the specific details of the building like this?

[JMGarcia]

The top of the cabled area and the spire have not been finalized as of yet so anything could happen. They are supposedly bringing in an artist to help them work out the spire and the top of the building in general.

[ZippyTheChimp]

From an engineering standpoint, the spire must be anchored, and transfer load to, the central core.

[NoyokA]

Its simply common sense to put an observation deck at the top of the building. Its so obvious that I feel ridiculously stupid for reiterating this.

[JMGarcia]

From an engineering standpoint, the spire must be anchored, and transfer load to, the central core.

The spire as now shown is not even possible from an engineering standpoint. There's nothing holding it up from below but cables.

Libeskind wants to beef the spire up and I hope he gets his way.

In any case, if you look closely at the top of the model you can see the 2 concrete cores - nicely shown as see through which of course won't be the case - in real life I fear they will be too apparent.

The one in the lower left corner is bound to be raised to become the spire with some sort of cableing coming off it.

http://www.renewnyc.com/images_WMS/freedom_tower/freedom_tower_model_south_night.jpg

[NYguy]

Libeskind wants to beef the spire up and I hope he gets his way.

In any case, if you look closely at the top of the model you can see the 2 concrete cores - nicely shown as see through which of course won't be the case - in real life I fear they will be too apparent.

Libeskind is full of it. He wants his slanted roof so the building will have his "trademark". Let an artist collaborate with Childs as planned to design the spire. As far as the concrete cores, they will of course be more visible. I see that as a good thing. The wind turbines will be based on those structures. The building will not be as "invisible" as a lot of people seem to think.

[Ninjahedge]

Whether its an office building or something else, the site definitely needed something quite tall to aesthetically fix the downtown skyline. It probably could have been aesthetically fixed with anything over 1100-1200 feet. IMO it would also need to taper to be the best fit into the overall skyline view. But that's just my tastes in thing.

As far as the name goes, I find it no more lame than the "Statue of Liberty". Why is the word Liberty any less hoakey than the word Freedom?

For a number of reasons. Firs of all, we did not name it. Second, it is OLD. A name that has been there for a while GAINS popularity.

But why don't we have the "Inspiration" village and the "Diligence" courtyard to be connected by the "remembrance" causeway. Independence might have been a better word, seeing how it was THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE that was signed in 1776, not the Declaration of Freedom.

Why do I get the picture of Mel Gibson at the dedication ceremony.... ?

[Ninjahedge]

From an engineering standpoint, the spire must be anchored, and transfer load to, the central core.

The spire as now shown is not even possible from an engineering standpoint. There's nothing holding it up from below but cables.

Libeskind wants to beef the spire up and I hope he gets his way.

In any case, if you look closely at the top of the model you can see the 2 concrete cores - nicely shown as see through which of course won't be the case - in real life I fear they will be too apparent.

The one in the lower left corner is bound to be raised to become the spire with some sort of cableing coming off it.

http://www.renewnyc.com/images_WMS/freedom_tower/freedom_tower_model_south_night.jpg

Most architectural concept sketches are structural impossibilities. Even when they are constructed, things are found later to be SERVICE problems that were never taken into account in the capacity calculations for teh structure.

You could probably design a building like that that will be fine with wind loading and anything that you could concevably throw at it. Except that it will make everyone in it above the 70th floor motion sick.

Having a transparent outer shell and a center core on a building that large is a NIGHTMARE. Also, having heavy machinery like wind turbines at the TOP of the structure is another problem (you are putting a large mass on the top of a long spring).

So there are a lot of problems with this. Not the least of which being the inherent phobia of ANYBODY LEASING COMMERCIAL SPACE IN A TOWER THAT IS TALLER AND MORE VISIBLE THAN THE ONES THAT JUST COLLAPSED!!!!!

They had a hard enough time leasing out the original towers, what makes these narrow minded frigging planners think they can get people, the same people that are pushing for this thing, to be the ones to lease it?

"We need it bigger, taller, more delecate"
"Oh, me? Nonono, not me. I don't need to be up there! That is for the BIG companies!!!"

:P

(Realisim sucks sometimes, but lets face it, it IS real).

[ZippyTheChimp]

The only name I completely detest is Ground Zero.

If the building footprint is a parallelogram, and the north and south sides rise vertically...

is the roof also a parallelogram, and is this the way it looks from above?

Black - base
Red - roof
http://www.pbase.com/image/24413946.jpg

[JMGarcia]

Whether its an office building or something else, the site definitely needed something quite tall to aesthetically fix the downtown skyline. It probably could have been aesthetically fixed with anything over 1100-1200 feet. IMO it would also need to taper to be the best fit into the overall skyline view. But that's just my tastes in thing.

As far as the name goes, I find it no more lame than the "Statue of Liberty". Why is the word Liberty any less hoakey than the word Freedom?

For a number of reasons. Firs of all, we did not name it. Second, it is OLD. A name that has been there for a while GAINS popularity.

But why don't we have the "Inspiration" village and the "Diligence" courtyard to be connected by the "remembrance" causeway. Independence might have been a better word, seeing how it was THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE that was signed in 1776, not the Declaration of Freedom.

Why do I get the picture of Mel Gibson at the dedication ceremony.... ?

I'm not saying I personally like the name, I'm just saying that in 100 years it too will be old and people who grew up with it will thinks its fine just as we think the Statue of Liberty is.

All in all if the were going to go for something patriotic I would have preferred Independence Tower or Liberty Tower myself.

[JMGarcia]

The only name I completely detest is Ground Zero.

If the building footprint is a parallelogram, and the north and south sides rise vertically...

is the roof also a parallelogram, and is this the way it looks from above?

Black - base
Red - roof
http://www.pbase.com/image/24413946.jpg

I think that's about right. Its why from the north and south it seems to taper while from the east and west it seems to widen almost. The corner views are interesting too ranging from a pyrmid shape to almost a fan shape.

Personally, I prefer the tapered look so I'd rather the upper box be smaller than the lower in all dimensions.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Thanks. That somewhat changes my perception of how the building will look up close. I prefer it this way; maybe it won't look as bottom heavy as it appears (especially that view up West St from the south).

[JMGarcia]

Do you think this looks bottom heavy?

http://mysite.verizon.net/vze26pnp/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/FT8.jpg

[Freedom Tower]

With the 2 concrete cores, the wind turbines, and the elevators that will possibly go to an observation deck at the top of the lattice work, the top of the tower probably wont be too transparent. I consider that a good thing. As for the bottom of the tower, I think it's a ripoff of Foster but it looks great. The bottom half of the tower is the best. The only part of the Freedom Tower that is completely awful is the spire! (And to think that there will be an antenna on top of that!) Thankfully it is the main part that will be redesigned.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Do you think this looks bottom heavy?
Answering this sort of question has invariably put me in the doghouse. :?

[JMGarcia]

LOL :lol:

Well, its more slender than the other buildings. ;)

[krulltime]

I don't know so much space on the top area of the tower wasted on dump experiments doesnt do it for me. :?

...and I still can't believe that Santa Claus is not real :cry:

[NYguy]

Another look at the office tower...(the detailed model looks better, but here's an idea)

http://www.felixsalmon.com/000225.php


http://felixsalmon.com/pics/diagrid.jpg?


http://felixsalmon.com/pics/base.jpg


http://felixsalmon.com/pics/trellis.jpg

[NYguy]

...http://felixsalmon.com/pics/trellis.jpg
http://felixsalmon.com/pics/diagrid.jpg

[JMGarcia]

Look, you can see the windmills. I was hoping for turbines instead. These don't add much to the building IMO.

http://felixsalmon.com/pics/trellis.jpg

[NYguy]

More mention of the upper deck from sunspot.net...


As the design develops, planners say, an artist will collaborate with the architects and engineers to make the spire a sculpture in the sky. In addition, a second observation level will be created at the top of the lattice, about 1,500 feet above street level and open to the air.

When visitors take an elevator from the 1,000-foot level to the 1,500-foot level, Childs said, the cab will pause when it gets to 1,362 feet and 1,368 feet - the heights of the two fallen World Trade Center towers.



If it's open air, that will be even better...

[NYguy]

Look, you can see the windmills. I was hoping for turbines instead. These don't add much to the building IMO.

I'm sure that was just put there for the purposes of the model. Like the rest of the upper building, I don't think that's the final "look".

[Freedom Tower]

I'm excited about this observation deck, so technically we can say that the building is useful(and occupyable) up until 1,500 feet. The empty space will generate power, and above that will be an observation deck. And as we all know, office space up until 70 stories. I'm not sure if the spire can be considered usefull, though. But the antenna will be usefull. I am just worried that too large a portion of the building will be a complete waste of space.

[James Kovata]

I'm sure that was just put there for the purposes of the model. Like the rest of the upper building, I don't think that's the final "look".

The fact that it is a model is a saving grace at this point. I do think the building will be incredible, but the spire on the model looks so very flimsy.

[NoyokA]

I like the tower design it’s simple and elegant, with an equivalent structural grace of the Twin Towers. It’s also similar to the new Hearst Tower and it should benefit from its structural expression. I will not reiterate that the latticework and spire need work, as it sounds like that’s under control too.

A couple of comments on the observatory though. It’s great that it will reach 1,500 feet!

It’s stupid however to have three floors of observatories at 1000 feet when they can be moved to the top instead. I would also expect that most people would forgoe going to the shorter observatories for the real expierence at 1,500 feet.

And as stupid as the name Freedom Tower is, its nothing compared to the idiocy of the elevators stopping at the towers old height, its a nod to nothingness. Seeing as how the Freedom Tower will not rise above the towers footprint the view that will be offered would not be what one would see from the North Towers observatory, furthermore its an inconvenience.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Thanks NYGuy for getting those shots, and to Felix Salmon for providing what Pataki/Libeskind/Childs/Silverstein should have.

I have a better picture of the street. The lobby looks like it will be grand.

Regardless of where they are, I'm glad there will be indoor and outdoor observatories. I loved the roof deck at 2WTC, but some people could not handle it, and were more comfortable at the indoor observatory.

[James Kovata]

I like the tower design it’s simple and elegant, with an equivalent structural grace of the Twin Towers. ...
A couple of comments on the observatory though. It’s great that it will reach 1,500 feet!

....

And as stupid as the name Freedom Tower is, its nothing compared to the idiocy of the elevators stopping at the towers old height, its a nod to nothingness.

I like the tower as well. I do find it very elegant. The spire, through, looks very flimsy, but it will certainly be improved upon.

As for the elevator issue....I totally agree. Pausing at about 1360 feet because that was the level of the prior observatory seems rediculous. Perhaps that idea will be scrapped...along with the name.

Incidentally....Merry Christmas and Happy Chanukkah, everyone!

[NYguy]

It’s stupid however to have three floors of observatories at 1000 feet when they can be moved to the top instead. I would also expect that most people would forgoe going to the shorter observatories for the real expierence at 1,500 feet.


I disagree because the views will be different. The top deck will be an open air deck also. The view at 1,100 ft will be closer to the buildings Downtown, while the upper deck would allow a better view of the tri-state area.

As far as pausing at the heights of the towers, I don't think anybody would want that in a crowded elevator, with your ears already popping. Its an idea that may be scrapped...

[Kris]

December 26, 2003

After Year of Push and Pull, 2 Visions Meet at 1,776 Feet

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/12/25/business/26TICK.groupxl.jpg
The architect David M. Childs, left, Gov. George E. Pataki, the developer Larry A. Silverstein and Mr. Libeskind unveiled the new Freedom Tower design on Dec. 19.

Only a week before he intended to unveil the Freedom Tower — a skyscraper meant to fill the vast physical and spiritual chasm at the World Trade Center site — Gov. George E. Pataki had nothing to show.

The architects David M. Childs and Daniel Libeskind had yet to find a form on which both could at least sign off, even if neither embraced it entirely.

Their standoff was the latest in an architectural evolution that, however tortuous, wound up producing a remarkably well-regarded design.

Governor Pataki's national reputation and statewide legacy will depend in part on the recovery of Lower Manhattan. The 1,776-foot Freedom Tower, which the developer Larry A. Silverstein will build, is to be its skyscraping emblem. Mr. Pataki's goal is to break ground by the third anniversary of the attack, just after the Republican National Convention next year. He said there would be no connection between the events.

To meet that ambitious timetable, Mr. Pataki set a Dec. 15 deadline for a design that would reflect agreement between Mr. Libeskind, as the master site planner, and Mr. Childs, as the architect for Mr. Silverstein.

But in a meeting on Dec. 12, it was clear that the governor had a problem on his hands.

Mr. Childs, who had already reduced the height of his building twice, was drawing the line adamantly at a superstructure 1,600 feet tall, topped by a 176-foot spire, according to those who attended the meeting. Mr. Libeskind was equally adamant that at that size, the building would look too massive and the spire too stubby, more like a pinky finger than the torch-bearing arm of the Statue of Liberty, as he intended.

With time running out, the governor cast himself as intermediary. "I do not want a compromise," he recalled telling Mr. Childs. "I want a consensus. The single most important thing is that both of you can look the harshest critic in the eye and say, `I'm very proud of this building.' "

Sent back to the drawing board with instructions from state officials to lower the superstructure to 1,500 feet, Mr. Childs and his colleagues at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill spent the weekend reworking their design. By Dec. 15, a Monday, they had lowered the top of the superstructure, which meant the spire had grown to 276 feet.

The result was not enough to call a collaboration, but the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation could say in its announcement that an "idea" by Mr. Libeskind had been "given form" by Mr. Childs.

By week's end, Mr. Pataki and Mr. Silverstein were able at last to unveil the basic design of Freedom Tower. Even though it will continue evolving in the five years it will take to build, the fundamentals have been decided. The pivoting, tapering structure will have a skin of faceted glass framed in a narrow diagonal grid of columns, changing at the top to an open network of cables, marking a place in the skyline but having only 70 stories of occupied space.

A year and a day had passed since the world first saw a different tower: Mr. Libeskind's Vertical World Gardens. What happened in the interim — told through interviews with those involved — was less an evolution than a substitution of ideas.

A Master Plan Takes Form

Mr. Childs began thinking about the future of the World Trade Center months before it was destroyed. Silverstein Properties had commissioned Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to be involved in renovating the complex after it took over the trade center's commercial space in the summer of 2001 on a 99-year lease from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

After the attack, Mr. Childs set to work helping Mr. Silverstein lay his rebuilding plans, beginning with 7 World Trade Center, a 52-story office tower north of the main site. He also began thinking of ways that a very tall tower could rise again at the site, perhaps near the PATH station. Structurally, he conceived it as a tube, morphing from a triangular shape into a circular plan as it rose. His designs were shown in the fall of 2002 in an architectural exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

Mr. Libeskind and his wife and business partner, Nina, were attending the biennale when they received a call from Alexander Garvin, the chief planner for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Ms. Libeskind said Mr. Garvin invited her husband to join a panel to select participants in a design study for the trade center site.

Unable to do so because of a schedule conflict, Mr. Libeskind entered the study as a participant. It was never entirely clear where planning would end and architecture would begin in the concepts that emerged.

On Dec. 18, 2002, the public first saw Mr. Libeskind's plan, Memory Foundations. He proposed a 1,776-foot tower at the northwest corner of the site.

Its tallest element was a needlelike, almost freestanding spire with an antenna reaching nearly 2,000 feet. Above the 65th floor, it would have been filled with trees and plants. The spire would have been attached to a 67-story office building with a sloping, diamond-shaped roof.

The Libeskind concept was favored by the Port Authority site planning committee. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation site planning committee recommended a plan by a design collective known as Think, which included Rafael Viñoly and Frederic Schwartz. The twin latticework Towers of Culture in Think's plan were to have wind turbines to power the elevators.

Governor Pataki and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg threw their support to the Libeskind plan, which was officially declared on Feb. 27 to be "the design concept for the World Trade Center site."

The signature tower's asymmetrical spire was now fused to the main 70-story office building but was still filled with gardens.Mr. Pataki named it Freedom Tower.

It was not the governor's to build, however. Only Mr. Silverstein could count on the money needed to finance a $1.5 billion project, through expected insurance payments. And he worried about Mr. Libeskind's inexperience with the design and construction of high-rise office buildings.

In May, Mr. Silverstein said he would hire another architect — it turned out to be the Skidmore firm, represented by Mr. Childs and T. J. Gottesdiener — though he added that Mr. Libeskind "will be part of the team of architects" and that the tower "will reflect the spirit of Dan's site plan."

The task of formally defining this complex architectural relationship fell in mid-July to Kevin R. Rampe, the president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, and Matthew Higgins, the chief operating officer.

After all-night interoffice shuttle diplomacy in the corporation headquarters at 1 Liberty Plaza, the architects emerged on July 15 with an agreement in which Mr. Childs would be "Design Architect and Project Manager" (emphasized by the use of capital letters), while Studio Daniel Libeskind would be "collaborating architect during the concept and schematic design phases" (lowercase).

Conflicting Visions

All the talk of collaboration could not disguise the fact that Skidmore was working on a fundamentally different building, tapered and torqued, 2,000 feet tall, dematerializing in the upper 1,000 feet into a cable-framed wind farm and antenna enclosure. It was slender, symmetrical and pivoting.

Though Mr. Childs insisted that he was trying to find the best way to express Mr. Libeskind's master plan, he began with a different premise: his tower would rise from a parallelogram. The east and west sides would twist to form a more slender parallelogram in the upper reaches, its long side directly in the wind, allowing turbines to harvest natural energy.

For all the public knew, Mr. Libeskind's Freedom Tower was still the one that it was going to get. The image of the tower was the one shown by the development corporation and the Port Authority on Sept. 17, when the "refined master plan" was presented. It is still shown on the Silverstein Properties Web site.

