Reply With QuoteI hope the freedom tower does not get surpass quickly. I really miss when we had the tallest building in the world.
From ground zero to sky high
By David Ho, Palm Beach Post-Cox News Service
Sunday, July 4, 2004
NEW YORK -- The United States is reentering a long-abandoned race to the top of the man-made world today as ground is broken for Freedom Tower on the scarred earth of the World Trade Center.
The tower, meant to fill an aching void in Manhattan's skyline left by the destroyed twin towers, would rise to 1,776 feet. The symbolic height honoring the year the nation declared independence might make it the tallest building in the world.
But since planners unveiled the design in December, building experts have debated whether it will qualify as tallest because the upper reaches are mostly vacant, filled with support cables and power-generating windmills.
Any record also may be short-lived -- buildings are planned in the United Arab Emirates and South Korea that would top Freedom Tower by hundreds of feet.
America once dominated the ranks of the world's so-called supertall skyscrapers, with New York's Empire State Building and Chicago's Sears Tower the reigning champs for decades at a time.
Now, eight of the world's 10 tallest buildings are in Asia, thanks to a building frenzy begun in the early 1990s.
The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat in Chicago, a recognized arbiter, in April awarded the title of tallest to Taipei 101, a 1,667-foot pagoda-like tower in Taiwan. It surpassed Malaysia's twin Petronas Towers, completed in 1998, and bumped the 1974 Sears Tower to fourth place.
In Asia, "a lot of it has to do with the local governments wanting to put their flag in the ground and say, 'We have arrived as an economy,' " said Ron Klemencic, the council's chairman, who is president of Magnusson Klemencic Associates, a structural engineering firm in Seattle.
Cost, not science, set height
Typically, economics rather than engineering limit skyscraper height.
The cost of materials and of moving people up and down restricts height, as does the space available for a building's footprint. In U.S. cities with established urban layouts, it hasn't made financial sense to build extremely tall.
Supertall construction is more practical in places such as the Middle East or China where there may be no street grid and "you can just build it in the middle of the desert," Klemencic said.
Skyscraper building is linked with economic cycles, and the Asian construction trend reflects that, said Carol Willis, an architectural historian who founded The Skyscraper Museum in Manhattan.
"The tallest buildings always come at the end of a boom cycle and generally before a crash," she said, noting the building craze of the late 1920s.
Plans arise during good times, when space is needed and rents promise profit, but buildings are often finished years later, adding excess office space to economies in decline, Willis said.
However, Freedom Tower, which may be completed before 2009, is an exception to all the rules, Willis said.
"Everything about Freedom Tower is driven by the extraordinary conditions of the World Trade Center tragedy and the desire to repair Lower Manhattan's economy," Willis said.
The destruction of the twin towers in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has influenced builders, who are using new security features such as filtered air systems and lower levels hardened against car bombs.
While Freedom Tower designers are driven to create a skyscraper that can endure colossal damage and allow people to escape, generally it is too expensive to protect against an attack on the scale of Sept. 11.
Many supertall buildings in Asia incorporate safety features such as concrete cores and refuge areas every several floors.
New technology pushes innovations
There is no scientific limit to how tall a building can soar, the Council on Tall Buildings' Klemencic said. Researchers in Japan, where real estate is notoriously limited, have studied the potential for monstrous mile-high buildings that would be cities unto themselves.
While there have been advances in computer design and building materials, the biggest recent change in building skyscrapers is the strategy for coping with powerful wind, Klemencic said.
The old strategy made buildings stiff and solid to resist wind. A newer approach, not widely used until the 1990s, allows buildings to sway as internal damping devices absorb wind energy.
The World Trade Center towers, which were about 1,350 feet tall, had a very early form of this technology, Klemencic said.
Builders of the Taipei 101 say they have the largest damping system in the world.
Another significant advance involves elevators, which often limit how tall a building can rise.
"As a building gets taller and taller, you need more and more elevators to move people up and down," Klemencic said. "Around 70 to 80 stories, the amount of shaft space consumed by the elevators is so great that the economic equation for the building begins to fall apart."
A solution is faster and more intelligent elevators that move in computer-controlled patterns tailored to levels of activity.
Tallest of them all?
The Council on Tall Buildings measures height by the architectural top of a building, which includes features integral to a design, such as spires, but not antennas.
The coming decision on Freedom Tower, with its 70 stories of offices, will likely focus on whether the majority of its structure is considered occupied.
A similar issue blocks top ranking for the CN Tower in Toronto, the tallest man-made structure at 1,815 feet. The building council discounts it because it is largely an unoccupied shaft topped by a restaurant and observation deck. Guinness World Records, however, calls the tower the tallest building.
