Cantilevered JPMorgan Tower: Mixed Reviews from CB1

By Andrea Appleton
POSTED JULY 16, 2007

The name-calling began nearly as soon as preliminary plans for the World Trade Center site’s Tower 5 became public. A New York Post columnist christened the oddly-shaped, cantilevered building “Beer Belly Tower.” Curbed, a city real estate blog, called it “The Tower of Darkness,” because of the shadow it will cast over the planned Liberty Park. Readers wrote in comparing it to a toilet in profile, a piece from the video game Tetris, an electric chair. 

The object of all this architectural derision is a 42-story tower that JPMorgan Chase will build and occupy at the corner of Greenwich and Cedar Streets (see diagram below), featuring a seven-story cantilever that juts out about 100 feet, 192 feet above the ground. The rebuilt St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church will set directly below the cantilever.

At a recent meeting of Community Board 1’s World Trade Center Redevelopment Committee, architect Gene Kohn of KPF Architects, which developed the unusual design, said it was the most elegant solution under the circumstances. 

“The only way you could get the investment bank to work is to do the cantilever,” he said. JPMorgan requested at least 60,000 square feet for each trading floor, while the building’s footprint is only 32,000 square feet. Kohn said the trading floors could not be placed at ground level because of the new church, and could not be at basement level either, because the vehicle security center will lie under the site. (JPMorgan has a 92-year lease on the 1.3 million-square-foot building, which they’re spending $2 billion to build. The tower will house about 7,000 employees.)

“It’s a challenging site, but usually challenging sites produce great results,” Kohn said. “This is a building that is different, somewhat unique, and for many people it might take a while to get used to.” He emphasized that the design was still in the conceptual stages and the architect for the final design is yet to be selected.

Though residents and board members refrained from outright ridicule, the building received mixed reviews at the July 9 meeting.

“I think you did a great job trying to solve this problem, but it still doesn’t work for me,” said board member Allan Tannenbaum. “When you look at the verticality of all the other buildings on the site, it somehow doesn’t fit in to have this bulge sticking out.”

A group of residents from 125 Cedar Street, a residential building across the street from the site, were among the most skeptical. “It’s very hard to conceptualize,” said resident Mark Scherzer, who lives on the top floor, “but it certainly has the sense of looming to me. I can see it maybe 20 feet above my head.” Kohn assured him the tower would be farther from his building than it seemed. “And I think it will actually improve the visual access you have currently,” he told Scherzer.

“What about the shadows cast on our building?” asked board member Pat Moore, who is also a resident of 125 Cedar Street. “We’ve lived there for 30 years.”

“Buildings throw shadows. It’s hard to avoid,” said Kohn, “but we feel that our building minimizes the shadow compared to a taller tower.” Under the terms of the master plan for the WTC site, Tower 5 was to be 800 feet tall. Reducing the height of the building to accommodate a cantilever would bring it to approximately 740 feet. (The building will be the smallest of the five towers on the WTC site.) 

Kohn showed a time-lapse shadow study in which, at the click of a button, the shadows cast by Tower 5 and surrounding buildings made a slow circle, in accordance with the movement of the sun. “You can see that the cantilever shadow is really part of the tower,” he said.

Some of those in attendance were comforted by the hi-tech display.

“I do feel a lot better about the design of the building having seen the shadow studies,” said board member Bill Love. 

Andy Jurinko (husband of Pat Moore) was the lone 125 Cedar resident with positive remarks about the building. He said he was “pleasantly surprised” by the design. “The thing I was a little concerned about was the cantilever,” he said, “but having seen it, I can come to accept it as a sort of sheltering space.”

As part of the presentation, Kohn and Timothy Lizura, director of the Port Authority’s World Trade Center Redevelopment Department, also gave a brief outline on the area surrounding the building. Though Liberty Park and St. Nicholas Church have yet to be designed, site constraints mean these features will set about 14 feet above street level. Lizura said the elevation was necessary for security reasons related to the vehicle security center below ground. Kohn suggested that a staircase might descend down from the church to Greenwich Street.

“This could be a great place for people to gather at all times of day,” he said. By way of example, he displayed a photo of the grand Spanish Steps in Rome.

But as with the cantilever, not everyone was charmed.

“That’s a 14-foot elevation we have to climb to get home?” asked a skeptical 125 Cedar resident named Kyle Brooks.

Board member Marc Ameruso didn’t care for the steps either. “Having to climb stairs to go through a street?” he said. “I personally don’t like it.”

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