A Closer Look

This article takes a closer look at the design of the Freedom Tower, the latest incarnation of which incorporates "chamfered, tapering corners that create a multifaceted obelisk form out of isosceles triangles." I had to do a double take since I've never heard of the term chamfered before. However, we all know what chamfered looks like.

It is used to describe the corners on the original twin towers. Instead of a razor sharp corner, the original WTC towers had the corners cut away such that they were not perfect squares but rather octagons, though one had to be real close to notice the cutoffs.

And all these towers might be thought of as owing a debt to the 233-foot lighthouse at Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, which was rebuilt after World War II.

But the search for architectural provenance is more than an academic exercise. In some cases, it has become a high-stakes pursuit.

Thomas Shine, an architect in Brookline, Mass., is suing Mr. Childs and Skidmore in federal court. He has charged them with copying the earlier Freedom Tower design, unveiled in 2003, from two of Mr. Shine's student projects of 1999, which Mr. Childs had an opportunity to see and admire as a jurist at the Yale School of Architecture.

Mr. Shine registered his work with the Copyright Office in 2004.

Skidmore insisted that the Freedom Tower design was an independent creation that differed substantially from Mr. Shine's projects, challenged the accuracy of several of his exhibits, questioned Mr. Shine's copyright claim and said that any similarities involved ideas, unoriginal material and functional elements that cannot be copyrighted.

On Aug. 10, however, Chief Judge Michael B. Mukasey ruled that the lawsuit could proceed, saying that a lay observer "might find that the Freedom Tower's twisting shape and undulating diamond-shaped facade make it substantially similar" to one of Mr. Shine's projects and "therefore an improper appropriation."

To date, the Zeckendorf family has not announced plans to sue over the use of the name "Freedom Tower," which the developer William Zeckendorf Sr. proposed in 1956 for a 1,750-foot structure in the West 30's.

William Lie Zeckendorf, one of his grandsons, recalled little about that unbuilt project other than the identity of the architectural firm working on the site at the time the first Freedom Tower was announced. It was Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.