http://www.esquire.com/features/worl...ebuilding-0912
The Truth About the World Trade Center
Joe Woolhead
Ironworker Mike O'Reilly setting a steel column on the northeast corner of the 102nd floor, with the Empire State Building in the background
August 20, 2012
Scott Raab
Quote:
The Freedom Tower's force is its 1,368 feet, exactly the same height as the old North Twin Tower. The building's spire — still being assembled in Canada — will lift it to 1,776 feet.......There will be taller towers in the world when this one is finished — the latest fond hope is early 2014 — but they weren't built atop a mass grave. Their perimeter columns were not sunk seven stories below street level, threaded among the tracks of an active commuter railroad. Those other towers were designed and built by men and women working unburdened by the memory of carnage — and by the certain knowledge that their tower will also loom as a thrilling bull's-eye....The Freedom Tower's true daddy is David Childs, the architect who designed it seven years ago, back when he was a lad of sixty-four with a mere three decades of experience as a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the world's premier corporate architecture firm.
...Spitzer in turn begat Blind David Paterson, who confessed his own philandering one day after his inauguration. And Paterson begat Andrew Cuomo, the current governor. Each had his own political agenda; each appointed a PA executive director of his very own; each viewed the World Trade Center rebuilding — and the Freedom Tower above all — as a redheaded stepchild. As the estimate for completing the tower rose past $3 billion, the PA struck a deal in 2010 with a city real estate developer, the Durst Organization, to help finish, manage, and lease the tower: For $100 million, Durst received a 10 percent equity interest in the building, plus a $15 million management contract that gave Durst 75 percent of any monies saved by cutting construction costs up to $12 million, and a mere 50 percent of every penny cut thereafter.
To nobody's surprise and David Childs's despair, Durst found costs to cut, particularly at the top and bottom of the tower. The prismatic glass chosen to wrap the base of the building was replaced with a cheaper version, requiring that the corners of the tower's first two hundred feet be squared off after those corners had already been tapered to meet the thousand-foot isosceles triangles of the curtain wall. Then Durst took its meat-ax to the tower's 408-foot spire: By simply scrapping the radome —
a sculpted shell of fiberglass and steel designed to sheathe the antennae and maintenance platforms atop the building — shazam! $20 million saved.
Childs learned from a Durst press report that the radome had been whacked, and issued a statement expressing his disappointment and his hope that SOM and the Port could find an alternate design. Durst claimed its radome decision was strictly about maintenance cost and safety, not money. Patrick Foye, current PA executive director, agreed, adding, "What was designed was impractical, unworkable, and quite frankly dangerous."
Considering that SOM has somehow managed to build and create maintenance plans for skyscrapers in many places for many years; and considering that Douglas Durst himself paid to place full-page ads in New York City newspapers in 2007, urging the new governor, Eliot Spitzer, to murder the tower; and considering that without the radome, what was a
spire may be discounted as an antenna mast by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat — the arbiter of building heights — which would mean that the Freedom Tower won't officially stand 1,776 feet tall: Regarding all this, David Childs is mum. Circumspect. Or plain worn-out.
"The simple, pure form — I'm proud of that," he says, and falls silent.
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The spire of 1 WTC, the feature that will bring the building to 1776 feet, being assembled in Montreal, July.
http://archrecord.construction.com/p...ade-center.asp
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Last edited by NYguy; Aug 20, 2012 at 11:53 AM.
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