Regarding himself as the steward of a popularly acclaimed plan and faced with a design that seemed to him to have nothing to do with it, Mr. Libeskind tried to fuse the two approaches in a way that would also improve the building layout. He offered a hybrid design that assumed a torqued shape but also kept its angular, offset spire.

To Mr. Childs, this was no answer. On any number of occasions, he had made it clear that he regarded himself as the lead architect and Mr. Libeskind as an informed commentator who had the power to critique the Skidmore design but not to change it. The idea of melding two different buildings was anathema to Mr. Childs, who understood their agreed-upon 51-49 partnership as guaranteeing that he would have final say on design issues.

On Oct. 23, the story of their impasse broke in the newspapers. That night, at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner, Mr. Pataki told Mr. Silverstein that he wanted to see something like Mr. Libeskind's asymmetrical Freedom Tower, with its visual reference to the upraised arm of the Statue of Liberty.

Five days later, Mr. Silverstein and Janno Lieber, the director of the trade center project at Silverstein Properties, met with Mr. Childs and Mr. Libeskind in the Silverstein office at 530 Fifth Avenue.

Pounding the table, Mr. Silverstein told the architects that they would have to agree on certain ground rules, a colleague recounted. Only one building was to be designed, not competing versions; the final design would have to make the most possible use of the technical work already performed by Skidmore; and Mr. Childs's design would have to reflect four principles outlined by Mr. Libeskind.

What Mr. Libeskind regarded as essential were that the Freedom Tower be asymmetrical, that it reach 1,776 feet (though antennas could exceed that height), that it "mark" the slurry wall forming the foundation of the original trade center and that it be the apex in a spiraling crown of towers that would ascend in height from the south, forming a kind of high-rise palisade around the memorial area.

In early November, he was shown Mr. Childs's revised design: a superstructure with an inclined top reaching 1,776 feet and an antenna rising to 2,000 feet. Mr. Libeskind used the word "ingenious" to describe it. He liked the torque and the windmills in the sky, which he saw as consistent with the ecological theme he tried to set with the gardens.

The governor saw the design on the day before Thanksgiving. He liked the torque, the cabling and the windmills, though he said he worried about the turbines' effect on migrating birds.

However, Mr. Pataki was not shown a model of the Freedom Tower in the context of the overall site. And Mr. Libeskind expressed concern that the superstructure, even though open, might appear to be solid, given the layers of cables, the concrete silos at the core and the ranks of turbines. The fear was that it would appear out of scale and inconsistent with his plan.

He needed images to make his case. On the night of Dec. 4, staff members from Studio Daniel Libeskind who were assigned to work in the Skidmore office at 14 Wall Street tried to obtain copies of computer renderings and photographs of recent models of the 1,776-foot version of the tower.

To what degree their Skidmore counterparts refused access and to what degree they cooperated is in dispute. Describing this episode and the general breakdown in discussions, The New York Post published a front-page article on Dec. 11 under the headline "Madhouse; Ground Zero Tower designers at war."

At a beam-raising ceremony that day for 7 World Trade Center, the governor's office made sure that Mr. Libeskind was seated on the dais alongside Mr. Childs. In the front row sat Howard Safir, a former police commissioner, whose security and investigative firm, SafirRosetti, is a consultant to lawyers for Silverstein Properties. The firm interviewed Skidmore employees about the events of Dec. 4 at the request of the developer, which now considers the matter closed.

Mr. Libeskind used the photographs taken on Dec. 4 to make his point to state officials, who found the argument persuasive.

The Final Issues

According to those involved with the protracted negotiations, Mr. Childs felt frustrated by a fresh round of objections that seemed more concerned with sculptural form than with planning. He maintained that his building had been extruded from the site, logically and organically, to accommodate the PATH tracks below, the skew of the riverfront street grid and the flow of the wind. "This building designed itself, like a nautilus shell," he has said.

Silverstein Properties and the Skidmore team were concerned that Mr. Libeskind was still trying indirectly to design the building himself and that if the superstructure was reduced too far, the wind farm would not be capable of generating a meaningful amount of electricity. Nevertheless, they lowered the overall height of the superstructure to 1,600 feet.

But it turned out that was still not enough to allay Mr. Libeskind's worry that the building would appear too massive. He suggested 1,450 feet as the new goal for the height.

On Dec. 12, in the state office at 633 Third Avenue, Mr. Childs and Mr. Lieber met with the governor and other top state officials. Mr. Childs argued forcefully against further compromise, some of the officials said, but at the end of the day was told by state officials that he would have to shave the superstructure down to 1,500 feet.

The story did not end there. Early last week, Mr. Libeskind expressed worry that the spire, which he fought so hard to keep, would not be prominent enough.

At a lunch with the governor on Dec. 17, according to those who were briefed by the participants, Mr. Childs assured Mr. Libeskind that the spire would indeed be an important element, a kind of lightweight tension structure inspired by the work of the sculptor Kenneth Snelson and the engineer R. Buckminster Fuller.

It was not until the morning of Dec. 18, that Mr. Libeskind finally saw the completed Skidmore design, in the company of Joseph J. Seymour, executive director of the Port Authority. Despite the tension, it was clear that the spire had been increased enough that Mr. Libeskind could, at least provisionally, give his approval.

"The design was enhanced, and the master plan was better served by enforcing the spirit of consensus," said Mr. Rampe, the development corporation president.

But Governor Pataki acknowledged on Dec. 19, a few hours after the unveiling at Federal Hall National Memorial, that enforced collaboration was "a tremendous thing to ask of people with the reputations of David Childs and Daniel Libeskind."

"Clearly," he said, "it was not an easy process."

It did not seem like the moment to remind the governor of his October speech. "Designing the Freedom Tower," he said then, "will turn out to have been the easy part."

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/12/25/nyregion/26TICK.chart.jpg

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[JMGarcia]

Link to sculptural towers by Kenneth Snelson mentioned as the artist working on the spire.

http://www.kennethsnelson.net/sculpture/towers/index.htm

[ZippyTheChimp]

The structural concept is called tensegrity. (http://www.kennethsnelson.net/faqs/faq.htm)

[sirhcman]

So is there only going to be one observationd eck or 2 because in that NYT drawing I only see one dot showing an Observation Deck..

[JMGarcia]

...and send it to the LMDC.

Here is my poorly done modification.

In any case, realistically I'm hoping the final design looks something like this up top. I think the flat top of the cabled area and the two dimensionality of the spire is what is its biggest design flaw at the moment.

http://mysite.verizon.net/vze26pnp/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/jmod1.jpghttp://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/12/26/nyregion/tick.large2.jpg

[TomAuch]

The modification looks a lot better JM. I'd like to see how that modification could be applied to other angles, like from the Brooklyn Bridge or ESB.

[JMGarcia]

The modification looks a lot better JM. I'd like to see how that modification could be applied to other angles, like from the Brooklyn Bridge or ESB.

I'll see if my artistic talents (or lack thereof) can accomplish that if I can find the time this weekend. ;)

[NYguy]

JMGarcia, that modification would help, but I really don't see how that spire is going to work. If I had to pick between two towers that I wanted to present to the world as "world's tallest" I'd go with the tower on the left, with an observation deck just beneath the crown. It would seem the more obvious choice over the building with the spire (which still looks stunted). Not to mention it just looks better.

I don't think there's a place for a 276 ft spire on top of 400 ft of cables, windmills, and lattice. There may be another fallout in the coming weeks, I don't see a simple resolution here, and Libeskind is hard to please.


http://www.pbase.com/image/24500913/original.jpghttp://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/12/26/nyregion/tick.large2.jpg


I offer this as a solution - Libeskind gets his asymetrical tower, and we get a top that's more in line with the rest of the building...


http://www.pbase.com/image/24500933/original.jpg


Perhaps Silverstein should take Libeskind on another trip to Germany, and return alone.... :wink:

[James Kovata]

I realize that the only thing definitive about this project is that it's going to change. With respect to the observation deck, was any mention of the deck at 1500 feet made by Childs to any source other than Downtown Express? (I think it was DT Express)

[ZippyTheChimp]

The tower on the left is completely out of balance. The latticework is too much a component of the building. I would rather see the one on the right without any spire.

Since Childs and Libeskind must realize how ridiculous the spire looks in the model, I wonder if it was purposely made to look unfinished because they have not resolved differences over the slope of the lattice roof.

[JMGarcia]

I think they've managed to agree on this Kenneth Snelson guy to be some sort of arbitrater in the whole spire thing.

[NoyokA]

JMGarcia I dont see any evidence that Kenneth Snelson will collaborate on the spire.

[JMGarcia]

JMGarcia I dont see any evidence that Kenneth Snelson will collaborate on the spire.

Just press reports that said they plan on bringing in an artist to help design the spire and then the NY Times article saying it was Snelson that inspired the design.

Its just a guess at this point that he may be the unknown artist.

[Clarknt67]

When visitors take an elevator from the 1,000-foot level to the 1,500-foot level, Childs said, the cab will pause when it gets to 1,362 feet and 1,368 feet - the heights of the two fallen World Trade Center towers.
This strikes me as silly, pausing, then moving 6 feet and pausing again? PLEASE. it's not like there won't be reminders everywhere, let's keep the tourists moving!

[ZippyTheChimp]

Architects should just shut up and draw.

[NYguy]

I realize that the only thing definitive about this project is that it's going to change. With respect to the observation deck, was any mention of the deck at 1500 feet made by Childs to any source other than Downtown Express? (I think it was DT Express)


Yes.

[NYguy]

Since Childs and Libeskind must realize how ridiculous the spire looks in the model, I wonder if it was purposely made to look unfinished because they have not resolved differences over the slope of the lattice roof.

Well, its what they presented to the public, I'm not sure if anybody involved knows how ridiculous (ridiculous!) that tower looks with that spire. And you know, it only looks that way because the spire was forced upon it. You can't deny it, there's no way to go around it. That building wasn't designed with a spire in mind - and it shows (its what happens when the governor designs the world's tallest building). I'm not convinced that any amount of redesigning the spire is going to help. And only the restoration of the NY skyline hangs in the balance...

[JMGarcia]

Would you prefer the 1500 foot building with or without the spire as Zippy suggests?

It reminds me of how the spire was added onto the ESB after its original design and presentation for something as ludicrous as a dirigible mooring mast. The building just wasn't originally designed with a spire in mind. It was meant to be the world's tallest flat top, if only by a little.

[Clarknt67]

It is basically stupid.

Why the hell did we need another obnoxiously tall building in downtown to prove that we could build up again. I agree that the latticework "headpiece" is a bit overboard,

Headpiece, I like that description.

So, in the spirit of the spinmeisters that claim FT as the tallest world's tallest building, I present the world's tallest woman:

http://www.cherextravaganza.com/cher87oscar.jpg

[NYguy]

This is what Libeskind fails to realize - it was his suggestion that 1,776 ft be the significant height on the building. The symbolic height. But If you want to make that height really mean something on the tower, don't tell me its at the top of a 276 ft spire. As far as that goes, you might as well make it 1,776 to the top of an antenna - same thing.

NO, that's not going to do it at all. If you told me that I could actually get 1,776 ft up in the tower - now that to me says a lot, and 1,776 ft becomes more real. More real than the 1,776 ft figure that is going to be thrown around for years and has no real meaning to the building.

I'm from the old school of New York thinking, where words such as "too tall" and "too big" didn't fit into the NY vocabulary because this was New York - the biggest and best of them all. (You wanted something smaller that would "fit", you went to Baltimore, Cleveland, etc.) NY was all about exceeding what anyone thought was "rational". Its part of the magic of NY, why people still come to NY with big dreams. Its not a place for those who like it "smaller".

Some would have you think the days of thinking big now belong exclusively to places such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, or even Dubai. We know that the Freedom Tower will only have occupied space up to about 1,150 ft - the rest of the tower being cables and windmills. So what if there's an extra 276 ft of cables and windmills, its not going to make the building look any worse than it does. If fact, as long as you are building that, you might as well make it impressive. Because that's the thing about New York. Its a place where anything could and sometimes should happen.

There are those who say building the "tallest tower in the world" is offensive. Offensive to whom? Those who would destroy it and knock us to the ground? I find the suggestion that we think smaller offensive. And the notion that a taller tower would "destroy" the NY skyline, outrageous. (I wasn't aware that there was a 1,500 ft cap on the skyline) Let us return to the days when NY was the Big Apple in more than just name.

But for now, it's in the hands of Libeskind and Childs to make the 1,776 ft height mean something more than lip service...


http://www.pbase.com/image/24500913/original.jpghttp://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/12/26/nyregion/tick.large2.jpg

[ZippyTheChimp]

You're missing the point concerning objections to the building on the left. It's not the height, but the proportion. It would be fine if the roof of the office portion were also raised a proportional amount.

[JMGarcia]

I agree with Zippy in that it is the proportion. The one on the left would be better if the office was higher or even if it was considerably lower making a base of sorts.

[Patrick]

After I've seen all the proposals here, I just wish to see a real bulding. Something thats accessable from the cellar to the roof. All this structure beyond 72/73 floor is needless. I really have no idea about architecture, but just the view isn't impressive. Everytime I see this new building I'm more disappointed, I don't need 120 floors, but something that says 'I'm full of life, full of hectic life and thats why I'm strong'. For me, this whole building is the exact the opposite.

Patrick

[Ninjahedge]

Do we really need the worlds largest phallic symbol?

And it really isn't all "real" either. It is like a wiener with a prosthetic "enhancement". :p

[JMGarcia]

Do we really need the worlds largest phallic symbol?

And it really isn't all "real" either. It is like a wiener with a prosthetic "enhancement". :p

One thing about the original WTC was that it could be seen from so many places across the metropolitan area. I have always thought the memorial that would make the most impact would include some sort of large beacon in the sky at the site that, like the WTC, could be seen from afar.

Therefore I do believe the replacement tower needs to be of a height that will make it visible. If they want to use the 1776 foot number of symbolism so be it.

I am also happy that there will indeed be a large beacon and a height that will make it visible from far away. Therefore I don't really see this as a phallic symbol but as something that has the necessary height to fullfill its function as a memorial beacon. In other words, form follows function to a certain extent.

[Patrick]

I don't get the purpose of the whole lattice thing.

Patrick

[Kris]

December 30, 2003

PUBLIC LIVES

Behind a Graceful Spire, Science, Art and Passion

By GLENN COLLINS

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/12/30/nyregion/30PROF.8.jpg
"We were able to meet on the common ground of geometry, just as geometry is the common ground between form and structure."
GUY NORDENSON

IN hard hat, Guy Nordenson was one of the structural engineers who clambered for months through the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center. Now, minus the headgear, in the hushed spaces of his office near ground zero, he holds forth about torque and taper, about Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. He speaks with considerable stillness and insistency, just as he does with his architecture students at Princeton.

An 18-inch model on his desk demonstrates his structural design for the Freedom Tower. The model, actually: the original paper-and-balsa-wood construction he presented to the architect David M. Childs in June, the twisted and tapered shape that evolved into the billion-dollar, 1,776-foot skyscraper whose design was unveiled on Dec. 19.

Mr. Nordenson's contribution has won praise from many. "The torque creates an opportunity to break up the wind, making the ground much more hospitable than the old trade center plaza used to be," said Kent L. Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society.

Starting Sept. 14, 2001, Mr. Nordenson mobilized teams of engineers to advise on demolition and to assess the buildings next to the fallen towers. During the 12-hour days when he inventoried damage in the landmark building at 90 West Street, he never imagined he would help create the spire that would replace the towers.

By the end of the contentious Freedom Tower development process, "we were able to meet on the common ground of geometry," Mr. Nordenson said, "just as geometry is the common ground between form and structure."

Common ground and geometry are crucial to Mr. Nordenson, who celebrates collaboration and delights in mathematical explorations of abstraction. He is the kind of polymath who summons analogies to Paul Klee, John Cage and high-energy particle physics in describing the challenges of disaster-debris removal.

"Any profession is embedded in the culture," he said, an approach that is certainly French, as is his upbringing. Mr. Nordenson — born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in France 48 years ago — is an immigrant, as is Daniel Libeskind, the überarchitect who created the ground zero master plan. . Mr. Nordenson first came to New York at age 4 in 1959, shuttling between Europe and the United States until he became a regular pupil at the Lycée Française in Manhattan at 9.

He passed the rigorous exam for the French baccalaureate in mathematics, the ticket to an elite French school, but opted for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, followed by the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned a master's degree in structural engineering.

His father, Lars, a petrochemical engineer who was born in Sweden and lived in France, loved the theater so much that when he was working in New York, in 1950, he produced Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People" on Broadway. Arthur Miller adapted the book after it was translated from Norwegian by Lars Nordenson.

Since many saw Mr. Miller's version as an indictment of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, the production became a political dartboard and closed after 36 performances. "My father had put up everything, investing, and he lost everything," said Mr. Nordenson (Guy rhymes with "glee," as the French pronounce it).

During his M.I.T. days, Mr. Nordenson's mother, Charlotte, who knew Isamu Noguchi, helped him get a summer job at the sculptor's Long Island City studio, where he also met R. Buckminster Fuller, a Noguchi partner.

Two decades later, Mr. Nordenson helped found the Structural Engineers Association of New York. "Engineering art is an essential part of architecture, but it is generally true that these two disciplines talk past one another," said Henry N. Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, who is a founding partner of the firm with I. M. Pei.

Mr. Cobb added: "Throughout history, great engineers have made great contributions to architecture, and Guy transcends engineering. He goes beyond the practical and participates in the conceptualization of things."

In an era when new technology and computer-assisted design are giving engineers the prominence of the brand-name architects they assist, Mr. Nordenson shrinks from the idea of becoming a star. His instinct for privacy is such that he initially preferred to offer a drawing in lieu of being photographed for this article.

