At first viewing, at the scales and levels of resolution presented, the three new towers—all huge, all glass—are not what anyone would call brilliant. Foster’s is a busy affair of bundled diamond shafts that strains at the top to recall Libeskind’s long-ago proposed (and otherwise defunct) notion of a spiral of prisms descending from the mother-gem of his original angular Freedom Tower. Rogers’s building, a block south, is an even more mundane affair, strapped from sidewalk to spire with busy wind-bracing. The last and smallest, Maki’s tower, is a simple composition of a rectangular base and a shifted triangular top; sleek and mute, it could be anywhere.Via Curbed.
All three towers, in fact, might be built anywhere—Foster’s has a distinctly Dallas feel—but if they are built at all, they will be built at a site that will confer meaning on even the most anodyne object. And if they can be built as 7 World Trade was built, with a good eye, a light touch, and perhaps a splash of decent art, then we all stand a fair chance of someday seeing a whole that does justice to the events that cleared the site: buildings that may be compromised and uninspired, products of more rancor than most, that still possess the power to lift jaded New York souls.
Rachel Snyder thinks that more must be done to identify the remains of the more than 1,000 people who have not been identified via remains. Promises were made in the days and weeks after the collapsing towers, and they need to be kept.
Meanwhile, somewhere along the line, the flag that was made famous by three firefighters hanging it near the collapsed ruins of the WTC, and taken by The Record's Tom Franklin, is missing.
Technorati: World Trade Center, WTC, Pataki, LMDC, urban policy, Freedom Tower, IFC, International Freedom Center, spitzer, silverstein, mount sinai, respiratory ailment, wtc cough, bloomberg.
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