Looking at the Freedom Tower

 When the world's tallest building is erected on the World Trade Center site, its impact will be most profound on Lower Manhattanıs residents and workers. The Trib asked six Downtown architects for their views.

Cleveland Adams

With input from Mr. Libeskind, Mr. Childs has coupled his expertise in the orchestration of complex projects with the spiritual vision of the tower as laid out in Mr. Libeskind's master plan. Mr. Childs has even gone one step further. Not only does the Freedom Tower visually connect to the Statue of Liberty with its fluid upward spiral and outstretched spire as envisioned in the master plan, the Tower now also evokes the Brooklyn Bridge with its crown of cabling. The connection to the bridge is twofold-there is the visual connection of the cables and the technological connection of what it allows the designers to do. Just as in Roebling's bridge, the cables of the tower will allow it to do what has never been done before.
In the case of the Brooklyn Bridge, the cabling technique invented by Mr. Roebling allowed his bridge to span great distances. In the Freedom Tower, the cables will allow the Tower's turbines to farm the wind, adding an additional layer of meaning to the name Freedom Tower. Not only will the building stand for spiritual freedom, but it will symbolize the struggle for freedom from outside sources of energy. The combined efforts of the Tower's designers could result in an extraordinary building appropriate to history-rich Lower Manhattan.

Unfortunately, there is much that can still go wrong under such an intense schedule on a structure of such immense cost and complexity. The team must now focus on the development of the finer elements of the design, such as the way the building resolves itself at the plaza level and how the skin of the building is detailed.
With continued sure-footed steps, this has the potential to become great architecture.

Cleveland Adams is an architect and 20-year resident of Tribeca.

Wayne Turett
I am heartened to see that Daniel Libeskind has been playing an active role in painting the broad strokes of the Freedom Tower. His overarching vision for the entire site should temper the design architect's vision for the tower.

But beyond what this new tower will represent, or how it will appear, interested and invested citizens should be asking and engaging in the more nuanced and detailed discussion about how the tower will perform: urbanistically, financially and culturally. Those of us who will live and work Downtown must demand that the discussion address the design of a thriving, safe street-level environment; an effective flow of foot and motor traffic; a robust mix of building scales and business types; a sustainable mix of building types, from residential to commercial. Unfortunately for local residents eager to understand how this tower will affect them, the design was presented as an ethereal-looking model, then quickly whisked away, leaving more questions than answers. Published images yield little more than what was described in the headlines. If debate of the Freedom Tower design is to have any meaning, the public, and local residents in particular, should not be satisfied with "eye candy," symbols and sound bites, but should demand that the discussion address the issues that affect their quality of life.

The reborn skyline, with its spectacular Freedom Tower, will be admired around the world for decades. But the real effects on business, culture and lifestyle in the shadow of the new structures will not be driven by the shapes, heights or evocative names given the new buildings.

How will the building meet the ground? Where will its shadow fall? Will it be noisy? Safe? Accessible? How will local businesses and residences be impacted? The process to date has brought forth a moving, exciting building concept; now we should demand a closer look.

Architect Wayne Turett is the founder of Tribeca-based Turett Collaborative Architects, an award-winning firm producing projects in architecture, and interior and product design.


Colin Cathcart
The Freedom Tower is not the big park many hoped for. Nor will it fit into our "24/7 community." Instead, it reproduces the old WTC we knew and didn't love. It will again give New Jersey a beachhead in Manhattan, with thousands of workers catching the Path train home. This design does not enfold a declaration of freedom. It is an office building. But it is one with a difference; it has emotional strings attached. Libeskind uses abstract drama; a fractured contraposto. His Freedom Tower was to be the halting climax of an angular helix. Childs is an expert in using signature flourishes to distinguish otherwise generic space. In the main, he has won this round. The building is distinguished by its parabolic shape and sleek and sturdy lattice skin. But these curves render the Freedom Tower an oddity in its own ensemble; Libeskind's design guidelines have apparently failed the first test, and if the remaining buildings' architects don't respect the guidelines either, we may be left with an incoherent miscellany.

Libeskind's upraised spire has also been made redundant. A windmill framework now crowns the building; a symbol of good environmental intentions to fill all those empty stories. But these windmills are just that-symbols. Given the wonderful solar exposure granted to this building by Libeskind's site plan, a solar curtain wall would have permitted the building to generate all its own power, freeing the building from dependence on Middle East oil imports. Now that would be a real Freedom Tower.

The most powerful symbol is the building's height, so tall that it cannot avoid being the memorial. But with only 80 occupiable floors, this "tallest building in the world" betrays a lack of confidence. Many will claim the next 40 floors would not rent, but there is only a tiny market for office space, now undersupplied, above the 80th floor. This Freedom Tower design shrinks from its own aspirations.

My verdict so far? "Still not there."