ALTHOUGH Mr. Nordenson earned a degree in civil engineering from M.I.T., he was a comparative literature major, and his writings and conversations offer not only insights on architecture and design, but also disquisitions on Mandelbrot's theories of fractal geometry, the poetry of William Carlos Williams and the transformational grammar of Noam Chomsky.

A tenured associate professor in the School of Architecture at Princeton, Mr. Nordenson is also resident rainmaker at his design shop, Guy Nordenson and Associates, a 6-year-old consulting firm that employs 12. He was the structural engineer for Richard Meier's Church of the Year 2000 in Rome and Yoshio Taniguchi's planned Museum of Modern Art expansion in Manhattan.

Mr. Nordenson's office, in a classic building soaring above Fulton Street and Broadway, will most likely be razed to make way for a new transit center. Would he then move into the Freedom Tower? "I'd love to," he said, "but I'd never be able to afford it."


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Clarknt67]

I don't get the purpose of the whole lattice thing.

Patrick

To give them bragging rights to having the "world's tallest building."

That is without ACTUALLY building the world's tallest building.

Actually, I'm less down on the project now that it's being said they'll be an observation deck at the top. At least that gives some function and purpose to all that height.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Considering this building was designed by committee, not just of architects, but of competing interests, it turned out well (assuming futher modifications).

The lattice also has utility. It will support the broadcast antenna, a source of revenue. Hopefully, it will house a higher observation deck. It will generate electricty and make the building more "green", a trend that is gathering momentum (Hearst Tower).

If you need symbolism, it will lessen dependence on foreign oil - we all know where that comes from.

[Ninjahedge]

In all fairness, the Chrystler Building did the same thing when it was built.

Noone told anyone about its antenna. It was constructed at about the same time as another building in the area (I forget which) where the second one was designed to be taller than the CB.

On completion of the CB, at the grand opening (I BELIEVE) they hoisted and secured the antenna up, making it taller than the new buildings design. A little finger to the nose.

As for the whole phallic reference. Look at the scale. It is a common human "comfort zone" to "proportion" these buildings accordingly. It is mere coincidence that these shapes happen to be the most efficient for our building systems.

After all, we created those too.....

[Gulcrapek]

Other bldg was 40 Wall St, downtown ;) .

[Patrick]

Don't get me wrong, I don't need sybolism. But it looks like fake sybolism to me. If they want the highest building in the world, good... lets build.

Why do they stop around 70th floor and then go on with this lattice? They could stop at 70th. Looks like 'Yeah, we can't go higher, because of our new sensitiveness, but to achieve our main goal, lets do the lattice.'

Hypocrisy, thats what I think when I see the pics.

Patrick

[ZippyTheChimp]

From the Downtown Express, another view
http://www.downtownexpress.com/index.html

Changes to Freedom Tower are beyond expectations

By David Stanke

The design for the first office tower to rise from the World Trade Center site has succeeded in producing an important American symbol and a very appropriate response to the attacks of 9/11/01. It has done this, against the odds, in a most American way. The Freedom Tower is the product of a dogfight of egos, politics and business. There was neither an overwhelming mandate of principle nor straightforward hierarchy of authority. The result is a pragmatic building with a unique form, a corner stone of restoration holding aloft a symbolic representation of the most important issue of our age: energy. And floating above all of this, the opportunity for a public place with contemplative potential far beyond that offered by the memorial being designed on 4.5 adjacent acres to the south.


The success achieved is beyond what we could reasonably have expected. There is typically one person behind a work of brilliance in architecture, in art, and in politics. Others must be persuaded and inspired to understand the vision over time. This is the theory wisely applied by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. in selecting one widely respected architect to design the transportation terminal two blocks to the east. But the design for the Freedom Tower was subject to political manipulation, general comment by a host of special interests, and a master plan that survived by applying a thin layer of sugarcoated marketing across the site. The specifics of the final design were left to cooperation of two architects: Daniel Libeskind, a political appointee, and David Childs, who was hired by a real estate developer, Larry Silverstein.


The first challenge successfully achieved was to establish the building’s height. Make no mistake; contrary to the public speeches, the Freedom Tower will not be the tallest building in the world. Occupied office space tops out at 1,150 feet, a height in the range of the Empire State Building. The rest is comprised of a 350-foot open-air structure and a 300-foot spire. Engineering this is not the same as supporting 650 feet of habitable space. The W.T.C. towers boldly carried their full footprints to their full height, creating a uniquely imposing form. The Freedom Tower whispers its way to its full height. To compare these towers on the basis of height is an insult to the originals.


But the way the building establishes its presence in the sky is symbolically important. On 9/11/01, America received a critical blow. It is an appealing concept, after being knocked down, to get right back up again. But we are still at war, and we are still exposed to heightened alerts. The response of the ego to build a taller building and to dare “them” to knock it down again is neither a wise nor a strong response. Living adjacent to the W.T.C. block and having witnessed 9/11 at close range, I am not as excited to define my neighborhood by the tallest building in the world as I once was. I would also never ask anyone else to work at the top of such a building, although many people would be willing.


Countries and individuals with something to prove build the tallest buildings in the world. The buildings are seldom economically successful. They are expensive statements of national or personal pride funded often on the backs of the public. It is an American strength that, in the midst of this war, our new building crouches a bit in a defensive posture. The stated height of 1776 feet is an attempt to conceal this obvious state of affairs, to ease the pride of the country into accepting something less than we once had.


America is essentially a pragmatic nation. We are not driven by religious ideals or ruled by arrogant dictators. We are driven by the principle that people should have a say in public issues that affect them and that individuals reap the rewards (and pay the price) for their own decisions. These principles are democracy and capitalism. These principles have produced a powerful and wealthy nation that is the ideal and envy of much of the world. We don’t need to draw artificial lines in the air to establish our worth. We can be just as successful at 1,200 feet as at 1,776 feet. This building respects our primary principles.


The second challenge was to establish a new skyline, despite a less imposing building. Aside from the pride they generate, tall buildings are beautiful and inspiring. Like mountains, they expand our awareness upwards. They bring atmospheric activity into an accessible frame of reference. They are beacons and position finders. The Freedom Tower fills all these needs with the open-air structure gently rising beyond the height of the original towers. This tower is a more organic and healing form than the original Libeskind version. The original tower was rigidly angled form with a crystalline-looking summit, punctuated with a sharp spire that accounted for most of the height. This tower spirals gracefully from the ground and tapers gently skyward into a porous structure that dissolves into the sky. The spire, still of dubious value, is less prominent and blends more naturally with the main structure.


The third challenge was to create true symbolism for the country. The positioning of wind turbine facilities at the top of this tower symbolizes the importance of energy for our country’s future and evokes the role of energy as the core cause of these attacks. Most of the symbolism of the Libeskind site plan and the memorial plans to date is intangible and obtuse in comparison. Even the name “Freedom Tower” is an arbitrary association to a principle that is in no way reflected in the architecture of the building. The Park of Heroes is just a park in name only. It is a smallish park with no real symbolism. In fact, all of the symbolism in the W.T.C. plans to date has required an explanation sheet. But the symbolism of an energy production facility elevated to the highest point of our city speaks for itself. Surprisingly, this symbolism has not been broadly proclaimed.


The towers of the W.T.C. were attacked and destroyed by a vastly inferior enemy making a thinly veiled attempt to gain control of the energy riches of the Middle East. To ensure access to this energy, the U.S. has established a history of supporting governments contrary to our own principles. Any leader who could guarantee us access to oil at reasonable rates has been eligible for our support. These governments bought off or repressed the resulting opposition while prospering obscenely.


Over time, the temptation for outsiders to fight for control of these resources has grown and the oppressed populations have served as a fertile ground for recruits to rebellion. Injustice is inherently unstable.


Despite this, our only national energy policy is a stopgap measure to explore more remote wilderness lands to postpone our dependence on foreign oil. Now, in the absence of a national energy policy from Washington, a capitalist has installed an energy producing facility on the most visible site in our country. Squarely facing and addressing our energy issues is the only way that we will ever build the tallest building in the world in this country. If our politicians in Washington can see as far as Downtown New York, perhaps they will understand the symbolism.


Finally, beyond hopes, the Freedom Tower includes the possibility of a public viewing platform atop the windmill facility. This platform would be slightly higher than the original towers. It has been surprising that the vocal family members, and especially the 9/11 Coalition of Families, have lobbied so hard to control redevelopment at ground level and below while hardly ever recognizing the importance to many of a place in the sky for contemplation and healing. Some have gone so far as to say they are not interested in the buildings because rebuilding is morally wrong. Despite this, many people directly impacted by the attacks, both relatives of victims and survivors, will want to take this sojourn, perhaps regularly.


What venue could be more moving than one looking over the city from the height of the original towers? From this perspective, we will not need designers to create a captivating space. The light will come from the sun, the moon and the clouds. The water will come from the rain and the snow and from the rivers surrounding Manhattan. The stone will be seen in the buildings of the ages below in the city. No memorial artist will create a more compelling experience. No one will be able to recreate the feeling of looking down from that tower. The top floors of the freedom tower will become the primary focus of the pilgrimage to the W.T.C. and its most powerful contemplative space.


David Childs has produced a building that may mark the turning point in the rebirth of the W.T.C. Gov. Pataki has clearly made some moves indicating his awareness of the need to move quickly. He has tilted the balance of control in favor of people who will make responsible decisions. Decisions are beginning to be made by those with a stake in and connection to the future of the site. The first building promises to be an elegant landmark with potent symbolism, pragmatic functionality, and a place of reflective importance.


David Stanke owns a condominium across the street from the W.T.C. site and is one of the founders of BPC United.

[BPC]

In all fairness, the Chrystler Building did the same thing when it was built. . . . It was constructed at about the same time as another building in the area (I forget which) where the second one was designed to be taller than the CB.



I actually thought the Chanin Building at 380 Lexington was the other building you were referring to.

[NoyokA]

BPC posted:


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FROM THE LATEST ISSUE OF THE NY PRESS:

The Shape of Freedom
What’s in a building? At Ground Zero, everything.

There are times when great decisions must be made–nearly always at moments of high emotion, uninformed, half in fright, half in boldness. Michelangelo had to decide whether the pope would dig his nude males zipping across the top of the Sistine Chapel. John Morton, a frightened pacifist, having arrived late to Philadelphia in 1776, had to cast the deciding vote on something called the Declaration of Independence.

We are now making a similar decision in Lower Manhattan. Last year, 10 million tourists came to Ground Zero to gape at a hole in the ground. Whatever now rises in that honey pot will mean far more to the entire world–to our culture, to our economy–than any other building, monument or manmade symbol ever has.

The question before us is simple yet profound: Do we replace the old, despised World Trade Center with the new "vision of freedom" much discussed by our governor, or do we slobber back down into the past? Do we step up to say that no half-crazed murderer will scare us, shut us down, take the future–or give in to stupidity and safety?




Cut quick to immediacy.

A long time ago somebody told me that the day after 9/11, an architect drew two new towers almost exactly like the original WTC uglies and handed them to the man who had just bought the ground they stood on. The owner-developer’s name, as you know, is Larry Silverstein, and I’m told he loved those sketches of the WTC clones. As this story made its way through the world of architecture, 90 percent of our finest designers began doodling the new WTC old-style.

My friend Daniel Libeskind did the reverse. He offered something entirely unlike the World Trade Center–a twisting, transparent tower, covered from middle to peak with shimmering glass, topped by a spire soaring 1776 feet into the air, offering the world a startlingly transparent face focused on the future. Beneath, its body echoes our beloved French femme in the harbor, massaging that arched little flame beside her lovely head.

What at the top? The higher you go, the fewer offices–the more restaurants, playgrounds, observation decks. Above that? A "sky garden" of sorts, a nest of trees and flowers–a dare to our enemies to attack naked nature, unveiling the true darkness of their hearts. Down below, there were plans for at least 60 floors of white-collar workers.

There is nothing like this model anywhere else in the world. And isn’t that what Manhattan has always been about? Newness? The new? Emerson summed this up when he asked us to turn away from the florid European past and regard each morning as the dawning of a new era. "We live in a new and exceptional age," he declared. New and exceptional–how better to express the possibilities as yet unformed that surround downtown Manhattan?

But we almost didn’t get this new age. We almost got the boxed past, not the future, not even the present.



Wait a minute!

While you learn how we narrowly escaped disaster–that is, another ugly box, provoking a dead, know-nothing neighborhood, a place where no company would dare to bring its bright, "New Creative Class" colleagues–let me tell you about going to Libeskind’s office and chatting with his wife and an anonymous co-designer.

"What will they use to stop this?" I asked.

"A box," the designer replied. "David Childs and his colleagues will try to give the developer exactly what he wants...another World Trade Center, this time in singular form...exactly 1776 feet high, matching our height, but nothing else."

"And what’s at the top? More offices for Osama to blow up?"

He shook his head. "Worse. The top 30 stories are covered with glass and a lattice frame that reminds you of a prison."

"What’s inside? Does the garden survive?"

"No," he answered, "and I’m not going to tell you what’s in there. It’s not bad. You’ll find out."

In brief, they might do what we’ve seen in our nightmares: one more dumb block of stone, one more rectangle, one more proof that big American money is scared of its shadow. Never would big oil or big realtors or the big brokers dare give us our prizewinner, Libeskind’s glistening evocation of the Lady, soaring above the spot where the old WTC stood, spiked inside greenery, sprouting up–a reformed Everest–nothing like what we expected to get from the forces of darkness eating up the insides of our city: a scone of the horrid, deficit-ridden World Trade Center, or perhaps something worse…topped off with…




Cut again to raw immediacy.

On December 10, I went to 25 Broadway, not far from Bowling Green, to hear Daniel talk to prospective art dealers who were considering jumping Chelsea and the Meat Packing district–as they were jumping Soho when last I wrote about the downtown crisis for this paper in 2001. The organizer is art realtor Susan B. Anthony, suffering her life and fortune to get art dealers to move, to open up themselves and the work of their artists to new audiences, audiences down in Zero, where already the average yearly income is approaching $100,000–nearing Soho style.

But that morning, the New York Times had told us exactly what we had dreaded, exactly what I had been told at Daniel’s office. Developer Silverstein and his pals discarded Libeskind’s ethereal "vision" of the spire and handed the job of designing what Governor Pataki dubbed (upon seeing Libeskind’s sketch) "The Freedom Tower" to David Childs, one of the losers in the democratic design competition, the pride and joy of the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill architecture firm.

We looked at the Metro Section and gaped at the grotesque boxes rising into the sky, covered, yes indeed, with a prison-style lattice network at the top, housing windmills. Not a bad environmental practicality, it must be granted, but it’s no garden. Instead, high in the sky, a complex of engines and whirring blades expected to power 20 percent of this new office monster, presumably saving you and me, the taxpayers, a couple of cents each year.

As the event pressed on at 25 Broadway, as Daniel sang in his lyric fashion about how much the arts can mean to this neighborhood, this "capital of the world" (yes, he said it), I waited for the question: What on Earth can the arts do in a neighborhood dominated by an imbecilic box?

No one would ask it, and the conversation between speaker and audience carried blithely on, as if nothing had happened, as if Pearl Harbor had never occurred. I could stand it no longer, so in the loudest voice I could manage without shouting, I asked Daniel, "How are all these beautiful things implied in your spire and in your master plan for the public spaces below going to occur? How are all these people going to bring their art galleries down here if David Childs and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill design the unfree Freedom Tower, as the Times has just told us?"

Short pause. It’s clear to me that most of the audience hadn’t read the Times and therefore didn’t know. They began to buzz, grumble, growl; Daniel, as always, was unfazed. He launched into a half-mystical, half-visionary discussion of how, yes, David Childs would be a part of the design team, he was the master planner, not supposed to design every inch, but–

"I’m optimistic we can work together."

I shook my head, began to protest, but the moderator of the evening, Carl Weisbrod, commander-in-chief of the "official" Downtown Alliance, shut me off and asked us all to go home.

In the next few days, most papers and media outlets revealed themselves to be relentlessly convinced that the once-sacred spire was dead and that Skidmore, Owings and Merrill was on top.

Which wasn’t entirely true. The decisions had not yet been made.

But when would we know for sure? Long ago, Pataki promised to reveal "the Freedom Tower" on Monday, Dec. 15–the ides of December. Later, he delayed until Dec. 19.



It ought to be clear by now that this means a lot to me. Why?

Hear it all. Not only because it is comic, tragic and moving, but because it teaches you how we got here, why we will face vibrant life or horrific death when the final final decision is made.

In 1973, long before I met Libeskind, I went to the top of the World Trade Center. Before almost anybody else in the press–before even stolid Minoru Yamasaki, the architect. I had just gotten a job writing about the visual arts for Newsweek. A brilliant and edge-minded editor named Jack Kroll had yanked me out of a jerk town called Washington, DC. In 1970, he brought me up here, scared to death, bankrupt but victorious with the custody of my two daughters who needed six meals a day (in addition to my one). I intended to keep this job.

A then-famous man named Osborne Elliott, semi-darling of the publishing trade, the man who had brought Newsweek almost up to Time’s level of circulation, the man who hired Jack Kroll, called me on the phone.

"Davis," he said, "the World Trade Center is about to open. You know it’s the world’s tallest building, don’t you?"

"Yes," I said, knowing that I should know everything he thinks I should know. "And Mr. Elliott," I added, "there are two tall towers, not just one."

"I know that," he said, "and my name is ‘Oz,’ not ‘Mr. Elliott.’ Now, Davis, no writer or critic has been to the top of this thing to tell us what it’s like to look down, over the top. I want you–"

"Yes, sir?"