Two skyscrapers on the way could silence the debate.
The Burj Dubai, a Brobdingnagian residential and commercial building in the United Arab Emirates, may be completed before 2010. The final height is a secret, but it reportedly might exceed 2,300 feet.
A planned 130-story building outside Seoul, South Korea, could rival or surpass the Dubai skyscraper.
I hope the freedom tower does not get surpass quickly. I really miss when we had the tallest building in the world.
Where do they get all the money to built this things? The governments in these countries?The Burj Dubai, a Brobdingnagian residential and commercial building in the United Arab Emirates, may be completed before 2010. The final height is a secret, but it reportedly might exceed 2,300 feet.
A planned 130-story building outside Seoul, South Korea, could rival or surpass the Dubai skyscraper.
The USA should start doing something. If they want to spend money on wars then they should spend it in a war for the tallest building.
Some interesting tidbits in this article that I've highlighted....
Freedom Tower architects test 3-D drawing software
By ALEX FRANGOS
The Associated Press
7/7/04 9:56 AM
The Wall Street Journal
NEW YORK -- It will be almost two years before steel rises even to ground level in construction of the iconic Freedom Tower, whose cornerstone was laid at Ground Zero in an emotional ceremony Sunday. But a few blocks away -- and far removed from public view -- a group of architects designing the tower are stretching design technology in ways that will change how buildings are created.
Architects at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, the firm hired by private developer Larry Silverstein to complete Daniel Libeskind's vision for the signature skyscraper, are using an innovative kit of software-design tools for the first time on such a massive project. Among the equipment: a three-dimensional drawing program that's part of an industrywide revolution altering how architects transfer ideas from their brains to paper.
The $1 billion-plus Freedom Tower will house offices, stores and restaurants and will have a 72-story twisting body, a cable skin, a concrete and steel core, and a 600-foot latticework cage on the top that will house broadcast antennas and wind turbines.
The tangled guts will be equally complex and difficult to keep straight. The architects predict the job will require 3,000 official construction documents -- as many as a large airport. Close to 50 Skidmore staff are on the project; their drawings will be done in batches and won't be completed until the first quarter of 2006.
On a recent morning in Skidmore's 23rd floor Freedom Tower project room, David Yanks, a staff architect, used a 3-D design program called Revit to grab the massive sides of the tower on his computer and twist them from side to side. In so doing, each floor adjusts its size according to Mr. Yanks's moves, something that would take weeks with standard two-dimensional drafting programs. "I'd have to make different floors" in the regular program, he says. Using Revit, a product of Autodesk Inc., San Rafael, Calif., he says, "we have one template with two 'knives' on the each side that cut the floors to the right shape."
The shape of the Freedom Tower, a parallelogram that twists as it rises, is particularly suited for the new software. Mr. Yanks enjoys using it so much, his colleagues rib him that his wife will be upset about the "Revit" tattoo he might get.
The revolution Mr. Yanks is experiencing now -- from 2-D to 3-D -- is in many ways a logical next step to the emergence of computer-aided design software in the early 1970s. In its day, CAD, as it's known, transformed architecture by digitizing drafting, sending the blueprint production process into warp speed. (Skidmore was one of the first firms to use CAD; it developed its own version.)
From a creative perspective, however, CAD wasn't a huge leap. Like its manual predecessors, the T-square and compass, CAD is a tool to make a set of abstract drawings -- basically instructions to the construction crew -- of what the building should be. A wall is represented by a set of lines, rather than by an actual picture of a wall.
The first 3-D programs emerged 20 years ago. They were good for flashy presentations but not powerful enough to actually design whole buildings with. The latest generation of 3-D programs changes the game.
"In the past, architects carried in their head what the three-dimensional conception of the building was and mentally translated that into two-dimensional drawings," says Charles Eastman, an architecture professor at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Now, they create on the screen exactly what they envision in their mind's eye.
Instead of drafting abstract instructions, the 3-D modeling has the architect design what the building actually looks like, and then spits out the old fashioned drawings for the contractor to use as a result. "Drawings become the byproduct of the model," says Michael Jarosz, a tech expert at Skidmore. "A staircase is a staircase, not just a set of lines."
More than that, the computer models act like actual buildings do. Designers can travel into the computer models at almost any angle or from any cross section and see the tiniest details. On the recent morning at Skidmore's offices, Mr. Jarosz was having fun showing how it works. "Let's take us into the toilet" he says, while zooming through the Freedom Tower's walls into a bathroom on the lower floors. On the screen was a bird's eye view of a bathroom with a series of stalls and commodes.
