Cultural Center ‘Gateway’ at Trade Center Site Is Unveiled By Etta Sanders The latest piece of the Ground Zero rebuilding puzzle to be revealed is the elevated glass and wood cultural center that will house the International Freedom Center and the Drawing Center, which was unveiled last month. Designed by the Norwegian architectural firm Snohetta, the center will hover up to 35 feet above the ground on three supports, allowing clear sightlines between the memorial park to the west and the transit center, designed by Santiago Calatrava, to the east. “The new cultural center will be a gateway to the memorial and a window on a bright future,” said Craig Dykers, one of the architects. The Drawing Center, the country’s only museum dedicated to drawing, currently located in Soho, will triple in size when it relocates to the northeast part of the building. Three-quarters of the 250,000-square-foot building will house the International Freedom Center, a new institution dedicated to the theme of freedom struggles around the world. The exhibit spaces will be accessed by ramps that will take visitors on what the center’s founders call a “Freedom Walk.” The walkways will surround an atrium to allow light to reach the train station below. The cultural center was designed during an intense 90-day period of close collaboration between the architects and the museums. The complex’s horizontal orientation will be a counterpoint to the 1,776-foot-tall Freedom Tower in the northwest part of the site. The model for the center also showed a rooftop garden. The center’s placement on the site, close to the memorial and above the transit hub, created engineering challenges. The architects perched the building in the air—it will hang from a sort of tabletop structure—in part to avoid columns going below ground through the transit center. “In a very unusual way, this building can be built from the top down rather than the bottom up,” Dykers said. George Negroponte, president of the Drawing Center and a Tribeca resident, said that the way the Snohetta architects approached the issue fit with Daniel Libeskind’s master plan. “I believe the reason he put the cultural center in the memorial was to create a filter and to make a transition from the life of the street to the memorial. It’s an extremely sensitive solution to a very complex problem.” In a month filled with the news of delays and problems at the site, including the required redesign of the Freedom Tower and the slow pace of the deconstruction of the former Deutsche Bank building, rebuilding officials cited the cultural center as evidence of progress. But the site’s other cultural building, a performing arts center for the Joyce and Signature Theaters, is facing a delay because of costs, according to John Whitehead, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s chairman. He said it will not be completed until the end of this year.