"I want you to get your ass up there. And I want you to write the best goddamned architecture piece ever written about this goddamned controversial thing. Thirty million people will read it because I will lay it out big. I want them to love it, get me? I’m not telling you to praise those hulks. That’s your decision. But make your words ring with the immediacy of this event. At last the arts can have a headline in my magazine. Understand?"

The next morning, I showed up early and was met at the door by none other than the architect Minoru Yamasaki, with all of his mafia, including the Secret Service agents who guard the Port Authority. Why such a welcome? Because this tall, scared nobody from Newsweek was about to tell the whole nation about their maxi-mega-dollar investment.

"We want you to get it right," someone said, smiling, pumping my hand. "Forty million readers will be reading every word."

"No, only 30 million," I corrected. "You’re thinking about Time."

"Well, Time’s not here. It’s you or nothing."

Yamasaki grabbed my arm and took me off on a guided tour, with beefy agents holding onto my other arm and both legs–or so I imagined. They wanted me to see big, furnished offices with huge picture windows way up, around floors 65, 70 and 75. They wanted me to see grandeur and impressive modernity.

I saw, instead, stolid, linear, deathly gray halls all around me. The World Trade Center, with all the world watching, had decided to become boring. When you looked out those picture windows, you saw nothing except empty plots of land and a waterfront decked with dumpsters and garbage. (Nobody lived or worked way downtown then, except a few illegal artists.)

Yamasaki, pleasant, charming, filled with quips and facts, was getting on my nerves. I wanted the freedom to see what was coming, the freedom to do my job (and thereby keep my job).

"I want to see the roof," I said suddenly.

"No, no, no," he told me. "It’s impossible…There are no guardrails, the roof isn’t finished."

Someone asked, "Why do you want to see it?"

"It’s the tallest building in the world. I want to see what you see when you look down."

"Nothing," they assured me, "nothing."

"Makes no difference," I declared, anger mounting. "My editor ordered me to go up there–and it makes sense. What does the world look like from the highest man-made point on Earth?"

In the end, they had to agree or risk losing my 30 million readers. One hulking carpenter agreed to lead me–nauseous at every step–up the one rickety pair of stairs that led to a door that led out to–

And there I was, outside, at the highest point in man’s world of that time.

"Don’t go any further," he cautioned. "You might slip and fall over the edge."

The World Trade Center was shaking and trembling as much as I was. When I looked across to its brutish brother, it, too, was swaying.

"This is enough," I told my guide. "I can’t see a thing up, and the damned thing is shaking like Mitzi Gaynor on the dance floor."

He guided me down the stairs with a firm, fatherly hand: "Don’t worry. We’ll fly you over the top tomorrow in a helicopter."

When I later met the engineer, he explained away the buildings’ movement.

"All tall buildings shake," he said. "The Empire State is worse. We build in balance weights to keep everybody inside steady. We’re not worried about shaking."

There we were, in one of the world’s two tallest buildings, and I’m being told that the world must shake, that it was to be expected.

Then he said it: "We’re worried about airplanes."

"Airplanes?"

"Yes," he said, "we’re in the flight path to JFK and LaGuardia. What if a pilot loses control or gets drunk and smashes his 707 into Tower 1 or 2?"

"Yes, what if?" I asked.

"It’s all under control. Plenty of fireproofing. Even if the building cracks under the impact, we’re okay. We’ve constructed the inner structure so that the tower collapses straight down. It won’t fall across the highway, where we expect new buildings and people to grow up. Nobody dies except–"

"Those inside?"

"Yes, though we’re fireproofing and perfecting the elevators so they can get out."

It would be a pity, we agreed. Then he added: "It will never happen."




What about Soho? Why must we yoke the two–Zero and Soho–together here? Disparate in scale, aura, funding, populations, they are nonetheless a form of question and answer, linked as one. To see how Ground Zero will survive–that is, how it will become a community, a place where millions upon millions will want to live, work and visit–we must look back at Soho.

One short year after my 1973 Newsweek WTC story, I bought into an old but lively building on Wooster St. It was my friend and agent, a wizard wheeler-dealer and accountant named Rubin Gorewitz, who pulled it off. He took me to the fourth floor and introduced me to sculptor Charles Ross, who was dying to sell out as soon as possible. I was also shown the basement studio, where I met a dark, snarling, brilliant artist from Lithuania named George Maciunas.

Maciunas and the infamous filmmaker Jonas Mekas–whose work I already revered and whose showplace, Anthology Film & Video Archive, thrived on the first floor–had planned the future of Soho down in that basement studio, where they took turns living, along with Yoko Ono, John Lennon and others. Maciunas and Mekas put their radical vision down on paper for the prestigious J.M. Kaplan Foundation, led by Joan Davidson, intensely interested in finding studio and living space for artists to keep in the city.

"Soho is zoned light-industrial," Gorewitz told me. "Miller Cardboard owns this building you’re going to move into, but nobody cares, least of all the city because there is no more light industry down here. Just artists and galleries… And they’re paying taxes, which the World Trade Center isn’t."

Soho and Ground Zero are irreversibly linked in my mind–and in their economic futures. Low-lying, asymmetrical Soho, created by artists moving into illegal spaces nobody else would use, bringing loads of tax money for the city, loads of tourists, much brilliant vanguard art. And now, steadily replacing high art comes the best of low art, comes the most elite and hippest boutiques, some of them–Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Issey Miyake, Anna Sui, Barneys Loft and the powerhouse Bloomingdale’s settling in on Broadway–spreading huge billboards all over Midtown boasting their Soho addresses.

Will the artist-writer-philosopher-performer, the Maciunas, the Mekas, the choreographer Trisha Brown (who also helped found Fluxhouse II, my building atop which she directed an historic dance piece in 1972), the Nam June Paik, the Bill Beckley, the James Seawright, survive? Will the daring, progressive New York Foundation for the Arts on Spring St. and Sixth Ave.–the only "public-private" foundation left in this state that can directly fund artists or their works–the first institution to thoroughly research the financial value per capita of bringing artists into downtown–survive?

As for Ground Zero, Susan B. Anthony and others want to find spaces for us down there, so the dealers have nearby artists to show. Other wise heads want to keep alternative art organizations like Franklin Furnace (which, with the old, revered Kitchen on Wooster and Broome Sts., pioneered what we now casually call "New Media Art"). The richness, density and speed of this development will be slowed if Libeskind’s lively public plaza in his victorious master plan, infused with spaces for culture and fun, which invites museums and tiny buildings into the public plaza down there, is ignored on behalf of more boxes and office space.

They may not remember that what finally saved those half-empty WTC towers was the arrival of Battery Park City, which gave workers someplace to live and brought schools, bars, shops, restaurants, art galleries. When the mayor and his planner, Amanda Burden, talk of Ground Zero as a "24/7" community, not just a nest of towers, this must be what they mean.



Last cut–perhaps–to immediacy.

It has been my good fortune to scour the world, to unravel mysteries found only in distant cultures and peoples. I have been to Russia and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Austria in the Cold War, to Croatia and Slovenia, to Sarajevo and Belgrade… I nearly lost my life in a performance on the Berlin Wall in 1978… In Japan, Australia, China, throughout the East, there, too, I sought what I knew was not here. Finally–just to put an end to a parade too long–I risked and found my life in Argentina, Chile, Venezuela and Mexico.

What do I find, over and over? The Other thinks you and I are free. We can do, sing, perform, behave any way we wish. Of course, it’s not true; we are hounded and harassed by capital, politics, pressures of unimaginable kinds. Worse, we expect too much of ourselves and of that fragile Constitution, its amendments, and most of all that Declaration of Independence (which Ho Chi Minh himself read to his new citizens on the day North Vietnam declared itself).

When I went in the fall of 2001 to Russia, Estonia, Croatia, all these countries, after lecturing and entertaining them with jokes, stories, serious theses and huge mural-scale images coming down from my website, their first question was always:

Why did you, the freest country, allow 9/11 to happen?

This spot, down in this Lower Manhattan and overseen by the Lady lusted after by all others on Earth, now stands for a kind of fantasy, a fantasy of total freedom–like your favorite intercourse fantasy–a fantasy that deserves pursuing.

These things are on my mind as I rush late into Federal Hall. Governor Pataki, fortunately, was also late. Waiting for him are Daniel Libeskind, of course, David Childs, Larry Silverstein, Mayor Bloomberg. The governor appears, stands before the podium, says, "Today we reclaim New York’s skyline with a towering beacon."

He pulls apart the veil over the model that, yes, sprouts a metaphorical phallus straight up into the air–Daniel’s spire–resting on 30 transparent gleaming stories of glass.

Take a look for yourself. The asymmetrical spiral, determinedly off center, soars over the twisted box below. Forgive me if I say that the torque-like 60-story base, which seems to spiral around itself, looks even more interesting than Daniel’s first desire. Forgive me also if I say the top 30 stories, transparent all, carry windmills that are mind-blowing. And there are still those last virgin 276 feet not yet assigned (to the best of my knowledge, as of this writing) to any artist, designer or architect. They will be crucial, not least of all to the solons who count "tallest" and "second tallest" buildings in the world, but who may not count 276 feet in which nothing happens, where no human being acts, lives, creates, loves, eats, sleeps. This tip needs at least one Adam and one Eve, if not trees.

As Libeskind has said, what we do here must "mean" something to the entire world, to the Other, everywhere. And that is precisely why we must keep struggling to keep the form asymmetrical, unbalanced, open, in order to permit freedom, innovation, professions, products and artmaking never before dreamed. The box is inappropriate because we are unboxed right now, in the sciences, the arts, in gender, in religion, in politics, in architecture. Let us nourish. Let us prepare…for the unexpected.

Volume 16, Issue 53

[dbhstockton]

Yawn. Was anybody able to get all the way through that?

[ZippyTheChimp]

Yes, but only because in was in the Memorial Competition thread, and I was looking for the connection. :?

[BPC]

Yawn. Was anybody able to get all the way through that?

It was a terrible article, and I already regret posting it. About what you would expect from the editor-less NY Press. The two things I originally found interesting about the article were (1) the author's love of the new design for the Freedom Tower, the defense of which I found compelling if not necessarily convincing (somewhere near the end), and (2) the author's recollections of his interview back in 1973 with the original WTC engineers about what would happpen if a plane hit the building (somewhere in the middle)

[fioco]

Editor-less New York Press? That explains more than I would ever want to know.
Your regrets for the post are graciously accepted (LOL). If you were hesitant to quote only excerpts, fear not. How could anyone put context to a meandering dog and pony show anyway? Even my journal musings are far better organized and I have a messy home!

[Clarknt67]

In all fairness, the Chrystler Building did the same thing when it was built.

And so did the Empire State, but not to the same extent however. This tower is basicially a 70 story building with what, 700 feet of nothing on top? as oppose to 200 for ESB & Chrysler

[Ninjahedge]

I think there should be two measures of a buildings height. The first being the highest point a human can access without special equipment. Maybe even a place that ANY person can access (say an inspector/etc).

The second height would be anything you can stick up in the air that is an integral part of the structure.

I think they should stop concentrating on height here. Make it striking, but you dont have to do that with size alone, or LAME ARSE atempts at a "greener" building (Those windmill/turbines will produce SO LITTLE it is not even practical to include their power grneration as a consideration in any finantial projections).

As for the article, he is rambling. I get criticisim when I write posts that are 1/10 the lengthe because people want me to get to the POINT and say what I need to. I think this writer is just pontification rather than phrasing a coherant argument/validation/defense of what he believes to be a good design.

It might as well be an Art History Thesis.

[TLOZ Link5]

From the City Review's new article about the Freedom Tower (http://www.thecityreview.com/wtcfree.html):


Libeskind's asymmetrical tower was intended in part to pay homage to the upraised torch arm of the Statue of Liberty in the harbor. Childs's cables are intended in part to pay homage to the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, across Lower Manhattan, over the East River. Such concepts are alright even if quite abstract, although one might have thought that a more obvious homage might have been to the fallen "twin towers" of the World Trade Center and indeed one contributor to the discussion board at http://www.wirednewyork.com digitally altered one of the new renderings to duplicate the tower with a twin, a rather effective and impressive concept.

Finnman has an admirer :mrgreen:

[Kris]

January 1, 2004

BLOCKS

Capturing the Spirit of 1776, With a Different Number

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

ONE day, a glistening skyscraper will rise over the World Trade Center site, commemorating in its very structure, through the unforgettable dimension of its towering height, the milestone year in which the king lost power.

The king, of course, was Hildibald. And the year 541 was when he was beheaded at a banquet, leading to the elevation of his nephew, Totila, as the new king of the Ostrogoths.

Though the Freedom Tower, the first and tallest of the planned trade center skyscrapers, is routinely described as a 1,776-foot design, it will be, in the eyes of most of the world, a 541-meter building. That suggests a reference not to the year of American independence but to the year that Totila became king and the emperor Justinian extinguished the Roman consulship.

No matter. The 1,776-foot elevation emerged as one of the most critical points in the design of the Freedom Tower by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, working for the developer Larry A. Silverstein, and Studio Daniel Libeskind, the master planners of the trade center site.

It was Mr. Libeskind who proposed the 1,776-foot idea a year ago as part of his design concept for the site. "A skyscraper rises above its predecessors," he said, "reasserting the pre-eminence of freedom and beauty."

Gov. George E. Pataki, who has called the skyscraper the Freedom Tower, embraced the notion. "To me, the operative number was 1,776 feet," he said in an interview, "because that really was an important part of the Libeskind concept, that we're celebrating freedom here."

Achieving that number will prove elusive, however.

Because steel and concrete react to changing temperatures, it could happen that Freedom Tower will contract and expand over a range of half a foot, at a minimum, from the depth of winter to the height of summer. Therefore, when the Fourth of July comes around, Freedom Tower may not be exactly 1,776 feet tall.

It gets trickier. The height is to be measured from the curb. But street levels, and therefore curb heights, are uneven around the rocky island of Manhattan. At the trade center site, they slope downward as they run west to the Hudson River.

Thus, a structure 1,776 feet above the curb at Vesey and West Streets, the northwest corner of the site, would be only 1,757.6 feet above the curb at Vesey and Church Streets, the northeast corner of the site.

(Curb heights are measured by the topographical unit of the Manhattan borough president's office against an imaginary but uniform line called the Borough of Manhattan datum, 2.75 feet above mean sea level at Sandy Hook, N.J., as determined by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey.)

Then there is the matter of what feature on the building actually marks the elevation of 1,776 feet. The photographs released last month show a model of Freedom Tower whose proportions do not visually correspond with the stated dimensions: a 1,500-foot superstructure topped by a 276-foot spire.

IN the model, the spire is roughly one-third as tall as the 1,500-foot building below it, meaning that it is in the range of 500 feet. That suggests that the symbolic elevation of 1,776 feet will have to be marked somewhere along this length, perhaps by a change in materials.

And all of the effort presumes that 1776 is synonymous with freedom to begin with, when it could be argued that it marks the creation of a slaveholding nation. As for the implications of the date in New York City, 1776 also marked the beginning of British occupation.

The elevation of 1,789 feet has been suggested as an alternative by at least one person working on the Freedom Tower project: it would commemorate the year the Constitution took effect and George Washington was inaugurated as president.

Higher in the sky, 1,865 feet could reflect the true advent of freedom by recalling the year slavery was outlawed by the 13th Amendment. There are those who might advance 1,945 feet, to record the signing of the United Nations Charter. A 2,001-foot tower was proposed last year, several months before Mr. Libeskind's presentation, by William Pedersen of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates.

The Freedom Tower may be the first skyscraper designed to meet a specifically commemorative height, said Ron Klemencic, the chairman of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, though he noted that some skyscrapers in Asia make a deliberate use of the lucky number 8 in their floor counts.

As the design of the Freedom Tower evolves, it is to be hoped that it will not be driven too single-mindedly by the goal of expressing a number whose precision cannot be guaranteed anyway. With all due respect to King Totila.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[NYguy]

http://www.enr.com/images/031229-09A.jpghttp://www.enr.com/images/031229-09B.jpg

[ZippyTheChimp]

My little perimeter drawing is pretty close. 8)

[James Kovata]

But where's the observatory at 1500'?

[JMGarcia]

http://www.enr.com/images/031229-09A.jpghttp://www.enr.com/images/031229-09B.jpg

Its pretty clear in these architectural/engineering specs that the spire/antenna contruction is a lot taller than the 350 feet from the top of the occupied area to the top of the cabled area.

In fact, if you measure exactly on these using the known heights of 1150 and 1500, the spire/antenna is 508 feet bringing the total height to 2008, the year of completion of the building.

[NYguy]

Its pretty clear in these architectural/engineering specs that the spire/antenna contruction is a lot taller than the 350 feet from the top of the occupied area to the top of the cabled area.

In fact, if you measure exactly on these using the known heights of 1150 and 1500, the spire/antenna is 508 feet bringing the total height to 2008, the year of completion of the building.

So you can see the extra eight feet? I don't think the graphic's that exact, but the exact height of the antenna was said to range from 2,000 to 2,100 ft, so anything's possible...

[NYguy]

But where's the observatory at 1500'?

It's not a completed graphic. The upper crown/spire of the tower is being developed...

[ZippyTheChimp]

A hat truss. Now I sort of understand the structure. The lattice braces the building against lateral loads. Since there are no office floors, instead of beams in compression, cables in tension are used to tie it into the core. Very clever.

[JMGarcia]

Its pretty clear in these architectural/engineering specs that the spire/antenna contruction is a lot taller than the 350 feet from the top of the occupied area to the top of the cabled area.

In fact, if you measure exactly on these using the known heights of 1150 and 1500, the spire/antenna is 508 feet bringing the total height to 2008, the year of completion of the building.

So you can see the extra eight feet? I don't think the graphic's that exact, but the exact height of the antenna was said to range from 2,000 to 2,100 ft, so anything's possible...

