[Brookside]

A rendering of the skyline after construction of the towers at ground zero are complete.


Designs Unveiled for Freedom Tower’s Neighbors

By David W. Dunlap/NYT/ Published: September 7, 2006

The developer of the new World Trade Center unveiled the designs this morning for three skyscrapers at ground zero, which in their gargantuan scale would reshape the New York skyline.

Each building has a different renowned architect — Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, both of London, and Fumihiko Maki of Tokyo —
and the result is entirely unlike the monolithic uniformity of the original trade center.

The office towers, designated simply Towers 2, 3 and 4 for now, would occupy three sites between Church and Greenwich Streets, along the eastern edge of the trade center site.
Together with the winged PATH terminal and transportation hub, they would form the face that the trade center presents to the rest of downtown, with the signature Freedom Tower behind them.



The designs offered the most comprehensive picture to date of what the finished complex might --
just might -- look like six years from now. Above, the Freedom Tower is to the left of Towers 2, 3 and 4.


Lord Foster’s Tower 2, with a rooftop of four enormous diamonds steeply inclined toward the memorial below, would be as high as the Empire State Building.

Tower 3 by Lord Rogers, framed boldly by an exoskeletal framework of diagonal beams, would reach a pinnacle of 1,255 feet at its corner antennas.
Even the smallest and subtlest building among them, Mr. Maki’s Tower 4, would be taller than the Citigroup Center in midtown.

If these buildings form any kind of ensemble with the Freedom Tower — Tower 1, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of New York — , it would probably be a jazz quartet.


Daniel Libeskind's original Freedom Tower design


Apart from Tower 2, they are also a far cry from the quartz-like forms originally envisioned by Daniel Libeskind, the official master planner of the trade center site.
Though they follow Mr. Libeskind’s dictum that the office towers step down in height progressively from the Freedom Tower,
the intended spiraling effect may be lost on the casual viewer because the buildings do not appear at first glance to be parts of a unified whole.

Instead, it may look like an instance of urban randomness.


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