The Freedom Tower

Slate magazine says the style and form of the Freedom Tower is what many expected from a collaboration between architects Daniel Libeskind and David Childs – “a gritted-teeth collaboration between two architects whose styles couldn’t be more different.
“Libeskind is a highly theoretical architect with only a handful of designs to his credit, most of them aggressively shardlike and cutting-edge. The far more experienced Childs, from the huge firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, has produced countless commercial projects—most recently the huge twinned towers of the Time Warner headquarters on Columbus Circle in New York City—that are elegant in a smooth, corporate way.”
‘In hammering out a final compromise on the skyscraper,’ Slatge says, “the relationship between Libeskind and Childs by all accounts grew increasingly testy. Reading about it, sounds like one of those movies where two people who can’t stand each other are handcuffed or duct-taped together and forced to struggle free … but jointly they accomplish some heroic task, like foiling a robbery or defusing a crude nuclear bomb.”
The crude analogy is an aside. It was made a long time ago when the Freedom Tower was just an idea, not a building that is on its way up. Still, what did Slate see that we’ve missed here?

Three speakers appearing at a Michigan forum say explosives planted throughout the World Trade Center bro0ught the Twin Towers down, not the burning fuel from jetliners that crashed into the World Trade Center buildings.
The Ann Arbor News reported this story, saying “That proposition was intriguing enough that about 300 people showed up Sunday, some out of simple curiosity, at the Michigan Union in Ann Arbor to hear three speakers explain why they believe the U.S. government - not fanatical Muslim terrorists - was behind the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.”
The talk was sponsored by Scholars for 9/11.

The blog, u2r2, reports the Freedom Tower will be protected by a state-of-the-art electro-magnetic shield dubbed the “Liberty Forcefield.”
Writing for U2r2, author Alex Terrieur says the force field may be protecting an empty building, if the past is any indication.
“Problems arose once officials realised that office space on the WorldTrade Center site was not necessarily in high demand. Before the destruction of the three skyscapers in 2001, including 47-story World Trade Center Building 7, the city had trouble finding tenants for the towers. Moreover, the towers were considered a liability due to the asbestos used in their construction, and they were slated to be dismantled by 2009 at a cost of several billion. Fortunately, the towers were destroyed by Al Qaeda terrorists and therefore costly cleanup and management was unnecessary. However the problems of building new office space and new terrorist threats remained. The replacement for World Trade Center Building 7 was completed in early 2006, and remains at about 10 percent occupancy.”
May the Force be with the tenants who do occupy Freedom Tower

The city of New York has released new 911 tapes from September 11. The release of the nineteen 911 calls was prompted by Freedom of Information requests made by the New York Times. City officials say most of the calls were transferred from the Police Department to the Fire Department.
This isn’t the first time the city has released 9/11 tapes. Earlier versions were tapes of fire fighters. In this batch, a fire director called 911 seven minutes before the South Tower collapsed. He was complaining that emergency medical services were not answering calls.
In one call, 32-year-old Melissa Doi told a 911 operator that it was very, bery hot. “Are you going to be able to get somebody up here?” she asked.
“Of course, ma’am,” the operator said. “We’re coming up for you.” These tapes were only recently discovered. The bulk of the calls released only contained the operator’s side of the conversations. For 27 minutes, an anonymous 911 operator comforted Doi.
“I’m going to die,” said Doi, a manager with IQ Financial Systems.
“No, no, no, ma’am,” the operator told her but later, she told Doi, “say your prayers.”

The Guardian Unlimited says the world is rapidly becoming over crowded with monuments to one holocaust after another. The poignancy of these monuments is slipping away. Our Freedom Tower is just one of the many erected around the world? Are there just too many memories?
“From the Holocaust to 9/11, from Berlin to New York, the world is now studded with memorials to human suffering. But does this really mean we care more than we used to? And does our obsession with terrible events make it any less likely that we will repeat them? Jonathan Jones joins the strange new tourist trail

Until very recently Berlin, a city where you can still find buildings riddled with shrapnel from 1945 and museums that are bombed-out husks, felt no need to build a memorial to 20th-century tragedies. Instead it made do with the neoclassical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Neue Wache, a 19th-century Doric temple appropriated since 1931 as a war memorial. Yet now this city, where monuments seemed superfluous, has two rival Holocaust memorials just a short walk apart

At the eastern end of the long brooding park, the Tiergarten, close to the sites of Hitler’s bunker and Chancellery, stands Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, unveiled in 2005. What was until recently ruins and waste ground is now a field of grey concrete blocks, designed to evoke a city of death run by featureless bureaucrats. Tomorrow, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, this should be a place of unbearable poignancy.”
Does this predict the future of the WTC Memorials?

