The Freedom Tower

There are 43 people the rest of the country will soon get to know. They are survivors of the World Trade Center, the survivors of the 9/11 tragedies, people whose names were erroneously carved in a tribute to the fallen victims of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
The names of the unknown 43 people who weren’t killed on Sept. 11 will be carved in the granite base of a 100-foot sculpture being unveiled on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
The sculpture went up across the Hudson River in Bayonne, N.J. It naturally features the names of the 3,024 names of people believed to have died in the 1993 world Trade Center bombing and the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and on United Flight 93 in Pennsylvania.
The 43 survivors were included in a sculpture done by Zurab Tsereteli, a Russian artist who created the work but use an outdated list of names of those missing at the World Trade Center.
“We did the best that could have been done under the circumstances, said a lawyer who represents Tsereteli. The problem stems from using bad sources and a list from a book published by the New York Times in 2003. The book includes 43 names that were removed by the medical examiner’s office in October 2003 and January 2004 because he city could not confirm their deaths or if they even existed at all. The names include illegal immigrants and missing persons who relatives said they were near the Trade Center on September 11.
It just shows that the details of what really happened on 9/11 is still being sorted out.

“As the first office tower to rise on the actual World Trade Center site, the Freedom Tower recaptures the New York skyline, reasserts downtown Manhattan’s preeminence as a business center and establishes a new civic icon for the country.” This is the pitch from www.wtc.com, the folks marketing office space at Ground Zero. “It is a memorable architectural landmark for the city and the nation; a building whose simplicity and clarity of form will remain fresh and timeless in its design. Extending the long tradition of American ingenuity in high-rise construction, the design solution is an innovative mix of architecture, structure, urban design, safety and sustainability.
“The Freedom Tower is a bold and simple icon in the sky that acknowledges the memorial below. While the memorial, carved out of the earth, speaks of the past and of remembrance, the Freedom Tower speaks about the future and hope as it rises into the sky in a faceted, crystalline form filled with, and reflecting light. This tall, pointed tower, in the tradition of great New York City icons such as the Chrysler Building and Empire State Building, evokes the slender, tapering triangular forms of these two great landmarks of midtown and replaces one quarter of the World Trade Center office space lost on September 11, 2001. (Overall, downtown lost approximately 15 million square feet of office space on September 11th.)”
A relative who works downtown and passes Ground Zero every day on her way to and from work says renting the Tower and the other buildings going up on the site will be a hard sell to prospective tenants. That’s the feeling in the community around Ground Zero. We’ll just have to see what kind of deals will be cut and how convincing the marketing will be.

It’s official.
Three of the tallest buildings in New York City will be built on the World Trade Center construction site – the Freedom Tower, Two World Trade Center and Three World Trade Center. The fourth tall building in New York is the Chrysler Building.
The Freedom Tower will be the tallest, if it is built to the designed height of 1,776 feet tall.
World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein made the announcement at a news conference today, saying the Freedom Tower will be number one in the city, Two World Trade Center will go up to 1,254 feet and Three World Trade Center will go up to 1,155 feet tall, 100 feet taller than the Chrysler Building.
At a press conference held at 7 World Trade Center … a building just north of Ground Zero or what firemen in the city still call “the job site, Silverstein said the buildings will have a total of 6.2 million square feet of office space, that is half the downtown office space in the city of Baltimore.
How’s them apples?
Mighty fine, I’d say, if they can find the tenants to turn a vacant lot into a dream come true.

The hallowed land at Ground Zero is being trampled to death by so much second- guessing after five years, some people are beginning to wonder if the plans to raise the Freedom Tower are real or “is it Memorex?”

Most recently, the New York Sun ran a piece quoting a fellow from the Fiscal Policy Institute who doesn’t have high hopes for the project. Fellow David Kallick wondered aloud, “is it real or isn’t it? There is some speculation about whether the next governor will want to go ahead with the plan as it is now configured.”
The current governor George Pataki is the Tower’s biggest cheerleader, seconded only by Mayor Bloomberg.
But Kallick’s warnings might just be the stuff that prophesy is made of.
“The Port Authority chairman, Anthony Coscia, said this month that further changes to the Freedom Tower could be necessary if Mr. Pataki fails to secure the government tenants by late September,” the Sun said. “Port Authority officials have suggested that those changes could include lowering the height of the tower.”
And what kind of PR can you get from a tower that falls short of the 1,776 foot level every patriot in America has dreamed of for the past five years now.

