Freedom TowerFirst, read Felix’s detailed tour of Freedom Tower, unveiled Friday. He was my eyes and ears for this post. What follows is my take:
I’m cautiously pessimistic about this structure. It brought a whole range of associations to the fore, none of them really positive:
It could look meek: I perfectly understand that nobody wants to work on the 110th floor anymore. 9/11 changed the long-term future of urban landscapes by tragically demonstrating that huge skyscrapers collect too many eggs in one basket and thus make too tempting a target.
One solution is not to build more 110 story skyscrapers. It’s an honest response to changed conditions. But building a 110 story skyscraper and then only using the bottom two thirds of it is too tangible a nod to Al Qaeda. It begins to sound like a building with a chip on its shoulders, with the trellis outlining up to where we would have built if only it weren’t for the terrorists, who, in other words, have already won.
It could look unfinished: The trelliswork at the top looks suspiciously like scaffolding. What’s going to keep it from looking perenially unfinished? Buildings permanently left unfinished — like the Antwerp Cathedral — betray a certain lack of will to get the job done.
It shows no unity of purpose: Instead, it looks like design by committee, or by negotiation (not surprising, as that’s what it was), along the lines of “you can have your trellis if I can have my spire.” Now we have both, and the whole is less than the sum of its parts
Think’s World Cultural Center.
About that spire: When a spire emerges as an inescapable conclusion derived from the internal logic of a building’s architecture, as with the Chrysler building, it makes for the most satisfying works ever. But if it just sticks out of the ground, as with the Dublin Spire, its purpose mystifies. The Freedom Tower’s spire, placed as it is now, tends to the latter, baffling kind. Libeskind original winning design had a much stronger logic for its spike.
I find myself wishing we could build something clearly better, more playful and optimistic, and I think back to the finalist that lost out to Libeskind, Think’s World Cultural Center (portrayed left). The twin towers pay homage to the World Trade Center but improve on its esthetics, and the entirety of the structure is made up of audacious architectural flourishes never seen before. But above all, the lattice work serves a purpose, as does the height. Dangling an opera house or similar cultural landmark 500 meters up in the air is an inspired move, because while we might not want to be there from 9 to 5 Monday to Friday, we will all gladly play hero for a few hours at a time. And it’s a much better way of telling the terrorists that we have already won.
1) Building a 110 story skyscraper and then only using the bottom two thirds of it is too tangible a nod to Al Qaeda.
No, it’s a tangible nod to economics. 110-story skyscrapers are simply uneconomical: the tallest you can go, as a for-profit developer like Larry Silverstein, is 70 stories. Beyond that, the marginal extra cost of construction, plus the marginal decrease in the lower floors of the extra space needed for elevator banks, exceeds the marginal extra revenues from the higher floors. This has nothing to do with terrorists: office buildings higher than 70 stories are always about ego, and a willingness to spend a lot of money just to have a really tall building. Larry Silverstein is more hard-headed than that.
2) Comparing a real-world skyscraper to what was basically a thought experiment is more than a little unfair to the skyscraper. We have absolutely no idea what the Think plan would have ended up looking like if it had been chosen. Even comparing the Freedom Tower to the original Libeskind maquette is pretty unfair: that was not a building design so much as a vague idea of what a tower on that site might look like.
Felix Salmon on the WTC Design
Felix Salmon spent a good deal of time looking at the proposed design model, and for anyone following the discussion, a very good read. Stefan Geens reply to Felix Note that Felix fires back at the bottom. There’s been a…
Or we could have done what was thought about when the WTC was designed and make sure that buildings could take the hit. The specs for the original WTC included that they be able to withstand the impact of a 707, even though it was known that the 747 jumbo jet would be in service before the towers were completed.
As for whether the extra stories are worth it – don’t underestimate the value of the advertising.
Felix,
1. I suspect that if there was no perceived terrorist threat and the WTC needed to be replaced for some reason it would be the tallest occupied tower in the world.
2. Is it just me or are the final design a bit far off from the original qualifying works? Was that always going to be the case? Eventually, the finished product is so different from what the process chose that you wonder whether it wasn’t a formality before the owner’s architect got to work on getting the job done.
2 1/2. I could see the THINK design being occupied in the bottom two thirds but having a “nest” of some sort in the higher parts of the latticework that is a public space. In fact, the current final design could also incorporate something useful in its spiderweb at the top. Currently, it is being sold as a means of making the building stronger — does that imply all future buildings are going to have such a contraption at the top?
2 3/4 The arguments being mustered on either side about how high the tower is for bragging purposes shows that the unoccupied husk is going to be a hard sell.
It isn’t a husk if it has value – and a windmills to help cut electrical costs, if they can be made economically viable – would go make the argument.
Stirling — If you recall, both WTC towers withstood the impact of a 747 going a lot faster than such planes are meant to, with little more than a bit of shaking. It wasn’t the impact which brought them down, it was the fact that the 747s were basically used as a delivery mechanism for some of the nastiest stuff on the planet: jet fuel. The 707 tests never accounted for what would happen if the plane was fully loaded with jet fuel.