You don’t need a hard hat,” the Times says. “You don’t even need a pass to see for yourself what kind of progress they are making at Ground Zero, New York Magazine says. How you rate that progress will depend on who you talk to … The New York Times gives you step-by-step instructions on how to witness that progress. “Stand on Vesey Street, between Greenwich and Washington Streets. Look through the chain-link fences and over the Jersey barriers. The tops of six columns of the tower’s south perimeter are now visible, sprouting from the depths of ground zero. A seventh column, standing alone nearby, is where the Freedom Tower’s east plaza will be … the Times said

“They are visible from the sidewalk now because a second tier of steel has been added to each column, bringing them up to about 8 feet below street level.”

Freedom Tower designer David Childs has a new commission. Consulting Design Partner David Childs will team up with roger Duffy to design a Lake Placid branch of the Adirondack Museum. The branch will include an 8,000 square foot space for permanent and changing exhibits, educational programs, office space and storage.

The Freedom Tower is superfluous, according to the Gothmist, a blog that says this is the view of architect Rafael Viñoly.
Viñoly leveled this charge last week in the Third Thursday lecture series sponsored by the Downtown Alliance.
“Viñoly characterized Freedom Tower–designed by Childs and SOM–as economically inefficient and aesthetically mediocre, especially in relation to the adjacent, arguably superior office towers now being designed by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki (towers 2, 3, and 4 on the WTC site).
The crowd of around 1000 appeared amused and perhaps stirred by Viñoly’s flippant, imaginative renderings of the site depicting the Freedom Tower at half-height and then missing altogether. “You don’t lose much,” he quipped. Viñoly reasons that the Freedom Tower’s 2.6M square feet of office space could be redistributed among other towers, and observes that its chief architectural features are its cheesy name and its height as measured in feet, which is the same number used to describe how many years passed between Jesus’s birth and the American Revolution.
Finally, Viñoly compared the “comedy of errors” of designing and redesigning the Freedom Tower to the US invasion of Iraq, in the sense that the situation may be too flawed to fix. “You can’t save face–because you made a blundering mistake,” he said.

Two new design architetcs have been added to the team working on World Trade Center redevelopment project.
Silverstein Properties, the developer of the World Trade Center is working on the construction of the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower and three other office buildings near the site of the World Trade Center. Guy Punzi and Fred Alvarez will join the WTC Design Task Force. The group includes four architectural firms and other design and engineering professionals. The group is charged with finalizing the designs for the three office towers.
According to the developer, Punzi will be design manager for 175 Greenwich Street, the proposed 2.2-million-square-foot building also known as Tower. He will oversee the team of architects, engineers and consultants charged with carrying out the design plan created by Richard Rogers Partnership. Punzi comes from the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. There he served as associate partner and senior technical coordinator. He worked on a number of high profile projects including the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Ben Gurion International Airport and the New York Stock Exchange.

Alvarez will be design manager for 150 Greenwich Street, the 1.8 million-square-foot Tower 4. It was designed by Maki and Associates. He was a senior partner with Handel Architects. The firm specialized in the development of corporate, residential and hospitality projects, including the Ritz-Carlton Georgetown in Washington, D.C.

The Daily News, one off New York’s finest tabloids, gave the city a Christmas present last year. On Christmas Day, the News published a study on how survivors fled the twin towers on 9/11.
The conclusion: In case of emergency: leave your purse, don’t ask your boss for permission and don’t waste one second getting out.
“Researchers who interviewed nearly 2,000 people who were in the World Trade Center say many people misspent precious minutes after the first plane hit. “They’re gathering things - purses and cell phones and car keys and house keys and ID badges,” Columbia University researcher Robyn Gershon said. “They’re seeking out friends.” As many as 3% stopped to change their shoes, Gershon said. “Some survivors who took part in the World Trade Center Evacuation Study “literally got out as the buildings were collapsing and climbed out of the rubble,” Gershon said.
“So we know from speaking to those people that people behind them didn’t make it out,” she added. “Those four or five minutes [of delay] were meaningful minutes.”
The research also uncovered a woeful ignorance about the layout of the towers, even among those who worked in them 10 years or more.”
Team players won’t survive. Whole teams were entombed on 911. Whole teams did not get out.