Now that Freedom Tower designer David Libeskind has something to really brag about on this side of the Atlantic – the completion of his first project in the U.S. — he’s taking his show on the road.
Libeskind, the defrocked designer of the jewel in the crown of the new World Trade Center, the Tower, is heading for the University of Kansas where he will deliver a talk he calls “Breaking Ground” On September 20.
Dean of architecture and urban design John Gaunt says Libeskind will focus mostly on his work, including his first completed project in the U.S. – a Colorado commission and his more famous international works, the Jewish Museum in Berlin. “He’s a very well-known and highly regarded international architect,” Gaunt said. “He’s got a lot of recent work and a lot of very high profile work.”Gaunt said the Freedom Tower could be an interesting topic because it is such a daunting task. “It’s interesting and controversial,” Gaunt said. “How do you memorialize anything that big? It’s a huge project of huge international interest.”

Tom Engelhardt, a blogger for the Nation Institute, calls the memorial project at Ground Zero called it “The Billion-dollar Gravestone. In a piece that carried the headline “Reflections on Memorializing the Dead of 9/11,” Engelhardt writes about the numbers involved and what the dollars being raised might really mean.“Recently, a number — one billion — in the New York Times stopped me in my tracks. According to a report commissioned by the foundation charged with building Reflecting Absence, the memorial to the dead in the attack on the World Trade Center, its projected cost is now estimated at about a billion dollars and still rising. According to Oliver Burkeman of the British Guardian, ‘Taking inflation into account, $1bn would be more than a quarter of the original cost of the twin towers that were destroyed in 2001.’
“For that billion, Reflecting Absence is to have two huge ‘reflecting pools” — “two voids that reside in the original footprints of the Twin Towers’ — fed by waterfalls ‘from all sides” and surrounded by a “forest” of oak trees; a visitor will then be able to descend 30 feet to galleries under the falls “inscribed with the names of those who died.’ There is to be an adjacent, 100,000 square-foot underground memorial museum to ‘retell the events of the day, display powerful artifacts, and celebrate the lives of those who died.’ All of this, as the website for the memorial states, will be meant to vividly convey ‘the enormity of the buildings and the enormity of the loss.’ Not surprisingly, the near billion-dollar figure does not even include $80 million for a planned visitor’s center or the estimated $50-60 million annual cost of running such an elaborate memorial and museum.
“So what is Reflecting Absence going to reflect? For one thing, it will mirror its gargantuan twin, the building that is to symbolically replace the World Trade Center — the Freedom Tower. As the Memorial is to be driven deep into the scarred earth of Ground Zero, so the Freedom tower is to soar above it, scaling the imperial heights. To be precise, it is to reach exactly 1,776 feet into the heavens, a numerical tribute to the founding spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the nation which emerged from it; its spire will even emit light – ‘a new beacon of freedom’ — for all the world to see and admire. Its observation deck will rise a carefully planned 7 feet above that of the old World Trade Center; and with spire and antennae, it is meant to be the tallest office building on the planet (though the Burj Dubai Tower, whose builders are holding its future height a tightly guarded secret, may quickly surpass it).
“The revelation of that staggering billion-dollar price tag for a memorial whose design, in recent years, has grown ever larger and more complex, caused consternation in my city, led Mayor Michael Bloomberg to suggest capping its cost at $500 million, caused the Times to editorialize, ‘The only thing a $1 billion memorial would memorialize is a complete collapse of political and private leadership in Lower Manhattan,’ and became a nationwide media story. Because the subject is such a touchy one, however, no one went further and explored the obvious: that, even in victimhood, Americans have in recent years exhibited an unseemly imperial hubris. Whether the price tag proves to be half a billion or a billion dollars, one thing can be predicted. The memorial will prove less a reminder of how many Americans happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on that September day, or how many — firemen, policemen, bystanders who stayed to aid others — sacrificed their lives, than of the terrible path this country ventured down in the wake of 9/11.
If the latest opinion polls are to be believed, Americans have grown desperately tired of that path and, as a result, the whole construction project at New York’s Ground Zero is likely to become emotionally obsolete long before either Reflecting Absence or the Freedom Tower make it onto the scene.”

