Final Design Chosen for WTC site

AP | 2/27/03 | Sara Kugler

[Aquinasfan]

NEW YORK (Feb. 26) - A cluster of sloping, angular buildings with a 1,776-foot spire that would be the tallest in the world was chosen Wednesday as the blueprint to redevelop the World Trade Center site, The Associated Press has learned.

Architect Daniel Libeskind's design beat a plan by an international design team known as THINK, which envisioned two 1,665-foot latticework towers straddling the footprints of the original towers, said a source familiar with the selection. An official announcement is expected Thursday.

The choice of the soaring design, which pays homage to the year America declared its independence, was made by a committee of representatives from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the offices of the governor and mayor.

Both Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg favored the Libeskind plan, an important factor in the decision, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

LMDC Chairman John Whitehead telephoned Libeskind with the news, the source said, telling the architect his ''vision has brought hope and inspiration to a city still recovering from a terrible tragedy.''

Libeskind, who is based in Berlin, declined comment. The source said he told the LMDC chairman that being selected is ''a life-changing experience.''

Deciding what to do with the 16-acre site in Lower Manhattan has been wrenching at times. Relatives of the nearly 2,800 people who died at ground zero called for memorials with a sense of respect and grace, while business officials and others said the city cannot afford to lose too much office space.

The Libeskind design called for 70 stories of offices, with airy ''gardens of the world'' beckoning tourists above office level. It included five starkly geometrical towers and several smaller cultural buildings around the foundations of the fallen towers.

The plan, which may undergo revisions, also called for a Park of Heroes, and a memorial encompassing the footprints of the fallen towers. The spire was designed to house a garden all the way to its top, and not office space, because ''gardens are a constant affirmation of life,'' Libeskind said in December.

He has estimated the cost of building his design at $330 million.

Developer Larry Silverstein, who owns the lease on the trade center site, said earlier this month he was not satisfied with either plan.

Howard Rubenstein, a spokesman for Silverstein, said Wednesday he ''has great respect for the architect,'' and looks forward to working with him to ''get this project moving.''

Rubenstein said Silverstein had no comment on the elements of the plan.

The design competition was launched after an initial set of plans, released in July, was derided as boring and overstuffed with office space. Nine proposals were unveiled Dec. 18.

The two finalists each featured buildings surpassing Malaysia's 1,483-foot Petronas Twin Towers, the tallest in the world. The World Trade Center towers stood 1,350 feet tall. A small number of telecommunications towers would still be taller than the Libeskind spire.

After the two finalists were chosen, both were asked to revise their designs to make them more easily realized. Libeskind, whose original design called for a memorial 70 feet below ground, reportedly changed that to 30 feet, allowing for infrastructure and transportation underneath.

Lee Ielpi, whose firefighter son died in the Sept. 11 attack, praised the design because it preserved much of the sunken area within the twin towers' foundation.

''That land was consecrated by the blood of the people who were lost that day,'' Ielpi said.

The final plan could be altered to accommodate victims' relatives who don't approve of plans to build parking areas at the base of the 70-foot pit, the source said.

Libeskind, 57, has said he included the sunken space because he was inspired by the immense slurry walls that hold back the Hudson River - what he says are the most dramatic elements to survive the terrorist attack. He wanted visitors to be able to visit the hallowed ground in a quiet, meditative space.

Other revisions to the plan were not disclosed Wednesday, but Libeskind's design as presented in December called for a museum in that sunken space, near where he envisioned a memorial will be placed.

A separate competition for a memorial design will begin this spring.

The LMDC was created by Pataki and former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani after Sept. 11 to oversee the rebuilding of the trade center site and downtown Manhattan. The Port Authority owns the site.

[longtermmemmory]

UGLY UGLY UGLY

This is an insult to the united states. It lookes broken. Thich architech, HAH, is just rehashing his prior weird angle design.

An AMERCICAN based company should have this contract period. Germany is in the same camp as france, why not just have the french build this so we can have a complete insult.

