Buildings
Childs Unveils Final Design for Freedom Tower
(archrecord.construction.com - 06/29/2006)
By David
Sokol
 |
click images to view larger
 |
 |
 |
| Images courtesy Silverstein
Properties, Inc., and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP |
The yearlong design development of the
World Trade Center Freedom Tower concludes Friday. To mark
the occasion, on Wednesday David Childs, FAIA, of Skidmore,
Owings & Merrill, presented several final drawings and
maquettes to an audience of 700 architects, engineers, and
clients at the AIA New York Chapter’s 2006 Design Awards.
“The building is remarkably the
same as the one I unveiled a year ago,” Childs said,
but he stressed three significant design refinements since
then. The building’s antenna, for example, will be constructed
as a closed form; Childs and collaborator Kenneth Snelson
originally proposed an open latticework. This final iteration
features a lozenge shape that tapers to a point, and the web-like
frame is slightly visible underneath it. Childs said the iconographic
element will still have the quality of lightness, and suggested
that it would be programmed with light displays and other
dynamic features.
In addition, the glazing surrounding
the building’s 69 office floors will eliminate spandrels.
Each glass component will stretch to the floor’s full,
13-foot, 4-inch height. This characteristic offers “a
unique character of monumentality,” Childs said. “It
also provides a marker in the sky of the most important place,
the memorial itself.”
In introducing changes made to the base
of the Freedom Tower, Childs confided that he “wasn’t
sure” of the architecture’s ultimate evolution.
Safety concerns forced the design team to wrap the bottom
186-foot-tall portion in a wall of concrete that is almost
uniformly three feet thick. “The concrete could have
looked like a barracks,” he said. The solution: 2,000
sheets of prismatic, laminated safety glass will clad the
concrete. The 4-by13-foot panels features prisms of different
depths; the variety is meant to animate the skin with a variety
of shadows and colors that move according to weather conditions,
or with the changing perspective of the viewer. “Most
consistent with the building would be to build the space out
of glass,” Childs noted. “This is a friendly, warm
plinth to the shaft above it.”
The multifaceted skin will fold and
morph into seating at the plaza level. Childs, who envisioned
“confusion about whether the building is growing out
of the ground,” is working with Peter Walker, who is
also the memorial’s landscape architect, on this aspect
of the project.
World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein
introduced Childs at the event. He promised listeners that
the Freedom Tower—for which below-grade excavations,
footings, and foundations were begun in April—would be
ready for occupancy by 2011, and the entire site completed
the following year.
|
