Word: towers
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...politically plugged-in bureaucrats--all with their own ideas about what should be built, how much it ought to cost and who should pay for it. Even Donald Trump makes a cameo. Trump, whom Silverstein once considered a friend, unveiled a competing proposal last summer, denouncing the Freedom Tower, the 1,776-ft. centerpiece, as "the worst pile-of-crap architecture I've seen in my life...
Farce aside, there's plenty at stake downtown. The towers destroyed in the attack covered 10 million sq. ft. of space and housed 25,000 employees. In total, 2,749 people died in the attacks--some leaping from the burning upper floors of the towers. The new World Trade Center will cost more than $15 billion and anchor the country's fourth largest business district after midtown Manhattan, the Loop in Chicago and downtown Washington. Construction on the Freedom Tower finally began last month, in a symbolic groundbreaking, after Silverstein came to an agreement with state and city agencies that...
...staked political capital on carrying out their visions of ground zero. Pataki muscled Silverstein out of the initial planning, organizing a worldwide architecture competition, eventually won by Daniel Libeskind, who designed a complex, including a museum, a memorial, a performing-arts center, a transportation hub and five office towers, with what is now known as the Freedom Tower as the tallest. Bloomberg tried a bureaucratic end run, offering to swap with the Port Authority control of the city's airports for ground zero, in hopes of then removing Silverstein as developer. That effort failed, but it didn't stop Bloomberg...
Keep all that in mind when you step into the tour de force just inside the Hearst Tower. Instead of a conventional lobby, Foster has produced a massive indoor piazza, a 10-story atrium bathed in sunlight from overhead skylights and surrounded by the windowed masonry walls of Urban's original base, which give the appearance of exterior walls facing inward. At a time when cities have ever less interest in parks or open space, this is an office tower with a town square inside, not a shopping mall. "A building should try to give something back to the city...
Foster also has a 65-story office tower planned for the World Trade Center site, not far from where the Freedom Tower is set to rise. His design for that project is still a work in progress. But the prospect that the good Lord might do something at that contested site is welcome news. It means that at least one tall building there may be worth looking...