Fifth Time's a Charm

Today's off-schedule post comes as a result of the new Freedom Tower design, which will be officially unveiled later this afternoon. We knew that the NYPD's security criteria were certain to leave us with an altered tower; the question was whether this newest version would represent an improvement upon a clearly flawed design, or a disheartening backslide that might jeopardize what public support the project still has.

Any news on the Freedom Tower demands a cursory review of the many steps through which the process has already been steered. Today's new design represents the fifth iteration. First came the six lackluster schematic designs by Beyer Blinder Belle, which were roundly rejected by the public -- and rightly so. It was thus clear early on that people expected more than a generic, cookie-cutter development in which any memorial was relegated to an office park courtyard.

Next, following from an enormously successful competition in which the invited teams were comprised of some of the world's top architects, Daniel Libeskind emerged as the first designer. His winning scheme called for a tower with the symbolic height of 1,776 feet and formal nods to the Statue of Liberty. He envisioned it as a kind of garden in the sky, with green space becoming a major element of the tower's interior. Aside from the arbitrary symbolism (twelve inches of height for each year after the supposed birth of Jesus Christ until America declared its independence), Libeskind's design resonated well with the public on the strength of the master plan, which left the slurry wall adjacent to the memorial site intact and imbued the site with a sense of memory and emotion that was lacking in many of the other plans.

But despite being named the winner, Libeskind was promptly forced to take a back seat to David Childs of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, whom WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein had retained as executive architect for the rebuilding effort. Without direct control of the design of the tower, Libeskind assumed the ambiguous title of master plan consultant, and watched as his plan was steadily chipped away by the more pragmatic (and experienced) Childs.

When the finished design was presented to the public, the strengths of Libeskind's tower had largely disappeared, while many of its problems persisted. The antenna mast, placed off center to emulate the raised arm of the Statue of Liberty, now resembled an awkwardly placed cocktail toothpick. While the 1,776-foot height had been declared inviolable by Governor George Pataki, the height of the occupiable building had shrunk, with office floors at a certain level giving way to an ethereal lattice of cables and an ambitious battery of windmills to provide some of the building's power. The overall impression was that the mass of the building was truncated, a sense amplified by the torqued form introduced by Childs.

Despite its flaws, this was the tower scheduled to begin construction until the NYPD announced its security concerns last month. Meanwhile, Donald Trump and others were beginning to clamor for the original WTC towers to be rebuilt as simplistic (and inadequately graceful) replicas of their former selves.

Now that the new design has been completed, in just seven weeks, the rebuilding effort at Ground Zero is closer than ever before to realization. The projected completion of the Freedom Tower has now been pushed back to at least 2010, but much of the already completed work on the design of its foundations will not need to be redone.

Instead of having a twisted form, the tower now changes from a square to an octagonal shape as it rises, and its antenna mast is centered at its top. Its base is a 200-foot tall square monolith, set back further from the street and designed to resist truck bombs, above which the glass facade begins. Even the glass is to be heavily reinforced toward the bottom. A tower once designed to be light and airy, almost a specter of a building, is now sold and impregnable.

As a form, however, the new design will recall the original WTC towers to a degree earlier iterations did not -- a fact David Childs was quick to point out. One wonders if this was partly intentional, or merely the convenient result of the new security guidelines. Either way, the new tower --innovative as it might seem to New Yorkers -- will be little different from recent towers elsewhere in the world, including even Cesar Pelli's Goldman Sachs building across the Hudson. It is perhaps a fortunate compromise, one that will allow both progressive and conservative tastes to appreciate and support the project. Still, it is a far cry from the kind vision demonstrated by the participants in the design competition, which may have been where the greatest opportunities were left behind, years ago.