Edwin Heathcote provides a progress report on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. He finds that the “most prominent building has proved the most disappointing”:
What was once dubbed “Freedom Tower”, but is now known more prosaically as 1WTC, was
intended to be the centrepiece of Daniel Libeskind’s master plan. The architect – Polish-born, but born-again New Yorker – spoke sentimentally of the impact of the Statue of Liberty as he arrived by boat in the city as a teenager. His tower was meant as an homage to the torch-bearing form, twisting and torquing to a spire (a symbolic 1,776ft tall) and emulating the beacon held aloft. … The site’s developer, Larry Silverstein (who had bought the World Trade Center only a couple of months before 9/11), judged Libeskind too inexperienced and instead brought in his favourite designer, David Childs of corporate giants SOM.
The result is dreadful.
Libeskind’s notion of an expressionistic, spiky tower may have been impractical but it at least embodied an idea. At the end of last year the new tower scraped through the vetting process of the Council on Tall Buildings to become recognised as the tallest building in the western hemisphere (a record formerly held by Chicago’s Willis Tower). It reached the record through its spurious “spire”, the last remnant of Libeskind’s vision, once a reference to Liberty’s torch but now merely an appendage atop a dumb chamfered block. With its clunky concrete base (a precaution required by the NYPD against future attack) and a form which refuses to relate to anything around it, the tower is a poor successor to the 1931 Empire State Building (which had become the city’s tallest building again after 9/11), a skyscraper whose spire seems a natural culmination of its stepped form, a style imposed by the city’s strict setback regulations.
Update from a reader:
Nah, it’s a worthy successor to the Twin Towers. They were hideous, lamely designed, and yeah, utterly “refuse(d) to relate to anything around them.” Their whole point, as far as I could see, was to sit there at the tip of Manhattan saying HERE WE ARE, WE ARE BIGGER THAN ANYBODY ELSE NYAH NYAH NYAH. Nonetheless, 30 years after they were built, people had gotten used to them and had developed their own associations and memories around them. People will do that about any really striking landmark, however badly designed (except maybe for the absolute worst of Brutalist architecture). And of course, once they had fallen, they acquired the sheen of martyrdom.
But notice that Heathcote has nothing kind to say about the Twin Towers as he slams 1WTC’s compromise design. He contrasts it with the Empire State Building, but not with its own predecessor. Give it thirty years (assuming no catastrophes) and people will speak affectionately of the “Freedom Tower” too, because it will figure, somehow, in their personal stories; it will show up in movies and in souvenirs from New York, and so on. And, it’s actually a bit less hideous than the Twin Towers.
(Photo of One World Trade Center in August 2013 by Jules Antonio)
The Dish 