A spire? This is an insult. Its like an afterthought. Here you hicks, here is your macho phalic highpoint.

How do we protest this? There was a land swap deal to avoid this type of travisty.

This was never before and especially now, just a building, it was a statement of wealth and power. This is a statement of broken glass. It is almost and inside joke against america to show we were broken.


I am furious but I don't live in NY what can I do against these morons.

[longtermmemmory]

Addendum:

What about operation electronic storm?

Emailing the architechture firm?

Who in the federal government would have the authority to get inovolved? The commerce department?

[E. Pluribus Unum]

The original WTC was built for a lot less than the $330M estimated for the replacement.

In 1966 dollars, not 2003 dollars.

[reflecting]

how sad.....it is just ugly.....

[NYC GOP Chick]

I think you should have been appointed to do this. Either that or they should just break out the original plans and makes whatever safety modifications and whatnot would be necessary.

[Spiff]

This design is frikkin' retarded. Look at all the crap they have in the top half of the spire. What the hell is all that!? Trees? Gardens? Huh? Tell me how that's going to look in about 15-20 years when interest wanes, budgets fall, tenants find newer digs, and the axe must fall somewhere. It will look like crap and you won't be able to miss it because it all appears above the NYC skyline.

If you look at how Libeskind gang-raped the Jesish Museum in Berlin, Germany you know how utterly awful he is as an architect and designer. He truly SUCKS! And now they're going to erect a 1776 foot vertical turd designed by the esthetically-challenged idiot. His crap is simply a bunch of oddly angled planes that looks like someone took a pair of scissors and cut oddly angled portions out of them.

Jewish Museum - Berlin, Germany - designed by idiot Libeskind:

Look down at the base of the new WTC designs and you see a whole bunch of crap similar to Libeskind's attack on the Jews which is such an atrocity it nearly rivals the Holocaust itself.

[Spiff]

This design is frikkin' retarded. Look at all the crap they have in the top half of the spire. What the hell is all that!? Trees? Gardens? Huh? Tell me how that's going to look in about 15-20 years when interest wanes, budgets fall, tenants find newer digs, and the axe must fall somewhere. It will look like crap and you won't be able to miss it because it all appears above the NYC skyline.

If you look at how Libeskind gang-raped the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany you know how utterly awful he is as an architect and designer. He truly SUCKS! And now they're going to erect a 1776 foot vertical turd designed by the esthetically-challenged idiot. His crap is simply a bunch of oddly angled planes that looks like someone took a pair of scissors and cut oddly angled portions out of them.

Jewish Museum - Berlin, Germany - designed by idiot Libeskind:

Look down at the base of the new WTC designs and you see a whole bunch of crap similar to Libeskind's attack on the Jews which is such an atrocity it nearly rivals the Holocaust itself.

[Pagey]

"The choice of the soaring design, which pays homage to the year America declared its independence, was made by a committee of representatives from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the offices of the governor and mayor..."

Well, this coming from the state that elected a Known Manipulator and Liar to be their Senator, I'm not surprised. But I have to ask , have all of these elected/appointed officials fallen down, hit their heads and are they bleeding? I would think the guy who purchased the WTC center 90 days before 9/11, could have/would have had more impact on this decision, if he did at all.But I don't live there, and won't be looking at it on a daily basis,so I wonder what New Yorkers think about this.Big BUMP for Later

[equus]

I disagree.
I think this design is beautiful, imaginative, and will become a great tourist spot.

The old towers were totally unimaginative & look how attached we got to them. The idea of vertical gardens--everyone will come view them. It's a kind of living museum and a wonderful metaphor.

[nutmeg]

ping!

Please FReepmail me if you want on or off my infrequent ping list.

[nutmeg]

*GAG* That building is awful!

[djf]

Whatta bunch of crap! These jerks want to indulge their teenage impressionist fantasies, someone should buy them an easel and ten dollar paint set instead of a coupla billion dollars of investment capital.
BTW, if someone does buy them a paint set, tell 'em I'll throw in the garbage can gratis!

[BlessingInDisguise]

Hehehe.

