The Battle For Ground Zero, Part XI

The redesign of the Freedom Tower shows the difficulties of trying to place the tower on the site while realizing that salvaging any remnants of the torqued tower design. The article claims that the torqued tower was close to becoming a reality with steel orders ready to be delivered, but there is nothing in the record to indicate that this is the case - no news reports from the NYT, NYP, or any other local media outlet suggest that the torqued tower was ready to be built before the NYPD stepped out and said that they had serious questions about the security of the tower's placement on the site.

To Mr. Gottesdiener, the challenge was "to build a great urban building that did not look like a concrete bunker," he said. The design's evolution was annoyingly slow. "There was never a eureka moment, just a series of confidence builders - ideas we knew would work."

Reconfiguring the building "was a three-dimensional problem," Mr. Gottesdiener said, "like an architectural Rubik's Cube." But the team realized that many of the north and south columns of the original tower, already laboriously configured to thread through the PATH tracks that ran underneath, could be retained.

And when the large parallelogram base was pared to a smaller square, the tower's distance from West Street could increase from 25 feet to anywhere from 65 to 125 feet.

The design may be acceptable to most folks, but here's the continuing problem. The Freedom Tower is only one of a series of skyscrapers that will be built on the site. Since each of those towers is a potential target, will they not be required receive the same kind of armored base that the Freedom Tower will receive? Thus, each of these towers will be placed on armored pedestals.

Also, critics contend that the armored pedestals are going perpetuate the bunker mentality or are aesthetically unpleasing.

UPDATE:
911 families are still complaining about the scaled down museum, saying that "anything other than a monument to the dead would be sacrilege." There are many different 9/11 families groups - some want the entire 16 acres preserved as a graveyard/memorial to their loved ones. Others are more pragmatic about the need to rebuild some office space as long as a memorial and monument to the fallen is prominently featured. I happen to allign myself with the latter group. However, on the issue of the appropriateness of the Drawing Center and IFC at the WTC, it would appear that the 9/11 families groups are speaking with one voice - to not have them involved at all at the WTC. It would be interesting to see whether the media could find a family that actually supported the IFC/Drawing Center at the WTC complex - if only to see what they had to say.

Technorati: World Trade Center, WTC, Pataki, LMDC, urban policy.