Traditional CAD software takes months to achieve the same views. Each cross section -- and angle -- has to be individually drawn. In the case of the Freedom Tower, Revit lets the designers peer into the structure's complex core, which contains structural columns, elevators, stairwells and utilities. Looking at the building from any angle helps the various teams sort out what parts should go where without interfering with each other.
Architecture is one of the last design professions to latch onto 3-D modeling. Design of cars, consumer products, even airplanes, turned to full 3-D design in the 1980s and 1990s. Some architects, such as Frank O. Gehry, have used industrial 3-D design programs not meant for architects. But the promise has yet to reach architecture because of the complexity of buildings and the one-time nature of giant construction projects.
"The economies of scale in product design, you design it once and sell it millions of times," says Omer Akin, a professor of architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. "In buildings, you design it once, build it once and use it once." He adds that the sheer number of parts in a building -- half a million for a 100,000-square-foot structure -- has until now overwhelmed 3-D modeling programs. The Freedom Tower will have 2.6 million square feet.
Autodesk isn't alone in promoting these new design tools. Bentley Systems Inc.'s architecture package boasts similar capabilities. The Exton, Pa., company says the reconstruction and renovation of the Pentagon used many of its tools. Graphisoft NV, based in Budapest, says its ArchiCAD 3-D product was the primary design program for the 80-story Eureka Tower in Melbourne, Australia.
Exciting as the new programs may be, they aren't perfect or even ready for full use. Skidmore is using Revit on a limited basis, mostly for the design of the lower floors of the Freedom Tower. It will use traditional CAD programs for the remaining floors. Another hitch is the size and complexity of the files the programs create. "There's a huge amount of data most civilians can't interact with," says Phil Bernstein, an Autodesk vice president.
To solve that, Autodesk sells another tool, a file-sharing program called Buzzsaw, that allows the architects to share simplified versions of the design files and other paperwork to clients and consultants. "Larry Silverstein can't look directly at a Revit model," says Mr. Bernstein. "We'd have to send him away to training for a year to jockey this thing."
Because of the Freedom Tower's high profile, keeping construction documents safe is a prime concern. Buzzsaw stores files in a sort of virtual lock box. Keys are distributed only to those who need access. Skidmore is also afraid of another sort of intruder: "people who may have been taken off the team and are pulling information down for their own portfolios, which is always a problem," says Ken Lewis, Freedom Tower project manager.
Whatever the potential problems, the promise of efficiencies makes the appeal of the 3-D programs clear. "It cuts down a lot of time and saves a tremendous amount of money," says Georgia Tech's Mr. Eastman, a pioneer in the design-modeling field. "You're building the building in the computer with all the three-dimensional parts before you build it on the site. There's no chance of a pipe boring through a beam, the kind of thing that requires a change order on site. Those errors disappear."
Also, all the parts in the entire building model are logged in a central database. So each toilet object has data associated with it such as size, cost, and source. Skidmore won't be utilizing that feature to its full extent on this project. But Autodesk and others such as Mr. Eastman see that as one of the product's biggest potential payoffs.
"Now, someone scans over all the drawings for product counts," of everything from air conditioners to faucets. "Everything gets counted by hand," says Mr. Eastman. With the new programs, he says, "you should be able to click on any object in the model" -- say a lighting fixture -- "see the specification, where it is, the status, whether it's on site ready to be installed."
The snappy new technology also lets Skidmore keep its money-minded client, Mr. Silverstein, happy. Neil Katz, a Skidmore computer guru, customized another 3-D program it is using to let the designers tweak the shape of the tower while simultaneously measuring changes in the rentable square footage. "That's something the owner of the building is very concerned about," says Mr. Lewis, the tower's project manager
Funny I just came across this earlier. I haven't witnessed the complete AutoDesk suite in full force, but it sounds fantastic.
"cable skin" How is this detailed? Hollow tubes? Do the cables support the floor plates at the periphery?
Is this the basic structure then?
Cable-net cooling tower at Schmehausen.* Height of concrete mast 180 meters, of tower 146 meters.* Diameter of tower 92 meters at top, 82 meters minimum, 141 meters at base.
A 600 ft latticework cage? That would seem to take the latticework to 1,776 ft, leaving a tower roughly midway between the 1,150 and 1,200 ft.....(1,176 ft).The $1 billion-plus Freedom Tower will house offices, stores and restaurants and will have a 72-story twisting body, a cable skin, a concrete and steel core, and a 600-foot latticework cage on the top that will house broadcast antennas and wind turbines.
