The Freedom Tower

The list of victims whose names will be displayed prominently will be group in meaningful ways. The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation today approved a plan to list the victims in groups. The largest group will be the names of 1,431 people who worked or died in the North Tower along with 87 passenger and crew aboard American Airlines Flight 11 will be engraved around the north pool at the memorial. Eight other groupings will be posted around the South Tower pool along with the names of more than 400 firefighters and police who died at the WTC. The south pool at the memorial will list more than 700 victims who were working or visiting the South Tower along with 60 passengers and crew members aboard United Flight 175.

This is from Phillip Nobel, a writer for Metropolismag.com:
“Even after several years, many of them spent at Ground Zero among the strange tribes concerned with the site’s reconstruction—even after at no little pain turning that immersion into an account running 85,000 words—I maintained that I was at home with the aftermath. The instant memorials had not gotten to me, neither massed candles nor vain posters of the “missing.” The Tribute in Light, that importunate civic grandiosity, left me blank when it made its debut the first spring after. And none of the formal memorial designs, professional or amateur, ever impressed me as the least bit fitting, let alone moving or, god forbid, “healing”: it was processed, I was done.

“So imagine my surprise when I first found myself in tears at the site as late as the summer of 2006. The catalyst was not a vision of the still distant shrine-pools conceived by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, still less those dual-role future memorials—Calatrava’s train station or what’s left of Libeskind’s master plan—the effects of which, through careful imagining, I had long ago dismissed as emotionally neutral. Instead the artistic team that finally cut through my cynicism was the comparatively humble duo of David Childs and Jenny Holzer—an architect who builds with little pretension to transcend and a now hackneyed artist of the severest sterility. I should add the great E. B. White too, since it was his Here Is New York, scrolling in huge white letters on Holzer’s screen in Childs’s lobby at 7 World Trade, that finally broke me down.”
Real grief sometimes takes time.

From Gabriel Arana’s personal blog, “From Wharf and Welt,” we get this as the rag tag pieces of steel columns, insurance payments, on and off again tenants, corner stones and all of the others things that hopefully will put this Humpty Dumpty Freedom Tower project back together again:

“I was thinking about Albert Speer’s Theorie vom Ruinenwert (theory of ruin-value) that guided building construction and architectural design during the Nazi regime,” says Arana who is currently living in Ithaca, New York.

“As the Freedom Tower goes up in downtown Manhattan, the principle–to build in order to produce, in a thousand years time, elegant Roman-like ruins evidencing a powerful lost civilization–is not considered in the design and construction of our diaphanous glass skyscrapers.

When the Freedom Tower is completed, it will echo its limestone counterpart in Midtown, the Empire State Building, and be the tallest building in the world, at least for a while. As pinnacles of the world’s two largest business districts, the pair will stand as contrastive historical markers in the timeline of our national consciousness.

The Empire State Building went up during the Great Depression as unemployed workers across the country lined up at soup kitchens. It became, upon completion a year and 45 days after construction began, an instant populist monument and an escapist expression of man’s desire to lift up into the clouds, leaving the ignobility of the earth below. It was “architecture as idea”–an amorphous idea, but one that has something to do with ambition, with dreams and their accessibility.

The Freedom Tower, on the other hand, is a defiant retort.”

With all of the ups and downs with the reconstruction of WTC, the memorial projects and the Freedom Tower, it is all being recorded, brick by brick. Project Rebirth is chronicling the rebirth of Ground Zero in New York City. Six cameras are filming everything that goes on down there 24 hours a day, frame by frame.
Every day our cameras are hard at work, documenting the World Trade Center site as it rebuilds. One frame of film, every five minutes, 24 hours a day. They never stop, no matter what the weather. When they’re finished, we’ll have a complete chronicle of the historic rebirth of Ground Zero, enabling audiences around the world to see the entire multi-year construction and community healing process in a single feature-length film.”
They’re asking for help. They’ve captured 2,898,474 frames so far and they say they’ve got 3,092,107 to go. You can help by going to Projectrebirth.org and find out how.

Salon.com says that Tower 7 seems to be a monument to grace. Those are Salon’s words not mine. “The original 47-story granite-and-glass building that stood across Vesey Street from the Trade Towers disappeared into the ground at 5:21 p.m. on 9/11. The new tower, which opened in May, is an elegant glass parallelogram that now dominates ground zero.
“Like the Freedom Tower, 7 also sits atop an enormous concrete vault (it’s not there for blast resistance but because it houses a Con Edison substation that powers much of Lower Manhattan). But from the street, the concrete isn’t visible. Childs has covered the base with handsome stainless steel panels designed by the celebrated TriBeCa designer James Carpenter. Carpenter also designed the tower’s exterior glass cladding, which surrounds its office space from the eighth story to the top.”
This is a tribute to a building that isn’t about to be built, or one no one seems willing and able to occupy. Tower 7 is up and open. The designer chose glass that’s low in iron, according to Salon and is coated with an anti-reflective material that keeps out radiant heat. “The glass is so transparent that at certain hours, when the sun hangs low on the horizon, Tower 7’s walls seem to disappear, and you can see through entire floors of the building.”

