I revised my post to address the latest from Herbert Mushmouth.

- tom moody 12-20-2003 8:28 pm [add a comment]

wedge of light


- bill 12-20-2003 8:30 pm [add a comment]

What a website. I can't resist annotating the text.

When completed, this will be one of the most important buildings of the early 21st century. It is significant in stature, in design, in its politics, its symbolism, and for the reason it was built. The Freedom Tower is the replacement for what was once New York's World Trade Center. In September, 2001 terrorists destroyed several of the Center's buildings, including the massive 110-story twin towers. The stated reason for this action was to protest the United States' support of the nation of Israel and its people. [Really? According to the newspapers it was to protest Israeli territorial aggression and the presence of US bases in Saudi Arabia.] The terrorist attack only served to solidify the bond between the U.S. [right wing] and Israel, and caused [the US to fight ineffectual] wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and the toppling of the Taliban government [as opposed to al-Qaeda, the organization actually responsible for 9/11]. Thousands died when the twin tower fell, and millions [of TV viewers] were emotionally and psychologically scarred. The Freedom Tower is more than a real estate project. It is rehabilitation for those hurt by the terrorists and a way to heal the scar on a nation. Part of the healing process is new growth. [Or changing behavior patterns?] The growth is not only symbolized by the rising of a great tower on the horizon, but also by what will grow inside it. The Freedom Tower's upper levels will contain a massive vertical garden known as “Gardens of the World.” Call it a tribute to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the original seven wonders of the world. ["Babylon" is also a metaphor for urban vice and depravity] The same culture that sprang from Babylon is the one that was perverted by the 20th century zealots who used religion to justify the slaughter of thousands at the World Trade Center. [Gee, I didn't know Mohammed was a Babylonian!] The Freedom tower is just one of several buildings that will be erected to compose the new World Trade Center. The design is officially known as “Memory Foundations” because it leaves room for several memorials in the 16-acre complex. One of those memorials is the slurry wall, more commonly known as “the bathtub.” This structure was the basement of the World Trade Center and served to hold back the Hudson River to keep it from flooding the complex. It was here that the remains of thousands of dead were found, and hundreds more were never found. People will be able to walk down a ramp from ground level all the way down to bedrock along the edge of this wall -- the last original remaining piece of the twin towers. [The building owner wants to nix this now--takes away too many rentable square feet.] Also worth noting is the “Wedge of Light” -- an area designed and aligned with the heavens so that on September 11th of each year, the area will remain free of shadows from 8:46am to 10:28am -- the time from when the first tower was attacked until the second tower collapsed. [Without "Leap minutes" this will eventually go out of alignment, right?]

its weird how fragmented the reporting is.


- bill 12-23-2003 2:20 am [add a comment]

"What is most dispiriting about this tower is that it will be a terrible place in which to work. By the time it’s ready for occupancy the degree to which it is outdated will be far more obvious."


- bill 12-23-2003 4:43 am [add a comment]

After Year of Push and Pull, 2 Visions Meet at 1,776 Feet
By DAVID W. DUNLAP

Published: December 26, 2003



nly 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."

- bill 12-30-2003 6:29 pm [add a comment]

Behind a Graceful Spire, Science, Art and Passion
By GLENN COLLINS

Published: December 30, 2003

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
"We were able to meet on the common ground of geometry, just as geometry is the common ground between form and structure."
GUY NORDENSON

World Trade Center (NYC)- Art- Buildings (Structures)


N 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."

- bill 12-30-2003 6:34 pm [add a comment]

I sympathize with you New Yorkers, and your pending stupid tower. But we Torontonians are innured to idiotic architecture in the sky.
- sally mckay 12-30-2003 7:10 pm [add a comment]

bad link on Sally's post.

I've decided to call my apartment the Freedom Apartment.

- tom moody 12-30-2003 7:46 pm [add a comment]

Architects Unveil Revised Freedom Tower Design


"We will build it to show the world that freedom will always triumph over terror," Mr. Pataki said. "This is not just a building. This is a symbol of New York. This is a symbol of America. This is a symbol of freedom."

