he nearly completed design for the signature tower at the World Trade Center site would recapture the title of world's tallest building for New York City without forcing anyone to work higher than 70 stories in the sky.Posted on 12/10/2003 1:03:47 PM PST by Timesink
he nearly completed design for the signature tower at the World Trade Center site would recapture the title of world's tallest building for New York City without forcing anyone to work higher than 70 stories in the sky.
 The basic design concept of the torqued tower with an open latticework top was offered in September 2002 by Guy Nordenson, the engineer working with David M. Childs on the design of the new Freedom Tower at the trade center site. Mr. Nordenson was part of a group that The New York Times Magazine assembled in 2002 to gather ideas about what might be built at ground zero. |
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Those who have seen the design of the Freedom Tower, as Mr. Pataki calls it, describe a torqued and tapering form culminating in an unoccupied, open-air structure filled with cables, trusses, antennas and — recalling the energy source that helped settle Lower Manhattan 350 years ago — windmills that may generate 20 percent of the electrical power needed by the building.
The 70-story occupied part of the Freedom Tower would rise 1,000 to 1,100 feet, more than 200 feet shorter than the twin towers. But the open-air structure would reach 1,776 feet, exceeding Taipei 101, which is being built on Taiwan, and would take the world's tallest title from the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which took it from the Sears Tower in Chicago, which took it from the trade center. The Freedom Tower's antenna would reach 2,000 feet.
This unusual hybrid would allow New York to "reclaim our skyline," the governor said in October, while acknowledging that most New Yorkers — 62 percent, according to a recent New York Times Poll — would not be willing to work in one of the higher floors of a new building at the trade center site.
What that leaves is a framework in which turbines can be installed to create a kind of vertical wind farm on the shores of the Hudson River.
"There is nothing about the technology that's unusual or experimental," said Ashok Gupta, the director of the air and energy program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who has been advising state officials on environmental issues and has seen the plan. "It's the application of it which is different and new. We have the opportunity because we want to build a very tall tower and not occupy a large part of it."
Mr. Gupta said the idea of a building producing some of its own energy was particularly appealing given the history of the site. "What happened on 9/11 was indirectly and in part related to the fact that we get a large part of our energy from parts of the world that seem not to like us," he said.
"The word `freedom' is great," Mr. Gupta said. "For us, `freedom' means freedom from pollution, freedom from oil, freedom from global warming."
Mr. Gupta said the altitude of the building and its location close to the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers might mean that the turbines would generate electricity at least 40 percent of the time. That might be enough, he said, to cover the base power demand — that is, the minimum needed overnight when most offices are closed — but nowhere near peak demand on a hot summer work day.
The windmills, like the 1,776-foot height and the building's torque and taper, seem virtually certain to be among the elements that the public will see next week. But the design of the open-air structure at the top, which will bear on its relationship to the four other office towers envisioned at the site, has yet to be resolved or approved by state officials.
Governor Pataki has set a deadline of Monday for receipt of the plan. He will be the ultimate arbiter, acting through the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the trade center property, and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is charged with planning the site.
Asked yesterday about the status of the design, Matthew Higgins, the chief operating officer of the development corporation, said only, "We're excited by the progress, but more work remains to be done."
It seems safe to say that the design will keep changing until the last moment, given the tumultuous relationship between Mr. Libeskind, who is the master planner of the trade center site, and Mr. Childs, a partner in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, who is working for Silverstein Properties.
However, enough is known with certainty about Freedom Tower that a number of people who have seen the plans were willing to discuss the project yesterday, most of them making anonymity a condition of doing so.
Until the governor announces the plan, no renderings of the building are likely to be made public. But it turns out that a conceptual forerunner of the Freedom Tower design was published Sept. 8, 2002, in an issue of The New York Times Magazine devoted to the past and future of the trade center site.
Drawing on a number of influences — including Isamu Noguchi, Buckminster Fuller and Frank Gehry — Guy Nordenson of Guy Nordenson & Associates, an engineer who is now working with Mr. Childs on the Freedom Tower, offered a torqued tower that would be "structurally sound, even at very great heights."
"An exterior structure of steel and an interior structure of concrete work together to resist both wind and gravity; the twisting of the entire form reduces the dynamic effects of the wind," said the caption for Mr. Nordenson's diagram, which showed a twisting building with a latticework top.
What it did not show — significantly — were the taper, the angled roof and the antenna that will characterize the Freedom Tower. The proportion of enclosed building to open framework is also markedly different.
But as a concept, it is closer to the Freedom Tower that Mr. Silverstein intends to build than the rendering by Mr. Libeskind that has been shown repeatedly in the year since he joined in the planning and design effort. (As late as last night, Mr. Libeskind's rendering still appeared on the Silverstein Properties Web site, in the "Development" category.)
Mr. Libeskind's plan was officially designated as the "design concept" for the trade center site in February 2003, more than six months after Mr. Nordenson's torqued tower was published.
Perhaps the biggest question in coming days will be the extent to which the new Freedom Tower design is seen as adhering to Mr. Libeskind's plan, which calls for the tallest building on the site to conjure and complement the Statue of Liberty, as well as crowning an ascending spiral of towers.
Neither Mr. Childs nor Mr. Libeskind would comment yesterday.
That would require so much structural mass in the blades and supports that the blades wouldn't turn except in a hurricane. Wind turbines don't really have stand that much lateral force as they spin (although more than I could stand leaning against it) and the blades are feathered during high winds.
And just what is so wrong with the Empire State Building holding that title? How does building a "Tall" building pay tribute to American civilians killed by international terrorists in the second strike on those buildings in under a decade?
Erradicating the terrorists would be a better vindication.
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