I was being a little tongue in cheek about all the symbolic numbers. ;)

[Clarknt67]

A long time ago somebody told me that the day after 9/11, an architect drew two new towers almost exactly like the original WTC uglies and handed them to the man who had just bought the ground they stood on.

It's a bit off-putting too that there's an obvious factual error in the first few paragraphs. Makes you wonder what other "facts" are in the article that no one caught.

[dbhstockton]

Looks to me like the observatory and restaurant are just above the mechanical, around 1100.' I remember reading something to that effect, too.

You know, it's a much better building if you get rid of the tacked-on spire. It would be a better building, too, if it wasn't shoe-horned into Libeskind's plan.

[Christopher X]

Looks to me like the observatory and restaurant are just above the mechanical, around 1100.' I remember reading something to that effect, too.

You know, it's a much better building if you get rid of the tacked-on spire. It would be a better building, too, if it wasn't shoe-horned into Libeskind's plan.

It belongs on the north tower footprint. Maybe that would be OK if they made it look more like a jellyfish.

[NYguy]

You know, it's a much better building if you get rid of the tacked-on spire. It would be a better building, too, if it wasn't shoe-horned into Libeskind's plan.

Exactly. Or just forget about the "world's tallest" and lose the windmill and lattice structure. Then just build a logical 200 ft spire on top of the 1,150 ft office tower. That would give us a 1,350 ft building. Sounds about right....

[LuPeRcALiO]

http://www.enr.com/images/031229-09A.jpghttp://www.enr.com/images/031229-09B.jpg

Its pretty clear in these architectural/engineering specs that the spire/antenna contruction is a lot taller than the 350 feet from the top of the occupied area to the top of the cabled area.

In fact, if you measure exactly on these using the known heights of 1150 and 1500, the spire/antenna is 508 feet bringing the total height to 2008, the year of completion of the building.

The 12-29-03 enr.com article accompanying this diagram clarifies that the total height of the spire, which it calls an "antenna housing" (also the total building height) is 1,776 feet, not 2,000 feet:

"Above the 70th floor, the unclad antenna tower houses a wind turbine system. The antennas will be housed in an open latticework made of glass-fiber reinforced polymers, to avoid interference with the antennas. The antenna housing extends like a raised arm to 1,776 ft.

[ZippyTheChimp]

The Engineering News Record article (http://enr.construction.com/news/buildings/archives/031229.asp) cited above.

From the article:

Sources say that the "green" guidelines section is 85% complete but the general guidelines for elements such as streetscape, building form and setbacks are only about half complete. The Lower Manhattan Development Corp., the New York state entity charged with guiding the redevelopment of the 16-acre WTC site, would not comment on the status, except to say there is no date set for release of the final plan.

[JMGarcia]

http://www.enr.com/images/031229-09A.jpghttp://www.enr.com/images/031229-09B.jpg

Its pretty clear in these architectural/engineering specs that the spire/antenna contruction is a lot taller than the 350 feet from the top of the occupied area to the top of the cabled area.

In fact, if you measure exactly on these using the known heights of 1150 and 1500, the spire/antenna is 508 feet bringing the total height to 2008, the year of completion of the building.

The 12-29-03 enr.com article accompanying this diagram clarifies that the total height of the spire, which it calls an "antenna housing" (also the total building height) is 1,776 feet, not 2,000 feet:

"Above the 70th floor, the unclad antenna tower houses a wind turbine system. The antennas will be housed in an open latticework made of glass-fiber reinforced polymers, to avoid interference with the antennas. The antenna housing extends like a raised arm to 1,776 ft.

Its so odd that the 1776 ft. height keeps being quoted in text while the accompanying drawing clearly shows it differently.

The image on the right is scaled to 1776 feet if the top of the cables are 1500 and the top of the building is 1150 as stated in the press.

http://www.enr.com/images/031229-09A.jpghttp://mysite.verizon.net/vze26pnp/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/Scale1.jpg

The article also makes this quote.

The cable system begins above elevation 1,100 ft, where the rectilinear core transforms into two 32-ft-dia concrete cylinders, about 70 ft apart and 500 ft tall, that stabilize the tower and contain stairs and elevators. Each cylinder bears on an opposite corner of the lower core.

If the 1100 ft mark is correct on the diagram and the cores really are 500 feet tall above that then the scale of the drawing is shown in this diagram.

http://mysite.verizon.net/vze26pnp/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/Scale2.jpg

Something is obviously not correct. Either the diagram is off or the article is.

[ZippyTheChimp]

My speculation: The fact that polymers will be used for the spire indicates that the base of the antenna will be at 1500 feet, and the transmitting portion will be it's entire length (if the spire was steel, the section within would be useless as an antenna). The antenna itself is a huge heavy structure, with a broadcast center at the base, containing heavy battery backup equipment which cannot be economically located away from the antenna. All this weight has to be tied in to the building core which ends at 1500 ft.

The "higher the better" is not just to increase broadcast coverage, but also more space for tenants. It's no different than an office building - not everyone is at the top. So it's possible that the antenna will rise beyond the height of the spire.

The antenna atop 1WTC was over 360 ft high, and getting crowded.


The "little" tip of Conde Nast antenna
http://images.beradio.com/files/135/1103/311br2207.jpg

[LuPeRcALiO]

From a professional perspective, any diagram, rendering, or model photo lacking dimensions is entirely conceptual. The only reliable numbers are the actual figures in the documents, in this case the 1,776' that appears in the LMDC's December 19 press release, and has been quoted in every published account of the rollout.

Diagrams, photos, and drawings lacking figures are not intended to establish dimensions.

[ZippyTheChimp]

My statement was not derived from the rendering. The point is that a 276 foot antenna may not be adequate for broadcast.

[LuPeRcALiO]

From a professional perspective, any diagram, rendering, or model photo lacking dimensions is entirely conceptual. The only reliable numbers are the actual figures in the documents, in this case the 1,776' that appears in the LMDC's December 19 press release, and has been quoted in every published account of the rollout.

Diagrams, photos, and drawings lacking figures are not intended to establish dimensions.

Interesting point Zippy -- I was just clearing things up for JMGarcia.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Oops :!:

Another interesting point in the article is that no date was given for a release of the final plan. Maybe they learned a lesson - unless Pataki needs another photo op.

[JMGarcia]

From a professional perspective, any diagram, rendering, or model photo lacking dimensions is entirely conceptual. The only reliable numbers are the actual figures in the documents, in this case the 1,776' that appears in the LMDC's December 19 press release, and has been quoted in every published account of the rollout.

Diagrams, photos, and drawings lacking figures are not intended to establish dimensions.

If we go strictly by the documentation, the cores start at 1100 and end at 1600. The hat truss obviously would be even higher although the documentation says, at 1500, that its lower than the cores. Plus, what should we make of the "Elevation 1100 ft" on the diagram? Is it just randomly placed?

The only conclusion I can draw is that this building is totally not finalized yet.

[LuPeRcALiO]

The only official documentation at this point is the LMDC's December 19 press release, which states clearly and repeatedly that the spire height -- also the total building height -- is 1,776 feet, which as you may recall was a point of considerable contention:

http://www.renewnyc.org/News/DisplayStory.asp-id=92.htm

Hope that helps.

[NYguy]

The 12-29-03 enr.com article accompanying this diagram clarifies that the total height of the spire, which it calls an "antenna housing" (also the total building height) is 1,776 feet, not 2,000 feet:

"Above the 70th floor, the unclad antenna tower houses a wind turbine system. The antennas will be housed in an open latticework made of glass-fiber reinforced polymers, to avoid interference with the antennas. The antenna housing extends like a raised arm to 1,776 ft.

The article is not an actual document, but it does state the "antenna housing" and total "building" height to be at 1,776 ft (spire). The height of the antennas themselves isn't determined...

[NYguy]

I use the John Hancock Center in Chicago as a guide to visually "see" the tower. Both have similar dimensions...the difference being the Hancock tower has double antennas instead of concrete cores rising to a similar 1,500 ft height. Just add windmills to the antennas and enclose with lattice and cables. Dont' forget the 276 ft spire on top....


http://tigger.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/imagebase/maclean/aerials1/23.JPEG


http://tigger.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/imagebase/maclean/aerials1/22.JPEG


http://tigger.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/imagebase/maclean/aerials6/032.jpg


http://tigger.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/imagebase/maclean/aerials2/088.JPEG

[JMC]

...funny, Chicago kinda looks like Hong Kong, from that last pic.

[Gulcrapek]

Probably from the X bracing on the white building..

[Derek2k3]

There is a section of the entire tower at The Slatin Report's website.
http://www.theslatinreport.com/story.jsp?Topic=Top%20Story&theStory=1223reply.txt

It also specifies that the unfinished spire/antenna thing is obviously taller than 1776 feet.

[JMGarcia]

http://www.theslatinreport.com/1224stack.jpg.jpg

Plus the observatory platform at the top of the cores! :D

[LuPeRcALiO]

Peter Slatin writes a real estate newsletter and probably pulled his info off one of those amateur highrise websites.

I'd believe the architects, the NY Times, the engineers at enr.com, and the LMDC, who have all stated pretty emphatically that the top of the spire (a.k.a. antenna housing), not the middle of the spire, is 1,776 feet high.

You have to remember that this figure was bitterly fought over by the opposing architects and their legal teams, with victory declared shortly before 12/19/03 by Governor Pataki. (That's probably the reason why the conceptual drawings are not to scale.)

And in that particular skirmish, I doubt if the problems of a few HDTV broadcasters amounted to a hill of beans.

[JMGarcia]

He's certainly spent a lot of time on a schematic then. ;)

I just find it odd that every rendering and plan as well as the model has the spire taller than the 350-400 feet of cableing.

[LuPeRcALiO]

I'd guess the drawing came from SOM, and who knows who added the numbers.

p.s. it's also possible that the numbers were added by SOM -- before the 1,776 figure had been (re)settled on.

[JMGarcia]

Its also possible that the drawings and models are correct and were agreed upon by both Childs' and Libeskind for presentation but that the politicians (Pataki and the LMDC) are just making hay out of the 1776 reference for political purposes.

Like I said before, it will be interesting to see the final spire design and how far it and its antennas reach.

Of course it could be like the WTC which didn't have an antenna as part of the original plan but had one added couple of years after the towers were completed.

[Ninjahedge]

A hat truss. Now I sort of understand the structure. The lattice braces the building against lateral loads. Since there are no office floors, instead of beams in compression, cables in tension are used to tie it into the core. Very clever.

Hat trusses are standard now, but you usually have stronger members on the perimeter of a hat truss. If you have only ornamental columns supporting nothing much, the whole hat-truss thing becomes unneeded and ineffective. What are you bracing? And what is giving it the support it needs?

[Ninjahedge]

From a professional perspective, any diagram, rendering, or model photo lacking dimensions is entirely conceptual. The only reliable numbers are the actual figures in the documents, in this case the 1,776' that appears in the LMDC's December 19 press release, and has been quoted in every published account of the rollout.

Diagrams, photos, and drawings lacking figures are not intended to establish dimensions.

Interesting point Zippy -- I was just clearing things up for JMGarcia.

But, in all fairness, is it right to present the design proposals in such a way? Here we are trying to get a final "concept" going, and the guys cannot even draw things that will look anything like the finished structure?

That is like showing the plans for a new house, saying that the rooms will be a certain size, and then through an "error" in scaling showing the client a house or an office that holds much more than the dimensions stated would ever be physically possible to hold.

That elongated spire looks better than the short stubby one. If they are proposing 1776 feet, DRAW it that way.....

[ZippyTheChimp]

Hat trusses are standard now, but you usually have stronger members on the perimeter of a hat truss. If you have only ornamental columns supporting nothing much, the whole hat-truss thing becomes unneeded and ineffective. What are you bracing? And what is giving it the support it needs?
The torquing of the building stiffens it against wind loads, and also breaks up the wind flow further reducing lateral load. The lattice section continues the twisting, but not at the expense of extra floor weight and building surface, which would be the case if it was enclosed. The support for the hat truss is the central core.

It is entirely possible that I do not know what I am talking about. :?

[NYguy]

I'd believe the architects, the NY Times, the engineers at enr.com, and the LMDC, who have all stated pretty emphatically that the top of the spire (a.k.a. antenna housing), not the middle of the spire, is 1,776 feet high.

You have to remember that this figure was bitterly fought over by the opposing architects and their legal teams, with victory declared shortly before 12/19/03 by Governor Pataki. (That's probably the reason why the conceptual drawings are not to scale.)

And in that particular skirmish, I doubt if the problems of a few HDTV broadcasters amounted to a hill of beans.

Don't confuse the spire with the antenna. Because the antenna(s) may be based inside the spire does not mean they cannot rise above it. As far as the HDTV broadcasters, they are paying for the antenna/spire, something that gives them a say in it....


http://www.pbase.com/image/24850699/original.jpg

[NoyokA]

The elevation suggest that the Anennae will rise the full height of the western side.

Look at the dotted lines only! You will see a return of the Libeskind Spire, it is detached from the "hat truss". If Libeskind has been given this, the tower might transfix itself to its original form + lattice. Very interesting.

[dbhstockton]

I think the dotted lines are because Libeskind's spire was added at the last minute, as controversy raged, to a rendering that had previously been considered complete.

[NoyokA]

So you agree that there will be a return of the infamous Libeskind spire.

[Jasonik]

Stern-

The elevation suggest that the Anennae will rise the full height of the western side.

Look at the dotted lines only! You will see a return of the Libeskind Spire, it is detached from the "hat truss". If Libeskind has been given this, the tower might transfix itself to its original form + lattice. Very interesting.

I thought that too, but then realized the dotted lines show the overall elevation, -since what we are viewing is a section through a twisting structure.

I would however like to see the spire "slice" out through the tower skin at the corner appearing to be a separate structure that skewered the tower from below. IMO the spire needs to have a solid appearance to compete w/ the concrete core(s?).

[Ninjahedge]

Hat trusses are standard now, but you usually have stronger members on the perimeter of a hat truss. If you have only ornamental columns supporting nothing much, the whole hat-truss thing becomes unneeded and ineffective. What are you bracing? And what is giving it the support it needs?
The torquing of the building stiffens it against wind loads, and also breaks up the wind flow further reducing lateral load. The lattice section continues the twisting, but not at the expense of extra floor weight and building surface, which would be the case if it was enclosed. The support for the hat truss is the central core.

It is entirely possible that I do not know what I am talking about. :?

Not entirely Zip.

Think of it this way. If you have a large structure going with only a center core, the stiffness is not a hell of a lot.

The more stuff you put on the outside of the frame/building, the stiffer it gets. Sort of like a solid rod and a hollow pipe of the same weight. The hollow pipe will be harder to bend (that is why most structural elements, bikes, and other things are hollow).

Now the hat comes in like this:

The basic idea of framing comes in several forms. Moment frames (kind of like a long spindle legged table. You can push it and it will wobble, but it wont just fall over), Brace frames (all those X's, K's and slants...) or Shear Walls (basically walls).

The center core brace frame/shear wall is limited in the stiffness it can provide. Sometimes the moment frame on the outside is enough to remedy this, sometimes not (you may not have enough...). The hat basically makes a stiffer floor. when you try to tip the structure over, you tilt the hat over with it (like the top of a slinkie that is just starting). Now if you put columns UNDER the edge of the hat, like a perimeter column, it will try to keep the top of the structure flat rather than bent over. The bent shape becomes kind of "s" like (you get vertical at bottom, bent over to one side a bit, then getting vertical again at top).

It is hard to describe in words, but so easy when you have a pen and paper!!!

BTW, "Hats" on a structure this tall usually work better with intermediate stiff stories. The more you put i, the better.

Anyway, I am outta here!

[NoyokA]

I thought that too, but then realized the dotted lines show the overall elevation, -since what we are viewing is a section through a twisting structure.

I would however like to see the spire "slice" out through the tower skin at the corner appearing to be a separate structure that skewered the tower from below. IMO the spire needs to have a solid appearance to compete w/ the concrete core(s?).

When the first of these elevations were released I thought the same but in a reversed order. Likewise, I assumed that the dotted lines were intended to show the overall elevation.

http://www.enr.com/images/031229-09A.jpg

The elevation however has a scale. As an additional measurement the dotted line is useless. I believe it is an outline for the still to be designed spire. It shows how big the spire could be, however as an outline there are no guarantees.

http://www.theslatinreport.com/1224stack.jpg.jpg

[JMGarcia]

The diagram is a section, the front half has been cut off. The dotted line represent the cut off section. The front left hand corner of the building is perfectly vertical all the way up to the spire. It is dotted because it is the front part of the building which has been cut away.

If you were to strip away the front wall (rather than this section) the upper office floors would abutt the dotted line all the way up the left side rather than recede from it. Likewise the lower floor would also be flush with the line rather than extend past it. The building juts out to the left (it is a parallelogram) and if you show a section at the center then it is farther left than the vertical front left corner.

Notice the cut away portion of the hat truss is dotted also.

As far as the height goes I think we can all agree that the building itself is 1776 feet. The question is whether there will be an antenna atop the spire (again, which goes to 1776 feet) and if so, what will the shape of the antenna extension be? Will it be only a pole or perhaps a pole with an angled cable attached to it? Only time will tell for sure.

So it seems to me the argument here is not whether the building will be 1776 feet, it will, but whether there will be an antenna atop the building, how high, and what shape?

[NYatKNIGHT]

That's exactly what it is.

[NoyokA]

Thanks JM, your the man. I can definitely see why you moderate at SSP.

[dbhstockton]

Yep. I stand corrected.

[LuPeRcALiO]

As far as the HDTV broadcasters, they are paying for the antenna/spire, something that gives them a say in it....

you'd think so, but Larry Silverstein is supposed to be paying for the whole shootin' match, and he's been overruled more times than Poland.