[fella]

This thing is a horrendous joke and a desecration of those who died. The best monument to them would be to rebuild the towers as they were or a little taller.

[Aquinasfan]

I just want to know where the beam up point is located for the Phantom Zone.

LOL!

[Aquinasfan]

I think the garden in the sky sounds nice, but in truth will be very very costly. Is the best use for the top of the tower a 1776' elevator ride so you can ride down escalators through an atrium garden? Comments?

This is the best feature and essence of the design. If the garden falls, so does the rest of the design. It's a wonderfully creative idea. I've never heard of anything comparable. OK, so it's not going to generate a lot of income per square foot, but this is the site of 9/11. A memorial is appropriate to the site, especially a life-affirming memorial "in the sky."

I don't mind the idea of angular buildings. Steel frame construction and computer-assisted design should enable to architects to break out of the box of boxy buildings. The garden in the sky is the best example of that. But other aspects of the design aren't just angled, they're mangled. Angular for the sake of angularity isn't any better than boxy for the sake of boxiness. Beauty should be the primary design consideration.

The fact that many of the buildings look like quartz, a naturally occuring substance, should ease fears that this is simply modern nonsense, even if the architect is driven by modernist architectural ideas. In other words, the answer may be right even if the architects motives are wrong.

Still, the buildings look more like shards of glass than quartz prisms. That's simply inappropriate. The buildings would look better and more natural if they were polygonal.

Overall, the buildings are futuristic looking, appropriately enough. The overall design should paradoxically memorialize the disaster by boldly looking forward. Overcoming adversity, dispensing with non-essential traditions and stepping boldly into the future are ideas that represent some of the best characteristics of the American spirit.

[Aquinasfan]

The Holocaust museum is a POS.

[ARCADIA]

Forget the gardens!?!@

I have this vision of barely accessible spaces, awkward plumbing, windowless offices, and vast areas that cannot even be ventilated properly. I hope this model is just eye catching garbarge to encourage the city into a dialog. The final design should look very different, then this confused overgrown fire trap.

[ken5050]

Am I the only one who thinks the spire looks like a minaret...hardly appropriate, given what happened there, dontcha think?

[finnman69]

I don't disagree that the idea of the sky gardens sounds nice, I just question the cost and if we need a memorial in the sky and in the 'pit'. Building a 30 story super slender greenhouse 1/3 of a mile into the sky taking into account wondloads, seismic loads, incorporating elevators, stairs, escalators, etc, will be a challenge as well as extremely expensive engineering wise. There are some brilliant structural engineers out there who will solve the problem, but I can guarantee you it wont be cheap.

My preference with this scheme would be to make the sky gardens the main memorial, and the footprints some other type of private memorial for the familes perhaps.

I also don't mind angular buildings if there is a coherence to them and level of detail that is not alien, nor inhuman in scale. The old WTC was a good example of buildings with no scale. The renderings of the proposal at the street level scale are bizarre and quite ugly. At the city scape level, I have less of a problem.

Modern architecture has radically changed since the invention of CAD (computer aided design) programs. I am a fan of designing architecture on the computer, but I always treat it as a tool. I fear that just because you are capable of designing bizarre angular forms on the computer and quickly rendering them on the computer by no means guarantees good architecture.

I tend to dislike Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, & Daniel Liebskind buildings because I view them as either mathematical design iterations, or simply as sculpture alone. Good architecture IMO involves a total integration of structure, space, detail, concept carried throughout the project, surface, materials, scale and most importantly proportion. Proportion is what separates the men from the boys in architecture. Slight differences make all the difference visually and spatially. The character of neighborhhods are determined largely by proportion and scale. Liebskind strikes me as an architect who does not understand proportion or scale.

In fact, Liebskinds buildings tend to ignore his surroundings, nor do they relate to a human scale. His choice of materials is industrial and in my opinion harsh.

Back to the design. My biggest issue is the large open pit which is a horrible urban decision. For all the reasons the WTC plaza was bad urbanistically, this huge open treench will be equally bad.