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New Tower Design for World Trade Centre Site
Kris Sims with CNN Fries
Wednesday, June 29, 2005 6:01 PM
The latest tower design at the World Trade Center site is being
discussed in New York this week.
Gov. George Pataki wanted design changes because police were concerned
that the tower's placement adjacent to West Street, a major
thoroughfare along the west side of Manhattan, would make it vulnerable
to a truck bomb.
Its 200-foot base will be a reinforced concrete wall covered in steel
and titanium.
The "Freedom Tower" will include reminders of the twin towers it is
replacing.
The roof above the public observation deck will be at 1,362 feet, the
height of old South Tower, while a glass wall will rise 1,368 feet, the
height of the old North Tower.
"In subtle but important ways this building recalls what we lost," said
architect David Childs.
The building will bear a spire that will emit light at night to echo
the Statue of Liberty's torch.
The tower will be also more slender and occupy a smaller footprint in
the northwest corner of the 16-acre site -- a footprint the same size
as the old twin towers' base, 200 feet by 200 feet.
The revised tower design takes up the same amount of commercial space,
one-quarter of what was lost on September 11, 2001, and many of the
same features.
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| User: "MonsieurStat" |
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| Title: Re: "Freedom" Tower |
30 Jun 2005 01:10:30 AM |
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From NY TIMES
June 30, 2005
A Tower of Impregnability, the Sort Politicians Love
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
The darkness at ground zero just got a little darker. If there are
people still clinging to the expectation that the Freedom Tower will
become a monument to the highest American ideals, the current design
should finally shake them out of that delusion. Somber, oppressive and
clumsily conceived, the project suggests a monument to a society that
has turned its back on any notion of cultural openness. It is exactly
the kind of nightmare that government officials repeatedly asserted
would never happen here: an impregnable tower braced against the
outside world.
The new design by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is a
response to the obvious security issues raised by the New York Police
Department, specifically the tower's resistance to car and truck bombs.
The earlier twisted-glass form, a pastiche of architectural visions
cobbled together from Daniel Libeskind's master plan and various
Skidmore designs, lacked grace or fresh ideas. The new obelisk-shaped
tower, which stands on an enormous 20-story concrete pedestal, evokes a
gigantic glass paperweight with a toothpick stuck on top. (The
toothpicklike spire was added so that the tower would reach its
required height of 1,776 feet.)
The temptation is to dismiss it as a joke. And it is hard not to pity
Mr. Childs, who was forced to redesign the tower on the fly to meet the
rigid deadline of Gov. George E. Pataki. Unfortunately, the tower is
too loaded with meaning to dismiss. For better or worse, it will be
seen by the world as a chilling expression of how we are reshaping our
identity in a post-Sept. 11 context.
The most radical design change is the creation of the base, which will
house the building's lobby and some mechanical systems. Designed to
withstand a major bomb blast, the base will be virtually windowless. In
an effort to animate its exterior, the architects say they intend to
decorate it in a grid of shimmering metal panels. A few narrow slots
will be cut into the concrete to allow slivers of natural light into
the lobby.
The effort fails on almost every level. As an urban object, the tower's
static form and square base finally brush aside the last remnants of
Mr. Libeskind's master plan, whose only real strength was the potential
tension it created among the site's structures. In the tower's earlier
incarnation, for example, its eastern wall formed part of a pedestrian
alley that became a significant entry to the memorial site, leading
directly between the proposed International Freedom Center and the
memorial's north pool. The alley, flanked on its other side by a
performing arts center to be designed by Frank Gehry, was fraught with
tension; it is now a formless park littered with trees.
The interior, by comparison, holds a bit more promise for the
hopelessly optimistic. Visitors will enter from north and south
lobbies, where they will have to slip around an interior partition set
just beyond the revolving doors - yet another concession to security
concerns. If the configuration of windows could somehow be improved,
one could imagine, with some effort, a sealed cathedral-like room with
heavenly light spilling down.