[JMC]

...I bet one side of the lattice-work wind farm will be closed, because the "spike" is cantileavered to it and the building. (not the cut-away side).

It would *NOT* surprise me if the spike material is a fiber glass, PVC or (at best) carbon composite that simply houses the anteanae.

http://www.fcrc.com/popupmainoffice.asp?im=images\projects\Ppmain

The top of this building (link above) is green, molded plastic, not copper...

[Jasonik]

Freedom Tower Engineer Wants Turbines To Double as Prayer Wheels
Wind and a Prayer
by Erik Baard
Village Voice (http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0401/ebaard.php)

[JMGarcia]

A little more insight on the height debate...


The antenna will likely bring the entire structure to 2,000 feet, the limit imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration, said Kenneth Lewis, SOM's project manager. It needs to be that high to widen the television broadcast area. Even PBS has joined this cause, because the poor can't afford cable educational programs. But at the 1,776-foot mark the materials used to build the spire will change, and it will be illuminated. "The 1,776-foot mark will definitely be acknowledged. The bottom part of the antenna will be like the Statue of Liberty's torch and the upper part like the flame," he said.

[JMC]

Ha! What did I tell ya?

"the materials will change."

Plastic.

[NYatKNIGHT]

....it will be illuminated. "The 1,776-foot mark will definitely be acknowledged. The bottom part of the antenna will be like the Statue of Liberty's torch and the upper part like the flame,"
I am glad to hear there will be something eyecatching at 1776', that the spire will be illuminated, and that the antenna will be artfully designed. It can't be ruled out that this tower has the potential to be quite stunning.

[JMGarcia]

I am glad to hear there will be something eyecatching at 1776', that the spire will be illuminated, and that the antenna will be artfully designed. It can't be ruled out that this tower has the potential to be quite stunning.

Personally, I think the success of the design depends as much on how the top of the cabled area is designed as on the design of the spire.

Right now the top of the cabled area doesn't work well with either the spire nor the slanted roof of the occupied portion. It needs to be corrected as much as anything.

I wonder if we will get some translucent plastic that lights up from within rather than something that is spotlighted or has exterior lights attached to it. I'd imagine lighting from with in will make it much sleaker both during the day and the night.

[NYatKNIGHT]

That would be the more green way to do it, so you're probably right.

I'm concerned about the cable area as well, namely the density of these cables. How easily will we be able to see the cores?

[ZippyTheChimp]

Ha! What did I tell ya?

"the materials will change."

Plastic.
Now, before you start getting al pumped up - the rest of us already knew this. It was posted by Lupercalio on page 41


The antennas will be housed in an open latticework made of glass-fiber reinforced polymers, to avoid interference with the antennas. The antenna housing extends like a raised arm to 1,776 ft.
We just didn't want to embarrass you. :wink:

[NYatKNIGHT]

Page 41! :shock:

Eventually we'll start a new thread: Freedom Tower Construction

But for now, the discussion remains to be about the Libeskind's and Child's collaboration.

Has a date ever been mentioned for a revised spire design or did I miss it?

[JMC]

:o

Oh, too funny. I'll reel it in...Page 41...geeze...

:wink:

[DougGold]

[\quote]....it will be illuminated. "The 1,776-foot mark will definitely be acknowledged. The bottom part of the antenna will be like the Statue of Liberty's torch and the upper part like the flame,"


Oh for crying out loud. This is starting to sound like some kind of bad amusement park attraction. Can we drop the 1,776 crap already? If the spire's going to be taller than 1,776 feet, than we're done. Marking it is stupid. Might as well mark every damn important number in american history along the building's height. And I really want to retch every time I hear the building's going to be symbolic of the statue of liberty. Putting the spire offcenter doesn't mean it's like the statue's arm, and we NEVER NEEDED A BUILDING INSPIRED BY THE STATUE OF LIBERTY, BECAUSE THE DANG STATUE IS RIGHT THERE!!!! She's inspiration enough.

[LuPeRcALiO]

Read on:


"As architects, we don't talk about designing the world's tallest building," Lewis says, but there's an undeniable groundswell of desire to see the Freedom Tower become the world's pinnacle.

A "desire" is not exactly the same as a contract, and the guy laying down the law here is the Governor, who's sticking to his 1,776 foot guns.

Of course, there's no law against wishful thinking, even in New York. :D

[NYatKNIGHT]

Oh for crying out loud. This is starting to sound like some kind of bad amusement park attraction. Can we drop the 1,776 crap already? If the spire's going to be taller than 1,776 feet, than we're done. Marking it is stupid. Might as well mark every damn important number in american history along the building's height. And I really want to retch every time I hear the building's going to be symbolic of the statue of liberty. Putting the spire offcenter doesn't mean it's like the statue's arm, and we NEVER NEEDED A BUILDING INSPIRED BY THE STATUE OF LIBERTY, BECAUSE THE DANG STATUE IS RIGHT THERE!!!! She's inspiration enough.

Whoa! Turn that frown upside down! I can understand taking the position that the tower isn't what you hoped, or that the meaning is hokey, but I really can't see the sense in your raging little hissy-fit. But you originally came from the twin towers replication club, so I guess that's my answer. You all sound like crying, spoiled children who didn't get their way - pardon me, but it's true, you all have nothing at all nice to say about this tower. I personally don't care if they want to change materials at 1776 feet or that the architect wants to evoke the Statue of Liberty in the antenna - as long as it looks great in the end. Complain on, and enjoy your ulcer.

[Ninjahedge]

Um, was that an intelligent reply?

It sounded like a slap to the face from a limp wristed artsey fartsey "oh that will look just LOVELY" memorial promoter... ;)

Dude, relax. I think getting anal about the heights we should recognize is stupid too. If it is taller than 1776 feet, don't mark it off unless you call it Independence Tower.

As for the arm of Liberty, the spire reminds me more of the spike on the front of that building in Jersey City. It looks no more like an arm than a TV ariel does... :P

[JMGarcia]

Read on:


"As architects, we don't talk about designing the world's tallest building," Lewis says, but there's an undeniable groundswell of desire to see the Freedom Tower become the world's pinnacle.

A "desire" is not exactly the same as a contract, and the guy laying down the law here is the Governor, who's sticking to his 1,776 foot guns.

Of course, there's no law against wishful thinking, even in New York. :D

As long as Pataki can claim the 1776 foot mark somehow he could care less IMO if there's an antenna atop it or not. No one's going around claiming the WTC was taller than 1368 because it had an antenna on top. Same issue here. It will be officially 1776 feet of building - errrr - with an antenna on top. ;)

You, though, are beginning to sound like you don't want it to have an antenna beyond 1776, even though the project manager says it will. hmmmm....

[NYguy]

we NEVER NEEDED A BUILDING INSPIRED BY THE STATUE OF LIBERTY, BECAUSE THE DANG STATUE IS RIGHT THERE!!!! She's inspiration enough.

I agree with that one. Everyone pretends the real thing isn't standing right there, in full view no less. How about building a skyscraper inspired by New York's skyscrapers. It is what we are supposed to be replacing afterall.

But that would make too much sense in a process that has seen little of it.

[JMC]

...NyatKnight...that was funny. I think you have a point...AND a saving grace will be:

HOW WIDE THE BUILDING IS

Anyone know what the dimentions across are? Anyone care to show it Vs. the WTC ?

If it's wide enough, it'll look ballsy, not flimsy. IMHO.

[Gulcrapek]

The building's ground plan is pretty big.

[NYguy]

The building's ground plan is pretty big.

It's larger than the "footprint" of one of the Twins...

[JayW]

It's larger than the "footprint" of one of the Twins...

True dat. Take a look at the full NYC diagram at skyscraperpage.com and you'll see that according to the dimesnions set forth by the model's designer, the structure widens out a good deal more than *either* Twin.
However, I'm not sure if that degree of massiveness will be quite visible from whichever vantage point one chooses. It very well may considering its placement further north than the footprints; so a view from, say, the Brooklyn/Queens side might show.

[Christopher X]

A little more insight on the height debate...


The antenna will likely bring the entire structure to 2,000 feet, the limit imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration, said Kenneth Lewis, SOM's project manager. It needs to be that high to widen the television broadcast area. Even PBS has joined this cause, because the poor can't afford cable educational programs. But at the 1,776-foot mark the materials used to build the spire will change, and it will be illuminated. "The 1,776-foot mark will definitely be acknowledged. The bottom part of the antenna will be like the Statue of Liberty's torch and the upper part like the flame," he said.

Hey JM. Is that clipped out of something broader that you can steer me to? I'd like to read it.

[JMGarcia]

It was posted as a link earlier. Here it is again...

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0401/ebaard.php

[Zzed]

this whole debate seems to be getting very silly. the 1776 foot level can be marked structurally in any of several different ways, for example giant numbers on each face or an observation deck. making the antenna as commercially high as required and part of the structure would go a long way to sensibly claim WTB status. wasn't the original TV tower set for 2100 feet including an observation platform? height restrictions should be easily waved as no one is going to be allowed to fly anywhere near that building.

[ZippyTheChimp]

FAA height limits are not easily waived. The broadcasters would have to provide a substantial case that the extra height was absolutely necessary.

[LuPeRcALiO]

You, though, are beginning to sound like you don't want it to have an antenna beyond 1776, even though the project manager says it will. hmmmm....

my point is that wishful thinking has no bearing on the facts unless your name is George Pataki but for the record I'm pretty indifferent to how high the spire goes or whether there's a flagpole on top -- just helping you cut through the SSPin. :)

[JMGarcia]

Better call it the SOMspin from now on don't you think? ;)

Plus, if you think Pataki is going to over rule an antenna height when he can still claim his 1776 feet for the building then I think you're engaging in a little LuPeRsPin of you're own. ;)

[DougGold]

Oh for crying out loud. This is starting to sound like some kind of bad amusement park attraction. Can we drop the 1,776 crap already? If the spire's going to be taller than 1,776 feet, than we're done. Marking it is stupid. Might as well mark every damn important number in american history along the building's height. And I really want to retch every time I hear the building's going to be symbolic of the statue of liberty. Putting the spire offcenter doesn't mean it's like the statue's arm, and we NEVER NEEDED A BUILDING INSPIRED BY THE STATUE OF LIBERTY, BECAUSE THE DANG STATUE IS RIGHT THERE!!!! She's inspiration enough.

Whoa! Turn that frown upside down! I can understand taking the position that the tower isn't what you hoped, or that the meaning is hokey, but I really can't see the sense in your raging little hissy-fit. But you originally came from the twin towers replication club, so I guess that's my answer. You all sound like crying, spoiled children who didn't get their way - pardon me, but it's true, you all have nothing at all nice to say about this tower. I personally don't care if they want to change materials at 1776 feet or that the architect wants to evoke the Statue of Liberty in the antenna - as long as it looks great in the end. Complain on, and enjoy your ulcer.

Well thanks for your well-thought out response. I still ask the same two basic questions: 1. If the building is not going to be 1776 feet high, then what the hell is the point of marking 1776 feet along its height? It's now irrelevant, and I'll bet somewhere along the way, it's dropped. 2. Putting the spire off-center isn't going to remind anyone of the statue of liberty, and I stick to it when I say it's silly to build a building 'inspired' by something that's right next to it anyway. Doesn't anyone build anything that's a singular vision anymore--that might inspire others? I can marvel that the beautiful spire of the Chrysler building was inspired by the grill of a car, but this latest "inspiration" is pretty dang weak by comparison. Oh, and yes I was a proponent of rebuilding the twin towers (I think when that ship sailed it still had my luggage on it), but that's not why I'm disappointed in this building. I'm mostly bummed that every time we say we have the world's tallest building, we're going to be a little bit embarassed, because we've weakly claimed that title with latticework and windmills. If I lived elsewhere, I wouldn't accept our claim.

[LuPeRcALiO]

Better call it the SOMspin
I'd say that's a pretty good guess.

[NYatKNIGHT]

Well thanks for your well-thought out response. I still ask the same two basic questions: 1. If the building is not going to be 1776 feet high, then what the hell is the point of marking 1776 feet along its height? It's now irrelevant, and I'll bet somewhere along the way, it's dropped. 2. Putting the spire off-center isn't going to remind anyone of the statue of liberty, and I stick to it when I say it's silly to build a building 'inspired' by something that's right next to it anyway. Doesn't anyone build anything that's a singular vision anymore--that might inspire others? I can marvel that the beautiful spire of the Chrysler building was inspired by the grill of a car, but this latest "inspiration" is pretty dang weak by comparison. Oh, and yes I was a proponent of rebuilding the twin towers (I think when that ship sailed it still had my luggage on it), but that's not why I'm disappointed in this building. I'm mostly bummed that every time we say we have the world's tallest building, we're going to be a little bit embarassed, because we've weakly claimed that title with latticework and windmills. If I lived elsewhere, I wouldn't accept our claim.
If you consider marking 1776' irrelevant, then why all the sarcasm? I don't care if it is marked either, but certainly don't mind it. Is it really SO cheesy? Likewise, if the off-center spire isn't going to remind anyone of the Statue of Liberty, then what's the problem? Especially if it looks good. I don't see the Statue of Liberty when I look at the FT renderings, but if Libeskind says he was somehow inspired by it.....whatever. I certainly don't think of the grill of a car every time I look at Chrysler, but if that was Van Alen's inspiration then who cares, it's an awesome building.

I don't mind the idea of an off-centered spire, nor do I mind my eyes being drawn upward to 1776' - as long as it looks really good. That, I am hoping, is being worked on. They aren't there yet, but will give them a chance to make improvements before a final judgement.

As for calling it the world's tallest building, I'm with you on that one. They ought to either drop that claim or design it so there is no argument, but don't do it with cables and poles and unoccupied space just for the sake of claiming the height. And don't try to pass it off as "reclaiming the skyline" unless it really does, they won't be fooling anyone.

[DougGold]

If you consider marking 1776' irrelevant, then why all the sarcasm? I don't care if it is marked either, but certainly don't mind it. Is it really SO cheesy? Likewise, if the off-center spire isn't going to remind anyone of the Statue of Liberty, then what's the problem? Especially if it looks good. I don't see the Statue of Liberty when I look at the FT renderings, but if Libeskind says he was somehow inspired by it.....whatever. I certainly don't think of the grill of a car every time I look at Chrysler, but if that was Van Alen's inspiration then who cares, it's an awesome building.


I think my sarcasm is coming from fear that this process has gotten a bit sloppy, perhaps because of the speed and pressure they're under. I did think that if the building were 1776 feet tall, it would be an important mark. When they announced that they're forced to build higher to accomodate the transmitters, but would still mark the height of 1776 somehow, it seems like they're not getting what they want design-wise and are coming up with a quick compromise to keep that 1776 designation intact. If they took more time with it, and weren't under deadline constraints, perhaps they could come up with something stronger. I'm really afraid that in years to come, we'll be looking at aspects of this building and saying "well, they built it that way because at the time they were forced into such and such a decision, etc. etc."

[NYatKNIGHT]

I think my sarcasm is coming from fear that this process has gotten a bit sloppy, perhaps because of the speed and pressure they're under. I did think that if the building were 1776 feet tall, it would be an important mark. When they announced that they're forced to build higher to accomodate the transmitters, but would still mark the height of 1776 somehow, it seems like they're not getting what they want design-wise and are coming up with a quick compromise to keep that 1776 designation intact. If they took more time with it, and weren't under deadline constraints, perhaps they could come up with something stronger. I'm really afraid that in years to come, we'll be looking at aspects of this building and saying "well, they built it that way because at the time they were forced into such and such a decision, etc. etc."

I agree with that, it's too important of a building to be rushed for the sake of Pataki's political ambitions. The tower has evolved greatly since its inception, what would it look like if they had more time in the design stage? Well, in a way they still have some time to make refinements, and Pataki got his "unveiling", and the public sees action at the site instead of watching it lie undeveloped for years because not everyone is agreeing on what should be built.

I also agree that the height of 1776 feet need not be adhered to if it requires a compromise in the design. I am very eager to see how they've changed the spire.

[JMGarcia]

Look at it this way, everyone knows the Empire State Buildings is 1250 feet high and it is quoted all over the place.

Yet, there is an antenna that goes up to 1472 and there's no way you can tell me it doesn't changed the look of the building and isn't an integral part of the visual affect of the building.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/images/0501empire.jpg
http://www.3dgraphicsoutpost.com/Images/esbuprs.jpg

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/wonder/structure/images/empirestate1_skyscraper_1.jpg
http://www.tech-notes.tv/History&Trivia/ANTENNAS%20ON%20ESB_files/ESB006.JPG

I don't see why the Freedom Tower can't be 1776 feet to the tip of its spire (just like the ESB is 1250 to the tip of its spire) with an antenna that goes to 2000 (just like the ESB has one that goes to 1472 - higher than Petronas BTW) that is integral to its look (just like the ESB) without losing some sort of symbolism.

[DougGold]

Indeed. We should also accept that we're arguing about something that'll probably be fine-tuned a LOT over the coming months and years.

[NYguy]

When they announced that they're forced to build higher to accomodate the transmitters, but would still mark the height of 1776 somehow, it seems like they're not getting what they want design-wise and are coming up with a quick compromise to keep that 1776 designation intact. If they took more time with it, and weren't under deadline constraints, perhaps they could come up with something stronger.

The bottom line is, if they weren't trying to copy and compete with the Statue of Liberty, and just focused on building a skyscraper, the design process could have been a lot better. It was only complicated by Libeskind's need for an asymetrical spire - never mind if it doesn't fit with the tower - and the 1,776 ft height mark.

