Designs Unveiled for Freedom Tower's Neighbors

[Brookside]

A rendering of the skyline after construction of the towers at ground zero are complete.


Designs Unveiled for Freedom Tower’s Neighbors

By David W. Dunlap/NYT/ Published: September 7, 2006

The developer of the new World Trade Center unveiled the designs this morning for three skyscrapers at ground zero, which in their gargantuan scale would reshape the New York skyline.

Each building has a different renowned architect — Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, both of London, and Fumihiko Maki of Tokyo —
and the result is entirely unlike the monolithic uniformity of the original trade center.

The office towers, designated simply Towers 2, 3 and 4 for now, would occupy three sites between Church and Greenwich Streets, along the eastern edge of the trade center site.
Together with the winged PATH terminal and transportation hub, they would form the face that the trade center presents to the rest of downtown, with the signature Freedom Tower behind them.



The designs offered the most comprehensive picture to date of what the finished complex might --
just might -- look like six years from now. Above, the Freedom Tower is to the left of Towers 2, 3 and 4.


Lord Foster’s Tower 2, with a rooftop of four enormous diamonds steeply inclined toward the memorial below, would be as high as the Empire State Building.

Tower 3 by Lord Rogers, framed boldly by an exoskeletal framework of diagonal beams, would reach a pinnacle of 1,255 feet at its corner antennas.
Even the smallest and subtlest building among them, Mr. Maki’s Tower 4, would be taller than the Citigroup Center in midtown.

If these buildings form any kind of ensemble with the Freedom Tower — Tower 1, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of New York — , it would probably be a jazz quartet.


Daniel Libeskind's original Freedom Tower design


Apart from Tower 2, they are also a far cry from the quartz-like forms originally envisioned by Daniel Libeskind, the official master planner of the trade center site.
Though they follow Mr. Libeskind’s dictum that the office towers step down in height progressively from the Freedom Tower,
the intended spiraling effect may be lost on the casual viewer because the buildings do not appear at first glance to be parts of a unified whole.

Instead, it may look like an instance of urban randomness.


More> http://www.nytimes.com

[Brookside]

I don't like saying this...but the truth is, inspite of the world-class talent involved, these are incredibly generic buildings
exhibiting just about every architectural conceit and cliche for tall buildings built in the last decade.
Every ammendment that the Freedom Tower has been through has been to strip it of innovation and individuality.
This design is the result of a sordid process of redtape and bureaucractic turf-wars, pettiness and just plain avarice.
NYC deserves better- God knows they've paid a steep price.

[Brookside]

What it Looks Like Today



Long article tracing the history of proposals. plans, and players of Freedom Tower.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/ny...pagewanted=all

[Brookside]

New York Times' Architectural Critic on Freedom Towers Redesign


A rendering of what Manhattan would look like with the new buildings.

by Nicolai Ouroussoff/NYT/9-11-006


The designs unveiled last week for three sleek glass towers at ground zero rise above the mediocrity we have come to expect from a planning process driven by political opportunism, backdoor deal-making and commercial greed.

But for those who cling to the idea that the site’s haunting history demands a leap of imagination, the towers illustrate how low our expectations have sunk since the city first resolved to rebuild there in a surge of determination just weeks after 9/11.

Designed by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki, the towers are solid, competent work by three first-rate talents. But each of these architects is capable of far more. Lord Foster has shown us better work recently in Midtown Manhattan, where his faceted Hearst Tower plunges through the top of an existing 1920’s building with impressive force.

Architectural merit aside, the most telling features of the ground zero master plan remain those in which the city’s anxieties bubble up to the surface: in the paranoia implied by David Childs’s heavily armored Freedom Tower, for example, or the defiant grandiosity of Santiago Calatrava’s transportation hub. By comparison, the three new towers are about forgetting. Conservative and coolly corporate, they could be imagined in just about any Western capital, paralleling the effacement of history in the remade, blatantly commercial Potsdamer Platz in Berlin or La Défense, the incongruous office-tower district just outside Paris.

Lord Foster set out to confront the emotional trauma at ground zero in a design he submitted in a master plan competition four years ago. His proposal, for two slender glass-and-steel towers that swayed in and out as they rose, seeming to meet here and there in a gentle kiss, captured the aura of the old twin towers. That proposal, a plan for the entire site, was rejected.

This time he was limited to a single tower at the northeast corner of the site, with a mandate to pack commercial and retail space onto a more constricted area. The result is bulkier. The building, which at 1,254 feet, with an additional 85-foot antenna (not pictured in the widely distributed renderings) would be the second tallest in the city after the Freedom Tower, rises straight up from its base with no setbacks. A vertical notch cut into each of its facades creates deep, brooding shadows; the top is sliced at a sharp diagonal that tilts toward the memorial pools below. One assumes that this is intended to imbue the structure with a quasi-mystical significance, but it’s a cheap gesture.

more: > http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/ar...gn/11zero.html


Wow, He said almost exactly what I posted earlier. Maybe he cut the architects a little more slack...but the buildings, as imposing as they'll be, are pretty ordinary. Brookside

[Brookside]

Sir Norman Foster on Tower 2


Proposed redesign of Tower Two in Manhattan by architect Norman Foster

The Future of Ground Zero

At a press conference yesterday, architects Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Fumihiko Maki unveiled designs for three towers that will rise along the eastern edge of the World Trade Center site. Following a clockwise spiral from the Freedom Tower, each of the buildings steps down in height, gradually descending to the WTC memorial.

For Tower 2, Foster designed a 78-story skyscraper that peaks with a slanted diamond-shaped top, acknowledging the memorial below. “It is generated by that tragic event of the past. But optimistically, in terms of the future, it’s an iconic, distinct, unique shape on the skyline,” Foster said. Organized around a cruciform core, deep channels slice the tower into four vertical volumes, which also break the summit into four smaller diamond forms. The unique roofline will be illuminated at night.

Source: Architectural Record