I have no idea what you’re talking about w/r/t “power of advertising”. Tenants might like to be at the top of the tallest building in the world for bragging purposes, but if it costs more to put them there than they’re paying in rent, it does the developer no good at all.
Stefan — your (1) is just plain wrong. For one thing, if the WTC reached the end of its natural life and was forced to be demolished, it wouldn’t “need to be replaced” — not unless and until demand for office space picked up again. And if new office buildings were built in its place, they would be commercially viable: no one in the US builds vanity projects like the WTC any more. Remember, it took decades for the WTC to fill up with tenants, and the Port Authority lost a fortune. No one in the PA would want to repeat the experience of spending untold billions on a structure which would stay mostly empty for the foreseeable future.
2. Libeskind won a competition to design a master plan. He did not win a competition to design every building on the site. Silverstein was always going to get his own architects to build the office towers on the site, and in fact Childs did not participate in the competition precisely because he’d already been asked by Silverstein to work on the new buildings.
2 3/4: Hard sell by whom to whom?
To set the record straight, it was 767s, not 747s, that were crashed into the WTC. The WTC was built to withstand the impact of a fully-laden 707, according to an engineer quoted in papers at the time, but this would obviously depend on the speed. A 767 and 707 are roughly the same size. 707s had 4 engines, 767 two, but 767s are around 20% heavier fully laden.
2 3/4 By those doing to the talking at the press conference to those who maintain the list of tallest skyscrapers.
Oh, you care about that “tallest in the world” designation, eh? Well, here‘s the Dunlap article, which basically says that the standard “top of the architecture” definition would put the Freedom Tower on the list at 1776 feet. The question, of course, is whether other buildings (in Shanghai or Dubai, say) are going to be taller than that by the time the Freedom Tower is occcupied, which might not be until 2010. But it seems that both the trellis and the spire are going to count. After all, the Petronas Towers are occupied to a lower level than the Sears Tower, but they have the record at the moment.
I would like to say first that i appologize if I insult anyone but ever since these attacks took place and the notion of rebuilding came about every single design and concept I seen is an embarrestment and an insult to all who have died and to all americans. Why is it that asia in particular the country of China can build what ever building or structure they want to at an alarming rate no doubt they are putting up a city financial destrict quicker than you can blink many times the size of NYC. They have buildings that are huge and no body has to fear anything. They have inovative structures built with not a care in the world. Here everyone is being a coward, and basically bowing down to all terrists and making a laughing tock of the mighty US by coming up with these stupid, frail, cowardly, and unfinished looking, and my favortite lets not occupy anything past the 70th floor design concepts what a bunch of chickens. There is no pride. I will work on the 200th floor of any new building if you want me to. Come on people wake up if this is the case why don’t just go to Chicago empty out and gut the top floors of the Sears Tower and paint the iron frame work in yellow because it is showing that we have no back bone. If people are affraid, get over it those people are dead not us lets move ahead to the future and show some REAL RESILIANCE.
thank you,
Oh! and another thing give it up already with this wind mill turbine deal it’s a joke. Don’t get me wrong the Freedom Tower design is beautiful I just feel this is another excuse not to have the top floors occupied. It’s an ingeneous cover up I wish thought of it my self. Actually I blame my self for not going taking higher education and becoming an engineer my self. We have fools doing it now. I think you were right maybe the THINK TEAM designs were better.
Felix,
You write that “110-story skyscrapers are simply uneconomical: the tallest you can go…is 70 stories. Beyond that, the marginal extra cost of construction, plus the marginal decrease in the lower floors of the extra space needed for elevator banks, exceeds the marginal extra revenues from the higher floors.”
This is true with respect to conventional skyscrapers, which is what the so-called Freedom Tower is. A torqued box is still a box, and it doesn’t appear that Childs’s elevator core ventures far, if it all, from the status quo.
Eli Attia’s design for the World Trade Center features three conical towers, each rising from a very large base to a single point in the sky. All three towers are 1728 feet tall — the height of the antenna atop WTC1 — each with a different footprint: circle, square, triangle.
Although the towers are designed to be occupied up to about 120 floors, the conical forms mean that the elevator cores do not consume inordinate floor space, as they typically do in tall and super-tall buildings.
The tapered forms also yield an almost infinite variety of floorplates, from about 80,000 sf (circle, square) at the base to about 5000 sf at the 100th floor (and slightly smaller beyond that). This offers an opportunity to appeal to the widest variety of tenants, creating a far more diverse economic base for the towers than the Silverstein/Childs/Taylor/Cooper/Garvin/Libeskind plan would ever do.
The elevator plan is at http://www.phoenixproject.info/design/presentation/DesignPresentAllPages72.html.
From there, you can access a full slide presentation of the Eli Attia design.
JOHN LUMEA
The Phoenix Project
This is a Freak Tower. The feeling of going to tumble as Pisa Tower in Italy is horrible.
In my opinion David Childs is 4 years old, or his grandson has made the design.
Yes, this is a big excrement.