The tangled guts will be equally complex and difficult to keep straight. The architects predict the job will require 3,000 official construction documents -- as many as a large airport. Close to 50 Skidmore staff are on the project; their drawings will be done in batches and won't be completed until the first quarter of 2006.
hmmmmm....Because of the Freedom Tower's high profile, keeping construction documents safe is a prime concern. Buzzsaw stores files in a sort of virtual lock box. Keys are distributed only to those who need access. Skidmore is also afraid of another sort of intruder: "people who may have been taken off the team and are pulling information down for their own portfolios, which is always a problem," says Ken Lewis, Freedom Tower project manager.
Silverstein will sueeze as much space in as he is allowed to, and no less...The snappy new technology also lets Skidmore keep its money-minded client, Mr. Silverstein, happy. Neil Katz, a Skidmore computer guru, customized another 3-D program it is using to let the designers tweak the shape of the tower while simultaneously measuring changes in the rentable square footage. "That's something the owner of the building is very concerned about," says Mr. Lewis, the tower's project manager
That picture is the perfect example of my worry about the cables disappearing and the core being all too visible.Originally Posted by Jasonik
Funny I just came across this earlier. I haven't witnessed the complete AutoDesk suite in full force, but it sounds fantastic.
"cable skin" How is this detailed? Hollow tubes? Do the cables support the floor plates at the periphery?
Is this the basic structure then?
Cable-net cooling tower at Schmehausen.* Height of concrete mast 180 meters, of tower 146 meters.* Diameter of tower 92 meters at top, 82 meters minimum, 141 meters at base.
All the non-realistic renderings out of SOM so far (which is par for the course with them) go to great lengths to hide the fact. Its a lot harder to render those semi-transparent cores than it would be to do just a straight 3D render of them as solid objects so they're obviously going out of their way to do it.
Its needless worry. You won't have a cable netting like that...
I think if they sheathed the cores properly they could be made to virtually disappear. Imagine a soft blue/grey matte annodized finish, or even a polished finish... fuhgeddaboudit!
I hope so but I can't see how it'll be much different.Its needless worry. You won't have a cable netting like that...
Earlier, there were discussions about two observation decks, one on the top floor and one at 1500' However, I haven't seen any discussion of that lately. Any news?
Ugh!
600 feet of latticework?
Disgusting...
I hope to god childs makes the lattice portion smaller just for the sake of NYC's dignity.
I want freedom tower to be taller than the twins. Not 200 feet shorter.
So far we have 600' lattice and no deck...everything is lower than the old WTC. I hope Childs can fix it. He's a good architect but he's under the rule of a NIMBY
July 8, 2004
BLOCKS
A 9/11 Cornerstone, Chiseled With a New York Accent
By DAVID DUNLAP
Gotham, the typeface chosen for the Freedom Tower cornerstone at the World Trade Center site, is distinguished by the uniformity in the width of its strokes and the absence of embellishments like serifs.
IT could have been imperial Trajan. Or elegant Bodoni. Or generic Helvetica. But the search for the ideal typeface to be inscribed on the Freedom Tower cornerstone at the World Trade Center site ended simply, in Gotham.
Gov. George E. Pataki said in his Fourth of July cornerstone speech that the 20-ton block came from the Adirondacks, "the bedrock of our state." He did not note that its 26 words were set in a typeface steeped in local origin, developed four years ago at the Hoefler Type Foundry in the Cable Building, at Broadway and Houston Street, by Tobias Frere-Jones, a native New Yorker.
The typeface, Gotham, deliberately evokes the blocky, no-nonsense, unselfconscious architectural lettering that dominated the streetscape from the 1930's through the 1960's in building names, neon signs, hand-lettered advertisements and lithographed posters.
Its chief inspiration, in fact, were the letters spelling out PORT AUTHORITY BUS TERMINAL over the terminal's Eighth Avenue doors. So the circle comes to a close, since the trade center site is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
The choice of Gotham is more than a matter of typographical arcana (though as typographical arcana go, it's not bad). As the first tangible element of the Freedom Tower - and, by extension, the trade center redevelopment - and as an image seen nationwide on Independence Day, the cornerstone sent an aesthetic signal of intent.
And the signal seemed to reflect the inherent ambiguity of the project: a solemn memorial to 2,749 lives lost in the worst single catastrophe in New York history that is simultaneously supposed to be a defiant restatement of the city's commercial gigantism.