But if this is a potentially fascinating work of architecture, it is,
sadly, fascinating in the way that Albert Speer's architectural
nightmares were fascinating: as expressions of the values of a
particular time and era. The Freedom Tower embodies, in its way, a
world shaped by fear.
At a recent meeting at his Wall Street office, Mr. Childs tried to
deflect this criticism by enveloping the building in historical
references. The height of the tower minus its spire (1,368 feet)
matches the height of the taller of the former World Trade Center
towers and is meant to re-establish a visual relationship to the nearby
World Financial Center, which was exactly half that height. The
fortresslike appearance of the base was partly inspired by the Strozzi
Palace in Florence, the relationship between the base and the soaring
tower by Brancusi's "Bird in Space" sculpture.
But the tower has none of the lightness of Brancusi's polished bronze
form, let alone its sculptural beauty. And the Strozzi Palace's rough
stone facade is beautiful because it is a mask: once inside, you are
confronted with a courtyard flooded with light and air, one of the
Renaissance's great architectural treasures. What the tower evokes, by
comparison, are ancient obelisks, blown up to a preposterous scale and
clad in heavy sheaths of reinforced glass - an ideal symbol for an
empire enthralled with its own power.
This obsession with symbolism extends all the way up to the tower's
spire. Mr. Childs has long been itching to reposition the original
spire, which, as Mr. Libeskind envisioned it, had to be set at the edge
of the tower to echo the outstretched arm of the Statue of Liberty. In
the new version, the spire rises out of the center of a tension ring
mounted atop the building, an abstract interpretation of Liberty's
torch and a concept that, like Mr. Libeskind's, has more to do with
pandering to public sentiment than with any big architectural idea.
All of this could be more easily forgiven if it were simply due to bad
design. But ground zero is not really being shaped by architects; it is
being shaped by politicians. Soon after the new security requirements
were announced, it became clear that the entire building would have to
be redesigned. That could have been seen as a last chance to repair
what had become a confused master plan, one that had little connection,
except in the minds of Mr. Libeskind and Governor Pataki, to the
original. Instead, the quality of the master plan has been sacrificed
to the governor's insistence on preserving hollow symbolic gestures.
Absurdly, if the Freedom Tower were reduced by a dozen or so stories
and renamed, it would probably no longer be considered such a prime
target. Fortifying it, in a sense, is an act of deflection. It
announces to terrorists: Don't attack here - we're ready for you. Go
next door.
"Wally LorneT" <wallylorne@yahoo.ca> wrote in message
news:1120102063.392700.37140@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
Would U like fries to go with that ?!?!?
New Tower Design for World Trade Centre Site
Kris Sims with CNN Fries
Wednesday, June 29, 2005 6:01 PM
The latest tower design at the World Trade Center site is being
discussed in New York this week.
Gov. George Pataki wanted design changes because police were concerned
that the tower's placement adjacent to West Street, a major
thoroughfare along the west side of Manhattan, would make it vulnerable
to a truck bomb.
Its 200-foot base will be a reinforced concrete wall covered in steel
and titanium.
The "Freedom Tower" will include reminders of the twin towers it is
replacing.
The roof above the public observation deck will be at 1,362 feet, the
height of old South Tower, while a glass wall will rise 1,368 feet, the
height of the old North Tower.
"In subtle but important ways this building recalls what we lost," said
architect David Childs.
The building will bear a spire that will emit light at night to echo
the Statue of Liberty's torch.
The tower will be also more slender and occupy a smaller footprint in
the northwest corner of the 16-acre site -- a footprint the same size
as the old twin towers' base, 200 feet by 200 feet.
The revised tower design takes up the same amount of commercial space,
one-quarter of what was lost on September 11, 2001, and many of the
same features.
===================================================================
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: "Freedom" Tower |
30 Jun 2005 11:40:12 PM |
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20 Stories of Fear at Ground Zero
http://911memorials.org/?p=237
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