It was one of those quiet, closed door things. Last summer there was a dispute between two Yale School of Architecture alumni over the Freedom Tower design. Thomas Shine, a 2000 graduate of the school took on 1963 grad David Childs, claiming that Childs copied portions of Shine’s design that wound up being part of the design for the Tower awarded to the firm where Childs works. Shine filed suit in 2004 and last summer a judge said his lawsuit could go forward.
Without any comment last summer, the two parties reached a settlement. Shine withdrew his charge and Childs’ firm withdrew a claim for legal fees. This is one of those sticky wickets, these kind of folks talk about with nods and head shakes while the rest of us are left to wonder how the world goes round. The two Yales not only wound up in Elm City as Yalies, they both had Yale architecture professor Alex Garvin, a 1962 grad himself who also met Childs as an undergraduate and was his classmate. Garvin also taught Shine and served as vice president of the infamous Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the folks who mustered the forced that are now building the Freedom Tower. Small world some of us live in, isn’t it.

Eight hundred tons of steel that will be used to craft the columns that will make up the base of the Freedom Tower is heading for Camden, N.J. by ship from Antwerp, Belgium.
It will be trucked to Lynchburg, Va. The I-beams are heading for the Banker Steel Company in Virginia where they will be reinforced with additional plating.
Industry experts say the I-beams are between 30 and 56 feet long and weigh about 730 pounds per foot. They are called “Jumbo Sections, according to press reports posted by The Roanoke Times, and it is made from the heaviest I-beams available. The steel is expected to arrive in Virginia in the coming weeks and the plating process will be done next month.

Gov. George Pataki says the Freedom Tower is America’s greatest symbol of “our freedom and independence.”
Critics overseas see it differently.
“Its lifts and stairwells are protected by walls of concrete and steel 60cm thick - robust enough to withstand a bomb blast, perhaps even a plane strike. It has wider exit stairs, better emergency systems and fireproofing. Its office floors sit on top of a concrete vault 24m high - not a security feature but accommodation for a key electricity substation,” says the Mail & Guardian online, Africa’s first online newspaper.
“The new 102-storey Freedom Tower will incorporate even more safety features. In response to the police’s comments, it is set quite a way back from the street on all sides, and surrounded by bollards. And, like 7 World Trade Centre, its 69 office floors will also sit on an impregnable base - this time purely for security reasons. The solid core of the base will be disguised by attractive prismatic glass panels that would shatter like a car windscreen in the event of a blast.
…To many, the last thing the Freedom Tower symbolizes is freedom,” the newspaper said. “This is not a problem unique to the World Trade Centre, of course. The US landscape has been transformed, post-9/11, by barriers, X-ray machines, screening facilities - the apparatus of counter-terrorism.”
This is so painfully true, it hardly bares mentioning but just had to be said.

The Freedom Tower will be getting some company when it goes up and defines the New York City skyline.
Three architects presented designs last Friday for three office buildings at Ground Zero that will surround the Freedom Tower to compliment the downtown landscape.
The designers presented three dimensional models of Towers 2, 3 and 4 that will go up along Church Street.
Designers Norman Foster, Fumihika Maki and British architect Richard Rogers said he and the other two skyscraper designers have tried “to create a symbol of this part of New York, this terrible happening.”
The Freedom Tower would be Ground Zero’s center piece but the other buildings would go up be nearer the permanent PATH rail station and near extensive shopping areas.

The talk of the town yesterday was naturally about all of the 9/11 tributes and remembrances that occurred everywhere I went. It was both somber and sobering. Waitresses, bus drivers, the counter girls at McDonalds and everybody else almost everybody, every where I went had the Twin Towers and the people who died their on their minds and in their hearts. These weren’t patriot gestures. They were human responses to a very recent tragedy, attacks not seen on our shores since December 7, 1941 when an American community was attacked and we were plunged into World War II.
The governor of New York used the day to announce a set of new energy and environmental measures that will be used in the design and redevelopment of the World Trade Center properties, including the Freedom Tower, the World Trade Center Office Towers2,3 and 4 and the World Trade Center Memorial and Memorial Museum.
The governor said yesterday the buildings will all go up to achieve the “U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.” This means the buildings will be 20 percent more efficient than the New York State Energy Conservation Construction Code. Developers also agreed to use fuel cell technology to increase efficiency and to provide clean, on-site electric power. The fuel cells will provide 4.8 mega watts of electric power, the largest fuel cell installation in the world.
The price of progress is always high, in this case, hundreds of stories high.