---

"We have to continue to have time lines here," the governor said. "The middle of September is something that's extremely ambitious. It obviously has nothing to do with the convention, which will be long gone."

"This is not a political structure," Mr. Pataki said, "and it will not be a political event."

---

Nice doublethink, Mr. Pataki.
- mark 12-30-2003 8:01 pm [add a comment]

i fixed the link - good word sally : "To habituate to something undesirable, especially by prolonged subjection; accustom: “Though the food became no more palatable, he soon became sufficiently inured to it” / Im not altogether against follies (CNT), esp ones with great observation decks and rotating restauants - pataki make its sound like a dare to knock the block off his shoulder. I wish they wouldnt jinx our town like that - he also said he would move his offices there but whos to say he would still be in office.


- bill 12-30-2003 8:36 pm [add a comment]

yeesh I'm having bad link day. thanks for the fix. Also can't spell, apparently. After 9/11 there was some speculation here about whether the CN Tower would be a target. As if! My friend Ben was quick to point out that it would be a rare terrorist who'd sacrifice his life to take down an overblown Canadian tv antenna.

I think follies are fine at the bottom of someone's garden, or tucked behind the copse, but this one dominates the sky over an entire city. pretty audacious. I actually kind of like it, though, not having a choice in the matter.
- sally mckay 12-30-2003 10:02 pm [add a comment]

by the way, bill, I found this link while cruising around last night. Thought you might like it.
- sally mckay 12-30-2003 10:08 pm [add a comment]

The Space Needle in Seattle is cool. Sorry, Freedom Needle.

- tom moody 12-30-2003 10:09 pm [add a comment]

At one point a few years ago they had an 'attraction' in the CN tower on the main floor. It was a sort of interactive sci-fi adventure, the story being that there was a hole below the tower that went down as deep as the tower is high. It was a silo for launching a small space ship. We paid our money and then went on the tour. it was hilarious, started with a vaccinating mist ( a stranger in a fur coat literally held me in front of her as a human shield to avoid the spray). Then we were led through corridors to an elevator that we stood in for a long time while the youth employment tour guide in star-trek type costume went through his routine about how far underground we were going. Then we got into one of those virtual reality ride compartments that shakes you around while they project on a screen at the front. The idea was that we were getting into the space ship, which tilted way back, and then shot up through the earth and into outer space. It was dorky, but somehow the illusion worked pretty well. I think the fur coat lady was on a bad date, but I'm pretty game for cheesey stuff like that , and had a blast.
- sally mckay 12-30-2003 10:30 pm [add a comment]

I dont know my onions in Londion. nice pink tank yard art.


- bill 12-30-2003 10:33 pm [add a comment]

world trade center tower one


- bill 1-01-2004 8:14 pm [add a comment]

turbines of prayer (wtf)


- bill 1-07-2004 9:57 pm [add a comment]

Wtf, indeed.

The metropolitan cynic is tempted to dismiss such sentiments as hokey, [That would be me] but at some level, any sincere gesture of love is. Many residents of Lower Manhattan have remarked that the twin towers were a familiar presence, felt over the shoulder even when not seen. [There should be therapy for that] The thrill of the new won't fill that void for long. Downtown planners must create a symbol that earns enduring affection by not just building high, but by giving a sense of renewal to those who look up. [Oh, must they?]

this whole wind turbine thing is such a red herring. Now it's gone nutso with the prayer thing. yech. wind turbines should be default infrastructure. they aren't that exotic (we've got a big one right in the middle of our waterfront and it looks way-cool, but nobody's going around saying its got any religious significance or anything), you won't be able to see them, and who gives a f*^%? Too bad this whole stupid project is sapping up so much of people's time and critical thought.
- sally mckay 1-08-2004 6:32 am [add a comment]

dont worry its not over yet.


- bill 1-08-2004 5:42 pm [add a comment]

The memorial design they picked wasn''t so bad, but it sounds like it'll be altered drastically before it's all over. The NY Post opposes it because, minus the hedge words, it "dominates a site long critical to the city's commercial vibrancy" and "dwells on death and grief." So any reasonable person should be for it.

- tom moody 1-08-2004 7:30 pm [add a comment]