Another opinion on the Freedom Tower
(NY Times)
Freedom From Fear
By GUY NORDENSON
February 16, 2007
THERE is still time to take the fear out of the Freedom Tower. Despite reports that Gov. Eliot Spitzer has now decided to back the project, the fact is that with a little time it is still possible to rethink the tower and make it both secure and welcoming without setting back the overall ground zero construction schedule.
The current design, which was unveiled in 2006, was created under pressure from former Gov. George Pataki, who tied his presidential ambitions to its swift completion. In this plan, the architects and engineers, for several reasons, took a very conservative approach. The result, a 20-story fortified wall around the base of a 1,776-foot tower, hardly evokes freedom — rather, it embodies fear and anxiety.
I write from experience.
Some four years ago I began working with David Childs, the principal architect, on the first version of the Freedom Tower. This was a 2,000-foot-tall structure of torquing glass and steel; the bottom half contained the office building while the top half was a broadcast tower composed of an open framework of cables and trusses. (Also in 2002 The New York Times Magazine published a proposal of mine for a 2,000-foot-tall broadcast tower on the site that we have been working on intermittently ever since.)
The structure would have given the tower the widest TV broadcast capacity possible, at the maximum height allowed by the Federal Aviation Administration. The office floors ended at about 70 stories, matching the tallest downtown office building, with as much overall floor area as the current design and with every floor having direct access to the ground level by elevator. The open, cable-stayed upper 1,000 feet of the structure would have had wind turbines that would have met more than 20 percent of the building’s energy needs, a fitting symbol for a city whose seal includes a windmill.
While the basic design won over almost everyone involved with the project, including many of the governor’s advisers, Mr. Pataki asked the architect to amend it in late 2003. Specifically, he wanted Mr. Childs to reduce the upper structure from 2,000 to 1,500 feet, and to add a slender 276-foot antenna to make it a symbolic 1,776 feet tall. The alterations, unfortunately, made the design impossible to build, and eventually the entire concept was abandoned.
So Mr. Childs presented the revised Freedom Tower, which meets Mr. Pataki’s interests but bears no resemblance to his initial design. It is in every way inferior, and those flaws — in terms of aesthetics, economics, security and ethics — are all rooted in the way in which it was conceived.
First, the aesthetics. The critics have not been kind to the Freedom Tower. The solid geometry is self-centered — this newspaper’s critic wrote that it “evokes a gigantic glass paperweight with a toothpick stuck on top” — without any sense of orientation or any recognition of its place in the skyline. This is a shame, especially considering what the same architects showed they were capable of next door, in the elegant new 7 World Trade Center building.
But it is understandable: not only were the architects rushed by Mr. Pataki, but after the ordeal of the first design’s development and rejection, it seems natural that Mr. Childs would reach for a simple geometry the second time around. The result, unfortunately, would be second rate in Chicago, Dubai or Shanghai, and should not be the symbol of New York City, let alone freedom.
Second, the finances of the new building are a disaster. The Freedom Tower will most likely cost around $3 billion to build, for 2.6 million square feet of office space. The cost of $1,150 a square foot is nearly twice what it cost to build the new Museum of Modern Art, for which I was also the engineer. Of the cost, about $1 billion will be paid with insurance money collected by the ground zero leaseholder, Larry Silverstein.
Assuming that the owners of the Freedom Tower, the Port Authority, are able to sign government or other tenants on at market rate rents of $50 to $60 per square foot, the income on the entire property, after expenses and taxes and including the rent on the TV antennas, will be at most $100 million dollars a year, which is less than 4 percent return on the investment. The Port Authority would do better buying back its bonds, which now offer a return of greater than 5 percent. What is more, the property is probably uninsurable, so the Port Authority will be spending billions for a below-market return and a substantial risk.
Third, the security concerns that have blocked so many facets of the plan remain unresolved. Last January, I sat in a meeting in the New York City police commissioner’s conference room and listened to a debate on various security plans and blast-resistant designs for the different projects at ground zero. In the end, James Kallstrom, Governor Pataki’s senior counterterrorism adviser and the security coordinator for ground zero, closed the discussion by saying, “Structural engineers will have to certify that the design meets the threat basis.”
I understood this to mean that as long as the engineers signed off on the design, everything would be considered fine. This is worrisome, especially given that that the computer software that is being used to simulate the blast effects is proprietary and classified by the federal government, and that the structural engineers being asked to certify the building do not have clearance or direct access to the program, only the data given them by the software.
In contrast, the approach taken by most private building owners in the city — which generally includes physical tests, repeated independent computer simulations and help from the Defense Department’s technical support working group — provides real assurances of security. The Freedom Tower deserves the same sound engineering approach as any commercial project.
The final problem with the tower is less obvious: the politically charged situation under which it was conceived has led to ethical problems in terms of tenancy. Mr. Silverstein never wanted to build the Freedom Tower, and few could blame him. The site is awkward, too far from public transportation and Wall Street, and the tower is too big for the downtown real estate market to absorb in time to realize a good profit. Last year, he exchanged this problem for the three towers he is now developing on the site, leaving the Port Authority saddled with the Freedom Tower.
The authority itself, however, will not occupy the Freedom Tower but will rent space from Mr. Silverstein in Tower Four, at the opposite corner of the site. So far, state agencies, under pressure from Mr. Pataki, have signed on for about 400,000 square feet (roughly one-sixth of the tower’s floor space) Federal agencies including the Customs Service and the Secret Service will most likely sign on for 600,000 square feet.
In other words, government employees are being conscripted to occupy a tower that no private company or authority — including the building’s owner — will take. At a time when there is considerable anguish over the 20,000 additional troops that President Bush wants to send to Baghdad, it seems that the ethics of forcing thousands of state and federal employees to work in fear in the Freedom Tower is fundamentally flawed.
The good news is that it is not too late to change things. The current construction of the foundation and subterranean levels does not lock us into a final design above ground. The work should continue up to the ground level and stop (this should take about a year) so that the architects and engineers are given another chance to design a Freedom Tower that, like other buildings rising downtown, is financially viable and a secure and welcoming work environment worthy of its place in the skyline.
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), what would the author have said if they had actually rebuilt the Twin Towers as they were? I mean, they were just two big boxes, nothing "fancy". Would he have been as critical?
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