Silverstein Offers Peek at New 7 World Trade

By Ronald Drenger

Architects for Larry Silverstein on May 13 publicly unveiled plans for the commercial building that will replace the destroyed 7 World Trade Center, telling two committees of Community Board 1 that the structure, the future "gateway" to the redeveloped trade center site, will be a mostly glass tower built over a new Con Edison substation.

David Childs, a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and the principal architect, told the committees that the proposed building would be 740 feet high, or the equivalent of about 50 stories, significantly taller than the 616-foot-tall structure that collapsed on Sept. 11. But the tower would be narrower and have a smaller footprint than the original, allowing Greenwich Street to run through the site and probably all the way through the Trade Center site, which community leaders and most urban planners desire. While the previous building extended to West Broadway, blocking the north-south corridor, the new building would stand entirely on the parallelogram-shaped plot bounded by Greenwich, Vesey, Washington and Barclay streets. "We pulled back the building so you can see down through the space looking south, and a piece of the fabric of the city is re-woven through the heart of this project," Childs said of Greenwich Street’s restoration. "We’re

binding together these two parts of the city that were connected before the World Trade Center went in to block it." He described the building as a "striking marker" of the former World Trade Center site, likening it to "the great obelisk leading into Luxor" in Egypt. The bottom 77 feet of the building, about eight commercial stories or 11 residential stories, would house a new Con Ed substation to replace the one that was lost when 7 World Trade Center fell. The "first floor" of the 42-story office tower portion would begin at 115 feet, with the space in between serving as the tower’s "basement." The building entrance, connected to a glass-enclosed lobby, would be on Greenwich Street. Silverstein said excavation of the site will be completed by mid-June, when construction of the foundation for the substation will begin. The substation is scheduled to be completed in the fall of next year, though some of the equipment may begin operating a few months earlier. The entire building is expected to be finished by the end of 2005.

Design details for the tower’s exterior still have to be worked out, but Childs said that the structure would be mostly glass, a "light-emanating shaft" and "as transparent a building as possible." This would differ starkly from the hulking granite design of the former building. The "glass sleeve" would drop down over the substation base, with some kind of vertical connection, so "it will not just be one box on top of another," Childs said. The exterior of the substation would be "an interesting architectural wall, lit from the inside," incorporating metalwork and other artistic elements to make it pedestrian-friendly, he said. To allow the building to be narrowed, the vaults for the 10 Con Edison transformers would be split, five running on the north side along Barclay Street and five along Vesey Street. In the original building, all 10 Con Edison transformers were lined up on Barclay. Loading docks for trucks would be on the Washington Street side.

He added that the design allows for a 60-foot-wide Greenwich Street, which could be used for pedestrian or vehicle traffic or both, and could be designed with a street bed and two sidewalk or any other configuration. The building would also incorporate environmentally friendly, energy-efficient technology, possibly including solar panels, and safety features for potential emergencies. The design calls for a concrete core, as opposed to a steel core with sheet rock around it, and two stairways that would be wider than building codes require. The two stairways would be separated from each other and each would divide near the ground floor, offering four emergency exits leading to the street, rather than to the lobby, which could be unsafe in an emergency. "We want this to be a dramatic gesture of the way we should design buildings, in New York and around the country," Childs said. In all, the new building would include about 1.6 million square feet of space, compared to 1.95 million square feet in the destroyed building. "So far I’m very pleased with what I see," Community Board 1 member Nancy Owens said after Childs’s presentation. The proposed development would create a triangle bordered by Barclay and Greenwich streets and West Broadway, and Owens said the community would want to see an open park space created there. Madelyn Wils, chairwoman of Community Board 1, reinforced that sentiment, telling Silverstein, "It would not only be a great space for a green park for the community, but it would also be a great space for people who will work in 7 World Trade Center."