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DanS
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Kickball Capital of the World
Jan 1970
time: 00:20
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I agree with the New York Times. What happened to the spire that evoked the upwardly outstretched arm of the Statue of Liberty? We would have been further ahead just rebuilding the original towers.
quote:
Appraisal: Fear in a soaring tower
By Nicolai Ouroussoff The New York Times
THURSDAY, JUNE 30, 2005
NEW YORK The darkness at ground zero just got a little darker. If there is anyone still clinging to the expectation that the Freedom Tower will become a monument of the highest American ideals, the current design should finally shake them out of that delusion.
Somber, oppressive and clumsily conceived, the project is 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.
On Wednesday, New York officials formally unveiled the redesigned Freedom Tower, an 82-story signature building at the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan. The enormous pedestal, with a budget estimated at $1.5 billion, would overlook the Sept. 11 memorial. "Construction will climax the greatest comeback in the history of our city," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.
The new design by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings Merrill is a response to the obvious security issues raised by the New York City Police Department, specifically, the tower's resistance to car and truck bombs. The earlier twisted glass form, a pastiche of ideas cobbled together from Daniel Libeskind's master plan and the bright minds at Skidmore, Owings Merrill, lacked grace or fresh ideas.
The new obelisk-shaped tower, standing on an enormous 20-story concrete pedestal, evokes a gigantic glass paperweight with a toothpick stuck on top.
(The toothpick-like spire was added so that the tower would reach its required symbolic height of 540 meters, or 1,776 feet - a reference to the year independence was declared.)
The temptation, of course, is to dismiss it as a joke. And it is hard not to pity Childs, who was forced to redesign the tower on the fly to meet the governor's rigid deadline.
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 the United States is reshaping its 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 mechanical systems. Designed to withstand a major bomb blast, the base will be virtually windowless. In an effort to animate its exterior facades, the architects have said they intend to decorate them 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 brushes aside the last remnants of Libeskind's master plan, whose only real strength was the potential tension it created between the site's various structures.
In its earlier incarnation, for example, the tower's eastern wall formed a narrow pedestrian alley that became a key entry to the memorial site, leading directly between the proposed Freedom Center complex and the Memorial's north pool. The alleyway, which was flanked on its other side by the Frank Gehry-designed performing arts center, 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 in New York, Childs tried to deflect this criticism by enveloping the building in historical references. The height of the tower will match the height of the tallest of the former World Trade Center Towers - 1,368 feet - which will re-establish its relationship to the nearby World Financial Center, which was built at exactly half that height. The fortress-like appearance of the base was inspired by the Strozzi Palace in Florence, the relationship between the base and the soaring tower by Brancusi's "Bird in Space."
But the tower has none of the lightness of Brancusi's polished bronze form, let alone its sculptural beauty. And the Strozzi Palace's blank 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 great architectural treasures of the Renaissance.
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, and unaware that it is fading.
This obsession with symbolism extends all the way up to the tower's spire. Childs has long been itching to reposition the original spire, which as 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 on the top of the building - an abstract interpretation of the statue's torch - an idea that, like 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 a result of 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 Libeskind and Governor George 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.
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DeathByTheSword
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soon to be a major religion
Nov 2001
time: 05:20
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why?
EDIT: let me edit this AFTER reading the article...what happened to a 3 or 4 building design with all angled roofs pointing to the memoirel in between them? i liked that design...and yes from the picture is does look like an obelix
Last edited by DeathByTheSword on 30-06-2005 at 19:10
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Kontiki
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Canada
Aug 2001
time: 00:20
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They need to change the name. It should be "The FREEDOM tower at FREEDOM square in FREEDOM place, 1776 GOD BLESS AMERICA FREEDOM Drive, FREEDOM, FREEDOM, FREEDOM!"
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Guynemer
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Am I the only person who thinks that there should be NO new building? Leave the area as is, as holy ground?
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DerSchwarzfalke
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Everyone hated the old design because it was "different," but it would have been appreciated within a decade. You would hear in some future History Channel documentary some of the quotes about how absurd, ugly, etc the building was, before they went into a paean about its particular grace and beauty. It would have been a rightful symbol of New York.
Skyscrapers are for the city, anyway, not the country as a whole. Nobody from Massachusetts speaks with great pride of Sears Tower, just as nobody from Nevada talks about the grandeur of One Liberty Place. They should just scrap all the melodrama and symbolism so they can build a skyscraper fit for the skyline of New York City -- nowhere else.
Security concerns are ludicrous. Number one, I bet even if they constructed this out of brittle glass and toothpick lattice work, no terrorist would even bother to flick it over. Number two, as pointed out above, all this does is put the Empire State or Chrysler Buildings into danger.
EDIT: Holy ground? In Lower Manhattan? Are you crazy? These are not the vast wheatfields of Iowa; they are prime real estate that should not be wasted. The best response to any terrorist attack is to make the area active again, rather than an expensive piece of mourning.
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30-06-2005 19:02
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