I saw something on the internet that’s worth taking a look at. It’s an alternative for Freedom Tower. The address is,
http://www.MemorialTower.net
Thanks,
S. Bohm
I would fly from Silicon Valley to attend a concert (Symphony in the Sky?) in the excitingly beautiful THINK WORLD CULTURAL CENTER.
I wouldn’t walk across the street to participate in any Freedom Tower activity.
DavidTaftBarrett@cs.com
Here was my idea, check it out!
Sincerely, Tony
—–Original Message —–
From: Tony (tonythegreat@swko.net)
Sent: 2002-07-21 15:55:04.907
To: The Mayor of the City of New York
Subject: Building Issues
—– Original Message —–
From: El Tony
To: lmdc@empire.state.ny.us
Sent: Sunday, July 21, 2002 12:26 PM
Subject: World Trade Center Plans
Everybody is right, the plans are ugly. These buildings are not just buildings they are symbols of this Nation. You must do better. I envisioned grandiose, a huge central structure with open arches of free space underneath it were both towers stood; it would be like the bottom of the Eiffel Tower over were both tower one and tower two stood, with the new World Trade Center building connected as one (unity) over both arched structures (memorials). The huge building would evolve up into two towers itself surrounded in garden balconies, and a park in the sky between the towers. Now this is a vision, a wonder of the world, and something worthy to be a symbol of America.
—–End of Original Message —–
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Dear Tony,
Thank you for your recent letter concerning the World Trade Center memorial site. Your heartfelt and creative response to the tragic events of September 11, 2001 is greatly appreciated.
You may forward your proposal to the New York City Department of Records and Information Services. Though the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site is still in the early planning stages, your proposal will be maintained and made available in a permanent archive entitled, Proposals for the World Trade Center Memorial Site. At the appropriate time, your material will be shared with the official memorial selection panel for its consideration. A number of thoughtful proposals have been received from caring citizens around the world who have shared their ideas and artistic concepts for an appropriate memorial.
We believe this archive will become a unique collective public memorial that will commemorate the strength of our great City in a meaningful and enduring manner. Please forward your suggestions and proposals to:
Department of Records and Information Services
31 Chambers Street
New York, NY 10007
Phone: 212.788.8580
Thank you again for your support and spirited participation in our City s remembrance and renewal efforts.
Sincerely,
Jody J. Kaplan
Director of Correspondence
I can see some objection to building the Freedom Tower, and removing the sacred ground that was once the World Trade Centre grounds.
I felt bad about the blasts of the world trade centre, and the recovery of victims.
It is a part of our history that we must never forget.
Especially for the victims and their families.
I vaguely remember a young man who was buried in the world trade centre, and he was recovered.
The comeback from what he went through, was amazing.
I trust that they will continue to remember the persons that were affected by the World Trade
Centre ordeal.
We must never forget.
Sincerely,
T. Van Dusen
I have to admit putting turbines on top of a skyscraper isn’t very attractive. But as for the arguement of 110 stories against 70 stories, well I don’t think height even matters. The building will stand 1,776ft tall, and lets not forget that 1776 was the year our great country was founded. The symbolism of it is the important thing, not the economics of it.
Don’t forget that the Twin Towers’ floors were only 12 feet tall on average and the Freedom Tower’s will be 16 feet on average, so the top of the Freedom Tower’s highest floor will be only about 200 feet lower than those of the Twin Towers (1,150 feet vs. 1,368 feet). In other words, the F.T. will be more like 95-100 floors worth in height, if it used the same size floors as the Twin Towers did.
This new “Freedom Tower”… i think it sucks 100% in every way from the idea right down to the construction. The area is a grave and building another tower on it is in complete dishonour of the families whom lost loved ones there on 9/11. I think there should be a vote, a National vote of some kind and let THE PEOPLE decide what goes there, period.
I have heard at one point that Haven steel might have had the contract and that the steel structure was going to be made in China. Is there any truth to that? I also am asking if there are any concrete plans to fabricate this complex structure and is it going to be made in American shops. Seeing that it is such a symbol of our country and of Freedom I should hope we do not accept this amount of work going into foreign hands. That would be Unamerican!
I cannot with good conscience recommend concrete plans for a steel structure.
Also, I hardly think they are going to be asking Belgian steel companies to produce the steel for Freedom Tower, so I’m pretty sure it will be made by foreig hands, then.
As for patriotism, I would be upset if the winner of the contract to produce the steel was not the result of honest competition, that great American virtue. I’m sure American steel workers wouldn’t want to be reduced to having to try to secure a special backdoor deal if they can’t produce the world’s best steel for the price.
i dont think we should think small (under 70 stories). were the united states of america. were the biggest best nation in the world and it would only signal to terrorist that they won if we built the next tower(s) small. heck japan is going to make a skyscraper that it the largest in the world and it is going to be able to house so many things that no one would ever need to leave the tower! its like a space ship on earth. thats what we should do. show our money, show our determination, and built it as beautiful as possible
freedom will be 1776 meters not feet they are just waiting for burj to be almost completed