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."
|
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