It appeared to me that the 1,776 ft mark had much more appeal when it was a mark that was accessible to the public - a destination of the tower itself. Now its merely a mark between spire and antenna, something that won't really matter visually anyway.

[ZippyTheChimp]

There's no way to know, unless Libeskind confesses in a tell-all book, but the 1776 may have been a contrivance to guarantee something tall. This was always going to be a 70 story office building, or Silverstein was going to balk at building it and the PA obviously did not want to buy him out.

You have to admit, all the silly posturing and maneuvering has been to justify the 1776 ft mark.

[LuPeRcALiO]

...which, to the rest of the world, will be the 541 meter mark.

[DougGold]

...which, to the rest of the world, will be the 541 meter mark.

Maybe he should have insisted on 1776 meters tall.

[NYguy]

There's no way to know, unless Libeskind confesses in a tell-all book, but the 1776 may have been a contrivance to guarantee something tall.

I don't think so. Remember, Libeskind had the height of the tower brought back down. He may genuinely feel a connection to 1776. But that significance is lost as currently planned...

[ZippyTheChimp]

I think you should look at this from the beginning, not the point when Childs and Libeskind were arguing. The 1776 ft mark was established early on. Don't you think that Pataki, the LMDC, et al could have convinced the public to accept the tallest building in NYC, just a little higher than the ESB?

A little tongue in cheek: Some would argue that America the confederation of states became America the nation after the Civil War.
Hmmm, 1865. Maybe I'll email Danny.

[JMGarcia]

There's no way to know, unless Libeskind confesses in a tell-all book, but the 1776 may have been a contrivance to guarantee something tall.

I don't think so. Remember, Libeskind had the height of the tower brought back down. He may genuinely feel a connection to 1776. But that significance is lost as currently planned...

Actually, he didn't bring the height down, just made the top part skinnier. I think he has more of connection to the Statue of Liberty shape than the height.

[NYguy]

I think you should look at this from the beginning, not the point when Childs and Libeskind were arguing. The 1776 ft mark was established early on. Don't you think that Pataki, the LMDC, et al could have convinced the public to accept the tallest building in NYC, just a little higher than the ESB?

Well, before the process even began, Silverstein and Childs were planning a tower topped by unoccupied space. Libeskind didn't present anything new there.

[NYguy]

Actually, he didn't bring the height down, just made the top part skinnier. I think he has more of connection to the Statue of Liberty shape than the height.

Actually, he did bring the height down. Not once, but 3 times. The tower was seen as out of scale with the other planned towers at the site. It's why they had that alleged "break in" incident a few weeks ago - to get photos to convince Pataki, who had previously given his blessing to the shortened 1,600 ft tower...

[ZippyTheChimp]

Well, before the process even began, Silverstein and Childs were planning a tower topped by unoccupied space. Libeskind didn't present anything new there.
How tall?

[NoyokA]

It would've been 1,500 feet, it also would've had a twin.

[ZippyTheChimp]

That's my point. Childs raised his 1500 ft design to 1776, eliminating the spire. In my opinion, the revised design was completely out of balance, too much open lattice.

Of the three choices: present, 1500 without spire, 1776 without spire, the last is the worst.

[NYguy]

That's my point. Childs raised his 1500 ft design to 1776, eliminating the spire. In my opinion, the revised design was completely out of balance, too much open lattice.


The spire was eliminated, but it could have been added. Libeskind was the one who made 1776 ft the significant height, and Childs responded by making it something real (not just lip service). Libeskind's biggest problem with the tower was that it was too tall for him. But the NY skyline doesn't have a 1,500 ft height limit. The only way the skyline grows is for taller buildings to be built. Many people thought the Twin Towers were out of scale when they were built, yet its because we don't have those "out of scale" towers that we are getting something tall built in the first place. You can't have it both ways.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Simply, what I said a few posts ago is that the 1776 reference may have set the bar for height, that without that reference, the maximum height may have been considerable lower. Not that would necessarily be a bad thing, but you seem to be searching for height, and you can't say with any certainty that the building would have been over 1500 ft without the 1776 reference.

[JMC]

I will opine, again, that the width of this puppy is what's gonna give it balls. From one angle, anyway...it will look like one, contiguous line...extending to at least 1776...we don't have that view on the cut-away graphic.

[JMGarcia]

Actually, he didn't bring the height down, just made the top part skinnier. I think he has more of connection to the Statue of Liberty shape than the height.

Actually, he did bring the height down. Not once, but 3 times. The tower was seen as out of scale with the other planned towers at the site. It's why they had that alleged "break in" incident a few weeks ago - to get photos to convince Pataki, who had previously given his blessing to the shortened 1,600 ft tower...

Its still 1776 feet, just skinnier at the top with a spire rather than open lattice or do you only count height if its an architectural feature of a certain width?

[NYatKNIGHT]

It would've been 1,500 feet, it also would've had a twin.
Really? Was there ever a rendering? Must have been twin 1,100' towers with 400' lattices because I don't believe Silverstein was ever going over 70 stories. That would have looked creepy, I think.

[NoyokA]

Really? Was there ever a rendering? Must have been twin 1,100' towers with 400' lattices because I don't believe Silverstein was ever going over 70 stories. That would have looked creepy, I think.

Supposendly a twin or a "near" twin. Although Child's never produced a rendering.

[ZippyTheChimp]

A few more tidbits on the FT

The Downtown Express http://www.downtownexpress.com/

C.B. 1 gets Freedom Tower presentation

By Elizabeth O’Brien

David Childs, who unveiled his Freedom Tower design last month, above, presented the building to Community Board 1 this week.

Freedom Tower architect David Childs offered more details Wednesday on security and public access for his building, a collaboration with site planner Daniel Liebskind that could restore Downtown’s skyline as early as 2006.

At a Community Board 1 meeting, Childs stressed that much about the design for the 1,776-foot tower remained subject to change. But he presented one certainty along with the “fluid” plans: The building would be among the safest in the world.

This means that people won’t be as free to move about as they were at the previous World Trade Center, Childs conceded. When a board member asked about the possibility of walking through the lobby as a shortcut, Childs responded, “Those days are gone.”

There will be a separate lobby on West St. for visitors who just want to go to the tower’s observation areas, Childs said. Those visitors will be funneled through a mezzanine level as they proceed to two dedicated elevators, he added.

The top of the occupied portion of the building, at about 60 stories or 1,100 feet, will have an enclosed observation deck and Windows on the World restaurant. There will be another observation deck inside the latticework top at 1,500 ft., Childs said.

There will also be ground-level public space outside the building, but landscaping has not yet been designed, Childs said. There will be little, if any, room inside the lobby for retail, but there will be shops on some basement levels, he added.

Julie Menin, a member of C.B. 1 and a member of the jury that selected the Reflecting Absence memorial design, praised Childs’ concept of public space.

“I just want to say that the experience of a visitor to the memorial and Freedom Tower will be more hospitable than existed previously,” Menin said.

As a member of the memorial jury, Menin had access to wind studies of the site. The torqued shape of the Freedom Tower catches the wind, welcome news for anyone who experienced the powerful gusts at the old World Trade Center site. Windmills in the upper third of the building will harness the wind to generate about 25 percent of the building’s energy needs, Childs said.

While the community embraced the windmills, many were more concerned about another energy source in the Freedom Tower: diesel fuel. There will be diesel fuel storage for companies’ back-up generators, Childs said. However, he said the fuel would not be below the building to the extent it was kept in 7 World Trade Center, which burned and collapsed on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001.

The exact place of the diesel fuel storage has not been determined, said John Lieber, senior vice president of Silverstein Properties, the company of W.T.C. leaseholder Larry Silverstein. The company also hopes to provide several non-diesel sources of power so that businesses will have an alternative to diesel fuel, Lieber added.

“The New York City law on this is very weak and it doesn’t take into account any acts of terrorism,” Madelyn Wils, chairperson of C.B. 1, said of diesel fuel. “We would probably like to follow it up as it goes along.”

Wils said she also wanted to monitor the issue of black car and taxi access to the site. Trucks and buses will likely enter and be searched at the Deutsche Bank building site, but no space has been designated for company cars and taxis.

“This is going to be the blight of your existence, post-Freedom Tower, if you don’t help us get this addressed,” Wils said to Lieber of Silverstein Properties.

“I’d consider that a warning,” Childs joked.

Childs said delivery trucks are likely to exit on Washington St. near Vesey St., and it is still unclear exactly how big the Freedom Tower footprint will be since planners are debating how wide to make Vesey.

“That’s something we’re very worried about, because it would be nice to keep on the governor’s time schedule,” said Childs, sounding something less than very worried. “You need to know the dimension of your site before you really design a building.”

Elizabeth@DowntownExpress.com

Downtown Express is published by
Community Media LLC.
Downtown Express | 487 Greenwich St., Suite 6A | New York, NY 10013

[JMC]

..there's that width issue coming up...

[NYguy]

The top of the occupied portion of the building, at about 60 stories or 1,100 feet, will have an enclosed observation deck and Windows on the World restaurant. There will be another observation deck inside the latticework top at 1,500 ft., Childs said.

Sounds good.

[ZippyTheChimp]

There will be another observation deck inside the latticework top at 1,500 ft., Childs said.

Looks like we get an open-air observatory. It could be breathtaking.

[BrooklynRider]

It is sounding more promising. I am looking forward to the LMDC keeping Liebskind preoccupied with Memorial and Transportation hub issues, so Childs can clip that spire from the final design.

[NYguy]

It is sounding more promising. I am looking forward to the LMDC keeping Liebskind preoccupied with Memorial and Transportation hub issues, so Childs can clip that spire from the final design.

LOL...I wouldn't count on it. The great Pataki sees ALL!..... :shock:

[JMGarcia]

Tower Struggle
It's not unusual for developers, politicians, and architects to clash over real estate projects in New York City. But there's never been anything like the battle over the World Trade Center site.
By Devin Leonard
Forbes

On Dec. 19, New York Governor George Pataki joined developer Larry Silverstein and architects David Childs and Daniel Libeskind at Federal Hall in lower Manhattan to unveil the long-awaited design of the Freedom Tower, the first skyscraper to rise at ground zero. They exchanged handshakes and forced grins. The collaboration between Childs and Libeskind had been stormy. The city's newspapers had portrayed them as divas who couldn't stand the thought of sharing the limelight. Obviously the four men wanted to put that behind them. "Today is a celebration of a successful collaboration of two brilliant architects," Pataki insisted.

It was a little early to celebrate. In truth, the struggle over the Freedom Tower is far from over. This is not a simple tale of two architects whose egos are larger than the building they are supposed to be designing. In the weeks before and after the Freedom Tower's unveiling, FORTUNE interviewed Pataki, Silverstein, Childs, Libeskind, and dozens of other people involved in the project. What emerged is a story about commerce colliding with politics over the most emotionally charged real estate project in New York City's history.

The primary combatants are Silverstein, the developer who is financing the skyscraper, and Pataki, who wields vast influence over the project because it will be constructed on government land. For Silverstein, the Freedom Tower must attract tenants to be a success—hordes of them. When it is completed, the skyscraper promises to be the world's tallest building, with 2.6 million square feet of office space. Silverstein wanted an architect with extensive experience to design it. He found one in Childs, a partner in the venerable firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill.

For Pataki, on the other hand, ground zero is a political symbol. He wants anything built on the site to honor the dead and inspire (i.e., not offend) the living, most notably the families of 9/11 victims. Indeed, it was largely to mollify those families that Pataki forced Childs to collaborate with Libeskind, who is most famous for designing the haunting Jewish Museum Berlin. He has never created an office tower before.

With such radically different visions for ground zero, it was inevitable that the governor and the developer would clash. What was less predictable was that they would do so using cat's-paws: their architects.

"The mission here," says Larry Silverstein, "was to create a great product that generations forward will look back at and say, 'Spectacular! Spectacular! Wonderful building!' Right? That's the mission. That's the goal."

The 72-year-old developer sits in the boardroom of his office on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. His voice is husky, and he speaks with studied, dramatic pauses. He says he has no interest in gaining personal glory by erecting the world's tallest building. He says he wants to rebuild to send a message to the terrorists. "We have an obligation to our children, an obligation to our grandchildren, not to cower," he says.

It's a nice sentiment. But Silverstein is clearly savoring this moment. Until six weeks before Sept. 11, 2001, when he leased the World Trade Center for 99 years from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Silverstein had a lucrative but rather undistinguished career. By the '90s he controlled millions of square feet of office space in the city. But Silverstein never got the attention enjoyed by some other members of Manhattan's skyscraper club. "He's after the limelight," says a competing developer. "He's never really had it, and he always wanted it."

That changed after the Twin Towers were destroyed. Silverstein was deluged with telephone calls and letters from people urging him to lead a rebuilding effort. With messianic zeal, he heeded the call. Instead of settling for a $3.5 billion payout from the World Trade Center's insurers, he demanded $7 billion, arguing that the destruction of the Twin Towers was two events. Silverstein's insurers objected; the case goes to trial in February. Even if he loses, Silverstein is entitled to $3.5 billion—plenty to build on the site.

But what exactly should rise there? For the answer, Silverstein turned to David Childs. The architect was already working for him. Just before 9/11, the developer had asked him to spruce up the World Trade Center. Childs wasn't thrilled. To him, it was a failed urban-renewal project from the 1960s. He felt that the Port Authority had surgically removed a section of the city when it built the complex and inserted something alien. "It was anti-urban—cold, harsh, hard to get to," the architect says.

Developers don't always suffer such critiques gladly. To them, a beautiful building is one that's fully rented. But Childs, 62 and 6-foot-3, commands respect. His list of projects is exhaustive—everything from the headquarters of Bear Stearns and Time Warner (FORTUNE's parent) in New York City to an airport terminal and railway stations in Singapore. Real estate moguls are reassured by his resume and his affable, WASP-y manner. But by all accounts, Childs can be ruthless. When Skidmore was on the brink of insolvency in the early '90s, he took control, laying off two-thirds of the firm's employees. As a reward, he was named Skidmore's first chairman. Childs gave up the position when he turned 60, and he is now a consulting design partner.

Much to his credit, Childs helped Silverstein reimagine the World Trade Center site after 9/11. He convinced Silverstein to restore the streets that once ran through the 16 acres. Childs also talked him into hiring five different firms to design the towers that the developer planned for the site. "Larry was a little nervous," says the architect. "But he bought into it. He really wants to do great things here."

Things were moving too quickly at ground zero for George Pataki. A shrewd politician with a preternatural ability to co-opt his enemies, the Republican governor was seeking a third term in November 2002. He wasn't about to entrust the rebuilding of ground zero entirely to Silverstein, a major contributor to Democratic candidates. "This is not a private development," Pataki, 58, says earnestly in a telephone interview. "Whatever the legalities may or may not be, this is a public trust."

Ground zero was also a political minefield. Some relatives of 9/11 victims felt that any commercial development there would be sacrilege. But the governor couldn't let the site sit empty. The Port Authority, which he controls with New Jersey Governor James McGreevey, was counting on $120 million in annual lease payments from Silverstein. It was understood in Albany that the only way the developer could make those payments was to rebuild ten million square feet of office space—the same amount as the original trade center—at ground zero. If not, the Port Authority might have to raise the tolls at its bridges and tunnels in the city. That was unthinkable in an election year.

Pataki created the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, a government agency that would oversee the revitalization of downtown. Silverstein chafed under the LMDC's authority. He was going to be putting up the money to rebuild ground zero. Anyway, his lease was with the Port Authority, not with the LMDC. But state officials say that under the terms of his lease, he can build something other than a replica of the Twin Towers only if he gets the Port Authority's consent. What's more, the Port Authority has the right to cancel Silverstein's lease. If it does, however, there is no way he will be able to win enough money from his insurers to cover the cost of ground zero's redevelopment. Under his contract he is entitled to the full sum only if he rebuilds. Pataki and Silverstein, then, were locked in an uneasy partnership.

The LMDC slowed the pace of activity at ground zero to a crawl. Pataki was intent on involving every possible constituency in the process. In July 2002 the LMDC and the Port Authority released six plans for the site. The various office buildings were represented by ghostly rectangles. That is a common first step in a major real estate development. But, says Silverstein, "people looked at the plans, and their first reaction was, 'This is ugly! This is terrible! This is awful!' because they didn't really know what they were looking at."

Pataki sympathized with the public. He says the schemes failed to capture the "emotion" of 9/11. With his blessing, the LMDC and the Port Authority solicited "innovative designs" for the site in August 2002. Submissions poured in from famous architects around the world. The LMDC made it clear that this was not a competition, that it was only looking for more imaginative ideas for the site plan. But the architects treated it like a competition anyway. They drew up plans with dazzling buildings, hoping Silverstein would hire them to design his actual skyscrapers. The process morphed into an architectural beauty contest. The winner was Daniel Libeskind.

Libeskind watched the debate over what should be built at ground zero from Berlin. He was mesmerized. "New Yorkers were divided," he says. "Half of the people said, 'Don't build anything.' And the other half said, 'Build significantly. This is New York.' And I thought, How do you combine these seemingly opposite points of view?"

Sitting in his office just blocks away from ground zero, where he relocated his architecture firm last year, Libeskind is every bit the artiste in his black suit and goggle-like glasses. He says he feels a personal kinship with the site. Born in Poland in 1946, he first saw the lower Manhattan skyline from the boat that transported him to America as a teenager. He studied architecture at Manhattan's Cooper Union. "We used to come down here at lunch when the trade center was being built," says Libeskind. "It was the most incredible building in New York."

Libeskind taught architecture for 16 years without designing a single completed building. Then, in 1989, he won a competition to design the Jewish Museum in Berlin. A decade later the museum—a thunderbolt-shaped building—opened to widespread acclaim. Says Mitchell Moss, director of New York University's Taub Urban Research Center: "Libeskind is a poet of death."