Once a landmark figure in the furious competition over who would develop the World Trade Center, architect Daniel Libeskind, now takes center stage in a Time Magazine feature, finally congratulating him for completing his first building in the United States.
Libeskind wasn’t so lucky in New York. He collaborated on the Freedom Tower, the undisputed jewel in the crown of downtown development, but fell on hard times in his east coast debut. Still, Libeskind has just completed the new Frederic C. Hamilton building at the Denver Art Museum in Colorado.
“Libeskind, who was a canny enough player to have ushered a Jewish Museum into the heart of Berlin, was gradually marginalized.,” Time said of the architect’s New York nightmare. “By the time construction began in April, the much revised skyscraper bore so little resemblance to his original idea, he had taken his name off it.
But he had struck gold 1600 miles west in Colorado.
“Libeskind, now 60, had completed just one major commission, but that building was the Jewish Museum, an architectural thunderbolt that would be endlessly talked about, contested and studied for its zigzag configurations. It took a leap of faith for Sharp and his trustees to place what would become a $90.5 million project in the hands of an architect in love with tilted walls and corkscrewing interiors. But it was a gamble that has paid off spectacularly. Libeskind’s museum addition, which opens Oct. 7, is the most captivating building to appear in the U.S. in a while, the first to compare in complexity, daring and brave-new-world beauty to the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles that Frank Gehry set loose three years ago. If anyone doubts that Libeskind’s ideas are a route to a powerful new model of space and form–and there are people who still think of his work as eccentric grandstanding–this is a building to change minds.”

If you just read the stories about the hustle and bustle of all the new downtown development, the Freedom Tower clearly seems like an omen for a bright future for the city of New York.
But if you examine what lies beneath the skin and design of the Tower, then walk through the city and simply glance at the perimeters of any significant public space today where government, commerce or trading goes on, the story changes radically.
City Hall is a bunker, barely visible from the sidewalks. The White House has been barricaded by slabs of concrete for a very long time. The United Nations has always been hidden by an iron gate on one side and the East River on the other.
Farhad Manjoo, writing recently for Salon.com, tells us that American architecture “is still reeling from the 9/11 attacks. Critics and architects say that security now trumps design, as barricades and mall-like plazas are sucking the soul out of urban life.
“Within a week after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, officials at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts set up a half dozen massive concrete freeway separators in a stately line across Josie Robertson Plaza, the complex’s main outdoor entryway. The security barricades, unsightly Jersey barriers, were intended to protect the center’s performance halls from a speeding truck bomb. Perhaps only the most unusually cultured of terrorists would want to hit Lincoln Center, which sits five miles north of ground zero on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — but in the tense aftermath of the attacks, no precaution seemed too much. Lincoln Center groundskeepers thoughtfully topped the Jersey barriers with colorful potted plants, a rehabilitation technique along the lines of pinning a tiara on Medusa. Almost five years have passed since the attacks. The barriers remain in place.
“To appreciate how America has changed since 9/11, walk slowly through any major city. What you’ll see dotting the landscape is the physical embodiment of fear. Security installations put up after the attacks continue to block public access and wrangle pedestrian traffic. Outside Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, garish purple planters menace rush-hour pedestrian traffic. The gigantic planters have abandoned all horticultural ambition, many of them blooming with nothing more than trash and untilled dirt. “French barriers,” steel-grate barricades meant for controlling crowds, ring many landmark sites — including San Francisco’s Transamerica Building — like beefy bodyguards protecting starlets. Then there are the bollards, the cylindrical vehicle-blocking posts that are so pervasive you wonder if they’ve mastered asexual reproduction. In Washington, bollards surround everything. Not since Confederate Gen. Jubal Early attacked the city in 1864 has the nation’s capital felt so under siege.”

As the world prepares to mourn the tragedy of 9/11 for the fifth time and the Freedom Tower rises downtown, a government agency has released a fact-finding report dealing with alternative theories about the World Trade Center fires and collapse.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been investigating the collapse of the Twin Towers and produced a massive report explaining what went wrong. Their investigation stemmed from allegations and a growing skepticism among Americans that the official explanation were wrong. The investigation preceded a Scripps Howard Poll that shows that a third of Americans suspect the U.S. government “was complicit in the Sept 11 terror attacks,” according to a website called WorldNetDaily.com.
The full NIST report can be found at: http://wtc.nist.gov, all 43 volumes of it.