Seen one way, the cornerstone's darkness and plainness are memorial, even funereal. Seen another, the radiant silver-leaf letterforms conjure the exuberant, modernist, midcentury optimism of New York even as they augur the glass and stainless-steel tower to come.
It is as if the cornerstone was meant to be as close to tabula rasa as an inscribed block can be; neutral enough so that viewers could impose their own meanings. Yet it is still anchored to the past through that typeface.
Michael Gericke, a partner in the Pentagram studio, which designed the cornerstone with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architects of the Freedom Tower, said Gotham "didn't look like something that was created yesterday and would be gone tomorrow."
"It seems like it's part of the larger urban environment," he said. "It seems, in a way, that it's always been there."
Another Pentagram partner, Michael Bierut, likened Gotham to the Manhattan street grid. "It doesn't show individual authorship," he said, "but it shows a character you wouldn't find anywhere else."
The letters that are Gotham's progenitors - BAR, PIER 40, DINER, PRIMARY SCHOOL 142 - appear almost as if they had not been designed at all. The strokes have a uniform width. The forms, like the circular O's, seem to have been dictated by pure geometry. There are no embellishments like serifs and spurs, barbs and beaks.
Mr. Frere-Jones, 33, who grew up in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and Brooklyn Heights, found himself drawn to these forms. And he had the chance to explore them in 2000, when Hoefler was commissioned by GQ magazine to design a new font. In 2002, after a period in which GQ had the exclusive right to use Gotham, it was made more widely available. It now comes in 16 varieties.
Jonathan Hoefler, 33, founded the firm in 1989. It has produced several faces based on the aesthetic characteristics of landmarks like Lever House, the Radio City Music Hall, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Mr. Frere-Jones joined in 1999, and the firm is now known as Hoefler & Frere-Jones.
Neither partner was aware that Gotham had been chosen for the Freedom Tower until after the unveiling. Mr. Hoefler learned about it in an e-mail message from a client in Hamburg. Mr. Frere-Jones found out in an article on the Web site of The New York Times after seeing news photos of the cornerstone and thinking the typeface looked awfully familiar.
Of course, they were pleased. "It's one of those typefaces that's open to interpretation," Mr. Hoefler said. "That makes it a good match for this monument."
But the simplicity of the typeface would not have mattered much if the inscription itself had been longwinded. The World Trade Center 1973 dedication stone, for instance, begins with a 50-word legend under which are the names of 25 officials and architects.
AS the text of the Freedom Tower cornerstone was being discussed by officials of the Port Authority, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and aides to the governor, it was decided that it need not incorporate excerpts from Mr. Pataki's speech in early May announcing the Fourth of July groundbreaking. A copy of the pared-down text was read to the governor.
"He wholeheartedly agreed with the less-is-more approach," said Lisa Dewald Stoll, Mr. Pataki's communications director. He asked that the text be circulated to ensure that everyone was comfortable with it. "The governor's only specific request was that we remove the names," Ms. Stoll said. There went the Honorable George E. Pataki, the Honorable James E. McGreevey and the Honorable Michael R. Bloomberg.
Larry A. Silverstein, the developer of the tower, was enthralled with the final version of the text, said Howard Rubenstein, a spokesman for Mr. Silverstein. At the Innovative Stone yard and factory in Hauppauge, on Long Island, the granite block was polished by Josveek Huligar and engraved by John Garafolo.
"To honor and remember those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001 and as a tribute to the enduring spirit of freedom," the cornerstone says. "July Fourth 2004."
Lines of all-capital lettering, intended to enhance the cornerstone's formality, may have diminished somewhat the idea that it commemorates people and spirit. "Use of upper- and lowercase would have democratized the message, removed its institutional pretensions," said John Kane, the author of "A Type Primer" (Prentice Hall, 2003). "Lowercase would have given the words a human voice."
Ann Harakawa, a principal in the Two Twelve Associates design firm, whose office at 90 West Street was destroyed on 9/11, said the typeface was simple, legible and, given its New York provenance, very apt. "The idea of it being slightly ambiguous is interesting," she said, "because no one has any idea of what's going to come."
The Gotham typeface was inspired by lettering found on facades all over New York City, including that of the Gansevoort Market, top, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, above.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Ugh!
600 feet of latticework?
Disgusting...
I hope to god childs makes the lattice portion smaller just for the sake of NYC's dignity.
I want freedom tower to be taller than the twins. Not 200 feet shorter.
So far we have 600' lattice and no deck...everything is lower than the old WTC. I hope Childs can fix it. He's a good architect but he's under the rule of a NIMBY
If it was infact 600 feet of cables I hope that they top out at 2000 feet just it looks in porportion
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