Fresh from his success, Libeskind submitted a site plan for ground zero. More than any of his competitors, he understood the need to make a bald emotional statement. The centerpiece of his plan would be a setting for the memorial. (Libeskind didn't design the memorial; earlier this month the LMDC selected architects Michael Arad and Peter Walker to do that.) It would be below ground, in the foundation of the World Trade Center. Rising above there would be five office buildings with angular tops like shards of glass. They would twine upward, culminating in a skyscraper with a spire that climbed 1,776 feet. The spire would hail the Statue of Liberty.

When Libeskind unveiled his plan in December 2002, relatives of the victims' families wept. Pataki, too, was smitten. "He took a lot of his cues from the families," says someone involved with the LMDC. The agency's site plan committee voted 7-1 to select a competing architect's plan. But the governor wanted Libeskind. "The governor simply overrode those recommendations based on his personal preference for the Libeskind plan," says Silverstein.

So much for consensus. Pataki christened the 1,776-foot building the Freedom Tower. He asked Silverstein to be ready to break ground by Sept. 11, 2004. Many believe the governor wants to lay the cornerstone at the Republican Convention next summer in New York to boost a possible presidential bid in 2008. Pataki strongly denies it.

Nobody questioned Silverstein's right to pick his own architect. All Libeskind had been hired to do by the LMDC and the Port Authority was handle the site plan. Says Joseph Seymour, executive director of the Port Authority: "He wasn't hired to do the designs of the actual buildings."

But Libeskind had other ideas. When Childs and Silverstein met with him to explain how they were going to proceed, Libeskind told them: "I'm going to design the Freedom Tower."

"I'm sorry, but I've hired David Childs to do that," said Silverstein. "Danny, you've never designed a tall building. If I'm going to have heart surgery, I don't want a surgeon who's never done heart surgery before."

Some relatives of 9/11 victims didn't like the idea that Libeskind might be cast aside. Neither did Pataki. After an eight-hour negotiation monitored by the governor's aides, Childs agreed to take Libeskind on as a "collaborating architect."

Childs wasn't about to let Libeskind dominate the project, though. He had already started to conjure a roughly 2,000-foot torqued tower. He felt it would pay homage to the Statue of Liberty in a more powerful way than Libeskind's building. After all, as Lady Liberty raised her torch in New York Harbor, she turned with a graceful twist. The tower's twist would do something intriguing: It would catch the winds and lift them skyward. That inspired Childs to design a windmill farm atop the tower, which could generate 20% of the skyscraper's power.

Libeskind was miffed. As the design took shape, he complained that it wasn't consistent with his "vision." In particular, it didn't have his spire. Libeskind didn't have veto power, so he tried to buy time. According to the Childs team, he told Childs he liked the torque. Then he changed his mind. That happened at least four times. (Nina Libeskind, the architect's wife and business partner, disputes this.)

Finally, in October, there was a blowup. Childs says Libeskind walked off the project; Libeskind denies it but says they "reached a stalemate." The news hit the papers immediately. Pataki met with Silverstein and told him to get the architects to be team players. Oh, and he wanted a final model by Dec. 15.

The collaboration continued. Yet Libeskind refused to sign off on a design. In one meeting, he grabbed a model of Childs's Freedom Tower and twisted it in another direction. "Why can't we turn it like this?" he asked.

The room exploded. Turning the Freedom Tower would throw Libeskind's entire master plan out of kilter, the Skidmore architects shouted. The tower, after all, had been designed to rise out of the very street grid that Libeskind himself had come up with. Even the normally unflappable Childs was shaken. "This meeting is over," he said. "I feel like I just skidded on a patch of ice."

In November, Silverstein's contractor, Tishman Construction, raised grave concerns about the asymmetrical spire that Libeskind was proposing. Tishman said the spire would be difficult and time-consuming to build. What's more, someone familiar with the project says the spire might create safety problems for construction workers, because it would act like a sail in heavy winds. Nina Libeskind says her firm's engineers gave the spire a clean bill of health.

By now, tensions were running higher than ever. In early December, in what the Silverstein team has called a "Watergate break-in," members of the Libeskind team who were working at Skidmore's Wall Street office made off with schematics of Childs's Freedom Tower to share with Pataki's chief of staff, John Cahill. Libeskind's attorney, Ed Hayes, says the Libeskind team had every right to take them.

There is little disagreement about what happened next. Hayes accompanied Libeskind to a design meeting. The Silverstein team was stunned. "You're deviating from the master plan," Hayes told them. "You have no authority to do that."

"This is a design meeting," said Janno Lieber, Silverstein's manager for the project. "I'm not meeting with lawyers."

"We've got instructions," said Hayes. "If you don't believe me, let's call Cahill now."

Lieber said, "Fine, but I'm still not meeting with you."

Said Hayes: "You can't ****ing do this." He got on the phone, but he couldn't find anybody who would order the meeting to take place with Libeskind's attorney present. The Silverstein team was delighted. It looked as though Libeskind had used up all his political capital.

But after championing Libeskind, Pataki would have looked foolish endorsing a building that was solely the work of the developer's architect. So he stuck it to Silverstein one last time. In mid-December, Pataki insisted that Childs compromise. The cobbled-together result, a tower with a spire that rises to 1,776 feet, is "inspirational," says Pataki.

The tower still has to go through a gauntlet of tests to make sure it works as an office building. Inevitably, further changes will result. Childs is already lobbying to restore the height of his design. He says that needs to happen so that the windmill farm can operate at peak efficiency. Watch for the spire to disappear too.

You can count on Libeskind's protesting loudly if those things happen. He talks as if dark forces (read: Silverstein and Childs) may still try to turn ground zero into a Houston office park. That, he says, will never happen as long as he's around. "Long after the developer is gone, the architects are gone, the politicians are even gone, I'll still be here to make sure," Libeskind says. "That's my role. That's what my responsibility is. Somebody has to make sure that this site is treated with the proper respect."

But the malignant powers that Libeskind warns against don't exist. Silverstein clearly understands that this is the crowning moment of his career. Childs isn't going to let him blow it either. Silverstein has made good on his vow to recruit other architects: He has named three prominent ones—Norman Foster, Fumihiko Maki, and Jean Nouvel—to design three of the remaining four office buildings at ground zero. He has bonded with Santiago Calatrava, the renowned Spanish architect, hired by the Port Authority to design a new transportation center on the site.

Great things are happening at ground zero. So why is Libeskind still fighting? Well, partly because Pataki is letting him. But if he and everyone else just relaxed a little, the site might actually get the tower it deserves.

[NoyokA]

The tower still has to go through a gauntlet of tests to make sure it works as an office building. Inevitably, further changes will result. Childs is already lobbying to restore the height of his design. He says that needs to happen so that the windmill farm can operate at peak efficiency. Watch for the spire to disappear too.

Child's has my best regards.

[TonyO]

Things are falling into place, finally. Danny, you'll get your chance to build a tall building..just not this time.

The claim by Pataki that the timetable has no politics involved pisses me off. He needs to go.

[ZippyTheChimp]

At least no more release dates have been announced. I hope the groundbreaking is...hmmmm, Thanksgiving week would be nice. :wink:

[NoyokA]

I think a fair compromise would be an observatory at 1776 feet, and a decorative spire and antennaes above that. As once outlined this wouldnt pose any restrictions on the creativity of either Childs of Libeskind.

[radical overemphasis]

i dont like the spire.

but if this project is going to stay on schedule (which it wont) then its probably best that no more changes are made.

[NYatKNIGHT]

The article posted by JMGarcia was excellent, very informative. How did the World Trade Center become all about Pataki and his political agenda without any public outrage? He's quite the skilled sleezebag.

Now we have NO idea what the FT will look like nor when we'll see the next set of renderings, what drama.

[radical overemphasis]

This constant design change is really p*ss*ng me off! :x

[ZippyTheChimp]

Yea, Pataki is smarmy, but I have to thank him for one thing - nixing the revised design of the Think WCC. That was horrible.

[Gulcrapek]

That was the one that had 7:1?

[JMGarcia]

Such a fine line between good and blah....

http://www.renewnyc.com/images/plan_des_images/firme_sig2.jpg
http://www.schwartzarch.com./think03.jpg

Hopefully the Freedom Tower will take a leap in the opposite direction from blah to good.

The scary thing though is that the upper reaches of the Freedom Tower are going to look even less substantially than the WCC update and the cores even more substantial than WCC's elevator shafts.

[NoyokA]

What a blight on the skyline. I for one am grateful over Pataki's intervention.

[TonyO]

The only reason why THINK's design made it was because it was a hollow (no pun intended) attempt to appease those who wanted the twin towers rebuit. Libeskind's design and salesmanship were geared towards the families.

[LuPeRcALiO]

At least no more release dates have been announced. I hope the groundbreaking is...hmmmm, Thanksgiving week would be nice. :wink:
if the past is any prelude I'm expecting a big rollout on Friday, December 17.

[NYguy]

Now we have NO idea what the FT will look like nor when we'll see the next set of renderings, what drama.

Thank Pataki for this mess. Two architects with two very different ideas that the governor wants to shoehorn into one for political purposes. Its time Pataki got some real blame for this fiasco in the making........

[Christopher X]

if the past is any prelude I'm expecting a big rollout on Friday, December 17.

I'll bite. What's December 17?

[LuPeRcALiO]

no punchline except that for the last two years, in the last few days before Christmas, the Governor has delighted us with jokes. :D

[DominicanoNYC]

I don't know. I think that a more patriotic date is going to be set for the groundbreak. I'm thinking 11-11 (Vetern's Day) or a few days after, since July 4 is too early.

[Christopher X]

no punchline except that for the last two years, in the last few days before Christmas, the Governor has delighted us with jokes. :D

Oh, I see. That's not a bad public presentation policy-fall through spring only. The summer humidity tends to fertilize my disagreeable side. Sides.

[Agglomeration]

To be frank with all of you, I've never liked the Freedom Tower, and after hearing this I like it even less now. :roll:

WorldNetDaily

Buddhist prayer wheel to top new WTC?
Engineer wants spiritual gesture to replace area once filled with death

Posted: January 10, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/artic...RTICLE_ID=36538

An engineer working on plans for the 1,776-foot-high replacement for the World Trade Center in New York wants the wind turbines at the top to serve as Buddhist prayer wheels, "cycling through mantras of peace."

Guy Battle, who's overseeing the wind farm for the planned Freedom Tower, calls it a spiritual gesture to replace the same airy reaches filled with death on Sept. 11, 2001, reports the Village Voice.

The paper explained Tibetan Buddhists write the mantra "Om Mani Padme Hum" many times over on thin papers and enclose them within cylinders called mani, which are also inscribed with the mantra.

"These spin on an axle, continuously repeating the prayer," writes the Village Voice's Erik Baard. "The words aren't directly translatable, but they invoke blessings from Chenrezig, the embodiment of compassion."

Battle's proposal has not been ruled on yet by Architect David M. Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, master planner Daniel Libeskind and developer Larry Silverstein, the paper said.

The turbines are expected to provide a fifth of the building's needed electricity.

"They are simple generators, but they can be somehow linked with the memorial," Battle said. "People could even put prayers on the propellers."

Baard writes: "A reflection of mourning, forgiveness, and hope open to all faiths and ethical traditions would give real meaning to the skyscraper's somewhat stilted name. Imagine if, from miles away in any direction, you could look to that skyscraper and know that within its ethereal, translucent summit was a testament to our better selves, our shared prayers."

The Village Voice writer continues: "That is the architecture of who we are as a people. And coincidentally, the northwesterly winds turning those prayer wheels would follow the same glinting line of the Hudson River that the planes of 9-11 used as a flight path to murder. It's the kind of gentle defiance that would drive al-Qaida mad."

[NYguy]

Here's a larger scan of the memorial with the Freedom Tower...


http://www.pbase.com/image/25127675/original.jpg

[Jasonik]

The way the canted Southeast corner line extends to the top of the spire works well from this angle. Maybe there could be a spire on the opposite (NW) corner for a similar effect from the North.

Imagine twin spires, one with an antenna....

[ZippyTheChimp]

From this view, I don't think that the slanted roof works well with the level roof of the lattice.

[TonyO]

Its hard to tell from the B&W rendering but Dey St. looks to be still closed off in the color one.

[JMGarcia]

From this view, I don't think that the slanted roof works well with the level roof of the lattice.

From any angle, the slanted roof does not work well with the level roof of the cabled area.

A building that has the vertical angles, twist, and taper of this tower really needs something other than a flat top. Unfortunately, this is typical of Childs in that he never quite follows through thoroughly with his ideas, sometimes quite good, by adding the necessary finishing touches.

I happen to agree with Muschamp in this case. He comes close but the "miracle" never quite happens. In a way that is more frustrating than if his designs were just mundane through and through.

[Kris]

http://renewnyc.org/images_WMS/memorial_final/mem_aerial_large.jpg

[ZippyTheChimp]

Nice image.

Tonyo, it clearly shows Dey St still closed, but the rendering shows Libeskinds original transportation hub which was to be attached to the office tower.

Sometimes forgotten, the tower to replace Deutsche Bank is to be sited further south in line with Cedar St, creating the park on the south side of Liberty St.

[radical overemphasis]

The above design is not as grotesque as the one with the giant wall-building on the west street side.

[emmeka]

you can say that again. that thing was an eyesaw.

[NYguy]

Its hard to tell from the B&W rendering but Dey St. looks to be still closed off in the color one.

You won't see those changes until the design for the new Transit Center is revealed.

[NYguy]

A building that has the vertical angles, twist, and taper of this tower really needs something other than a flat top. Unfortunately, this is typical of Childs in that he never quite follows through thoroughly with his ideas, sometimes quite good, by adding the necessary finishing touches.

Don't forget that the tower was cut short, and this is NOT the top that was originally planned for the tower, but one that was forced on by Libeskind and the governor.

In other news, I was looking at the model of the memorial presentation on television, and tower #2 is VERY impressive - more so than the Freedom Tower in a sense. I'm already looking forward to more designs...

[JMC]

Where's Century 21?!?!

Where am I supposed to my my socks?!

[JMGarcia]

Don't forget that the tower was cut short, and this is NOT the top that was originally planned for the tower, but one that was forced on by Libeskind and the governor.

True, but it was still flat and that doesn't work with the twist and taper to well whether its lower or higher.

In any case, IMO its not only the spire that doesn't work with the flat top its the angled office roof. Like it or not, if they are going to add a spire and an angled office roof then the top of the cabled area needs to change too.

BTW, the design for the transit center will be revealed Jan. 22 - next week. :D

[NYguy]

Don't forget that the tower was cut short, and this is NOT the top that was originally planned for the tower, but one that was forced on by Libeskind and the governor.

True, but it was still flat and that doesn't work with the twist and taper to well whether its lower or higher.

Not exactly. There was a crown that included multiple antennas. It worked well with the design, and the twisting, tapering tower became more narrow towards the top, creating the same "sloped" look the tower has today. The only reason it looks out of place now is because of the spire that was literally tacked on by the governor and Libeskind.

[NYguy]

Where's Century 21?!?!

Where am I supposed to my my socks?!

That would be on Church St, on the other side of the new transit center..

[NYguy]

A comparison of old vs new...

http://www.pbase.com/image/25140840/original.jpg


http://www.hpphoto.com/servlet/LinkPhoto?GUID=1ea15141-5109-5754-53fb-1d06395c229f&size=

[JMGarcia]

Not exactly. There was a crown that included multiple antennas. It worked well with the design, and the twisting, tapering tower became more narrow towards the top, creating the same "sloped" look the tower has today. The only reason it looks out of place now is because of the spire that was literally tacked on by the governor and Libeskind.

The only pic I've seen of Childs original version was the elevation you posted from the paper. Do you have another? It was fairly impossible to tell from that what the top was doing.

One of your old vs new pics isn't showing up btw.

[NYguy]

Anyone else notice a small resemblance to the SWFC?


http://www.kpf.com/images/Projects/shanghai/n1041_3007z.jpghttp://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/01/14/nyregion/14cnd-wtc.2.450.jpghttp://www.mori.co.jp/forest/world/images/world-view.jpg


http://www.kpf.com/images/Projects/shanghai/n1041_3056z.jpg


http://www.kpf.com/images/Projects/shanghai/n1041_3010z.jpg

[LuPeRcALiO]

A comparison of old vs new...

http://www.pbase.com/image/25140840/original.jpg


http://www.hpphoto.com/servlet/LinkPhoto?GUID=1ea15141-5109-5754-53fb-1d06395c229f&size=

tough act to follow.

[PHLguy]

even as ghosts the twin towers STILL make more of an impression than the FT :oops:

[matt3303]

TheFreedom Tower will end up looking like any other random new building being built in Jersey City. I have a bad feeling that the glass top will be almost invisible.

[Pottebaum]

TheFreedom Tower will end up looking like any other random new building being built in Jersey City.

Just wondering; why Jersey City?

[JMC]

I hate to sound like a broken record, but the width of these guys...and, I mean all of them...are gonna help make that impact happen, again.

The cluster of WIDE ~thousand footers is gonna be quite nice.

The sum of the parts...

[LuPeRcALiO]

possibly JMC but width is rarely the most elegant dimension of highrises or humans..
http://www.webulagam.com/women/beauty/images/2002/07/fatgirl.jpg

[Jude1017]

yeah, why Jersey City!??!

[ZippyTheChimp]

possibly JMC but width is rarely the most elegant dimension of highrises or humans..
Maybe extra width on Vesey will hide those pounds.

[TonyO]

From the large rendering, the large bubble in the water makes it appear that someone has already "soaped" the fountain. no respect. :)

[BigMac]

Here (http://www.som.com/press_release/) is a site with images and animations of the Freedom Tower.