An environmental skyscraper designed by Colin Cathcart's firm, Kiss +Cathcart Architects, is included in "Big + Green," an exhibit now on view at the Museum of the City of New York.


Todd Zwigard

Considering that Mr. Libeskind's original vision for the Freedom Tower was thought to be unbuildable, it seems as if Mr. Childs was brought in to be the voice of reason and act as a go-between for the developers and politicians.

I suspect that there was very little collaboration, rather that Mr. Childs' team designed the tower viewing Daniel Libeskind's schematic vision only as a starting point. Aside from its location, height and asymmetrical spire, it is a completely new concept.

I also suspect that Mr. Libeskind is not happy with the result and therefore credits Mr. Childs with its design. Despite the dubious process, it is undoubtedly a significantly better building.

I am glad it has moved away from the zigzag skinned box, a Liebeskind trademark, which holds little intrinsic meaning for Ground Zero. The gently twisting trapezoidal form sets it appropriately apart from its rectilinear context as a symbolically unique structure. I am also glad the spire has remained because it establishes a triptych relationship with the city's other heroic landmark buildings, the Empire State and the Chrysler buildings.
I was not convinced about Mr. Libeskind's "garden in the sky" and therefore welcome the far more pragmatic and economically noble proposal of wind turbines, hoping that time proves them to be more than a nod to sustainability.


On many levels (i.e. globally, politically and symbolically), the tower will become a more significant memorial than whatever is selected to honor and remember the victims and heroes.

Try this at home, place your hand over the four other towers in the rendering of the new downtown skyline. All of a sudden the Freedom looks fantastic. The challenge now is how to transform these other scaleless, truncated diagrams into suitable neighbors for the Freedom.

Todd Zwigard of Kiss+Zwigard is an architect whose work includes commercial and residential projects. His firm's office was destroyed on Sept. 11.



Elizabeth O'Donnell
The design for this tower must be considered within the context of the process that framed it. This process can establish a model for considering architecture and urban design as interconnected and fundamentally public activities. Some of the principles defined by that process seem to have been addressed with elegance and clarity by the tower design (as can be understood by photographs of the model) while others, especially affecting street level, are very difficult to discern.

The focus on building height raises concern that opportunities for inventions of enduring value will be lost. At this time, the "tallest" is too easy to achieve. The extent to which this building proposes new programs, invents and reveals economical structural systems, establishes new standards of ecological viability and supports new public space will determine its power and significance. Such longterm considerations have yet to yield a clear new architectural expression in high-rise design. The proposal for an urban wind farm (and the earlier gardens) in lieu of conventional commercial space at the top of the building is exciting, rethinking a typically horizontal operation for a vertical "landscape." The wind turbines should now be put through the rigorous study of a prototype, testing their actual economic and environmental value, the impact on street level, the potential for wider use. This building should be nothing less than a laboratory for a completely new kind of high-rise structure.

As the design process moves forward, it is ever more urgent that attention be returned to the issues of context, civic engagement, and the creation of new public institutions and spaces, so prominent in the open discourse surrounding the design competition. It is the quality of that public space, as framed and informed by a new architecture, which will ultimately define the success of the rebuilding effort as an inventive and public process.

Elizabeth O'Donnell, an architect who lives and practices Downtown, is associate dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union.


Mark Winkelman
I have consistently championed a grand new tower at the WTC site. But is this the right design or the right time to build? I say no to both.

The original WTC towers expressed an unbridled optimism in engineer's abilities to harness nature's forces, acknowledged expanding world trade (by building 10,000,000 square feet of office space all at once) and symbolized the power of American capitalism.

The collapse of the towers coincides with the pall cast upon those dreams we once embraced. American world leadership, with promises of world peace, has yielded its own forms of insecurity with the emergence of terrorism. Our engineers understand natural forces but are powerless to prevent willful destruction by terrorists. And hopes, founded on the spread of capitalism, have been replaced with fears of globalization.The new design has been pushed and pulled by practical, egotistical and political forces to evolve through distinct designs. My favorite version, because it most closely shares the original WTC values, is David Childs' design before it was altered to satisfy the architect of the site plan. It is an unadulterated tapered and torqued 2000-foot tower. Like the original towers, the structure is boldly expressed on the exterior as the building unapologetically reaches skyward. Although only 64 habitable floors-a tentative bid for "the world's tallest"-this design would be wondrous!

Finally, we need to ask the question: Is Gov. Pataki's aggressive schedule an expression of optimism for a peaceful and prosperous future or an act of defiance directed at terrorists? If we insist on calling the symbolic 1,776-foot-tall building "The Freedom Tower," shouldn't it be built to celebrate the freedom of people the world over? If we build it to celebrate our own success and superiority, we might as well paint a target on the façade.

Mark Winkelman is a 20-year Tribeca resident and partner at Downtown Group Architects.