One World Trade Center: Difference between revisions

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Freedom Tower
Official name	World Trade Center Tower One
Height to tip	1,776 ft (541 m)
Height to roof	1,368 ft (417 m)
Floors	82
Ground Breaking	April 27, 2006
Top off	2011 (est.)
Opening	Unknown
Gross floor area	Unknown

The Freedom Tower is the planned centerpiece building of the new World Trade Center complex in New York City, whose predecessors were destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

A revised design for the tower was formally unveiled on June 29, 2005, to satisfy security issues raised by the New York City Police Department in April of that year. On April 26, 2006, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey approved a conceptual framework that enabled foundation construction to begin on the following day while a formal agreement is drafted. It is expected that the formal agreement will be finalized by September 2006. Construction began on April 27, 2006, the 75th anniversary of the opening of the Empire State Building with a formal ceremony that took place when the construction team arrived.^[1]

The tower will be located in the northwest corner of the 16-acre (65 000 m²) World Trade Center site, bounded by Vesey Street, West Street, Washington Street and Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan.

The height to the top of the spire is set to be 1,776 feet (541 m), a tribute to the year 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed. The Freedom Tower is intended to be taller than Chicago's Sears Tower and become the tallest building in the United States, and among the tallest buildings in the world when completed. A new proposed tower in Chicago, Fordham Spire, is expected to be taller and constructed as early as 2010.

Depending on the angle from which the building is viewed, the Freedom Tower is designed to appear as either a rectangular shape like both of the previous towers, or as a massive obelisk design. The walls at the base are offset 45 degrees from the walls of the highest floor with interlocking triangle facades.

Construction on below-grade utility relocations, footings, and foundations for the Freedom Tower began in the first quarter of 2006, four and a half years after the World Trade Center's destruction and three and a half years after the Pentagon was completely reconstructed.

Many remaining vestiges of the concepts drawn from the 2002 competition have been discarded. The Freedom Tower will now consist of simple symmetries and a more traditional design intended to bear comparison with selected elements of the existing New York skyline. There will now be a central spire drawing from precedents such as the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building rather than an off-center spire intended to echo the Statue of Liberty.

The Freedom Tower will not have the "skeletal frame" of latticework and wind turbines: these have been abandoned. Wind turbines are generally not suited for urban environments because of turbulence created by other nearby buildings; however, the singular height of the proposed tower would have presented a unique opportunity in this context. The latticework would have constituted nearly 30% of the building's height. The turbines were expected to generate 20% of the entire building's power.

Because there will no longer be a frame of latticework above the habitable space, the observation deck will now be higher than the previous design. Instead of 1,100 feet (335 m), the new deck will allow views from 1,362 feet (415 m), the ceiling height of the previous Tower Two. This will be higher than the destroyed Twin Towers' observation decks, and also 9 feet higher than the observation Skydeck of the Sears Tower in Chicago.

Like the World Trade Center, there will be a large public lobby, with 80 foot (24 m) ceilings, and a restaurant. However, owing to security concerns, the first 30 feet (9 m) up will now lack windows and will rely instead on artificial lighting and openings from 30 to 80 feet (9 to 24 m) high to illuminate the area. The next 120 feet (37 m) immediately upward will also lack windows, containing only mechanical floors to fill out the massive cubic base of the building. The exterior of this base will be encased in reflective sheet metal cladding, likely stainless steel and titanium. Interlocking reflective sheets of these materials along the facade will illuminate in turn as the sun moves across the sky above it.

Other new safety features will include 3 foot (90 cm) thick walls for all stairwells, elevator shafts, risers, and sprinkler systems; extremely wide "emergency stairs"; a dedicated set of stairwells exclusively for the use of firefighters; and biological and chemical filters throughout its ventilation system. The building will no longer be 25 feet (7.6 m) away from West Street—with the redesign and smaller base (the same width and length now as each of the previous towers), the Freedom Tower will average 90 feet (27 m) away from the street. At its closest point, West Street will be 65 feet (20 m) away. The windows on the side of the building facing in this direction will be equipped with specially tempered blast-resistant plastic, which will look nearly exactly the same as the glass used in the other sides of the building.

"Ultra-clear" glass, as opposed to reflective or tinted glass, is proposed for the fenestration generally. This will benefit internal daylight propagation; however, at this stage it is unclear how the corresponding issue of solar heat gain will be addressed. Although the roof area of any tower is comparatively limited, the building will implement a greywater recycling scheme involving rainwater collection.

On top of the spire, the antenna may, pending design finalization, be the new broadcasting system to various New York television channels and radio stations, replacing the antenna on top of the North Tower of the former World Trade Center complex.

Also atop the spire will be an intense beam of light that will be lit at night and will likely be visible over a thousand feet (300 m) into the air above the tower. New York City is a suitable place to set such a light pointing towards the sky without complaints of light pollution by astronomers, as the night sky in locations near New York City are already far too bright for serious astronomical observers.

Security concerns outlined in April 2005 by the New York Police Department "have set off a serious reassessment of plans for the World Trade Center site. People involved in the rebuilding effort say that the revisions that need to be made to the site's most prominent feature, the Freedom Tower, could delay the start of construction from several months to a year."^[2]

In May 2005, it was announced that a redesign was being done to provide for security from ground level bombs. "The building itself, except for the first 150 to 200 vertical feet (46–60 m), will be the same," said Port Authority Vice Chairman Charles Gargano.^[3]

Upon the redesign, announced and revealed on June 29 2005, the upper building design changed significantly. Above the first 150 to 200 feet (50 to 60 m), the redesign may be as much a result of popular opinion and dissatisfaction in New York City with the previous design, or perhaps the growing popularity of the Twin Towers 2 movement, as with the concerns of safety. The new redesign much more closely resembles the character of the previous towers than did the original plans. "It is a rare moment when new is better," said Design Partner David Childs, "I feel better about this than the original. The building is simpler, architecturally. It is unique, yet it subtly recalls, in the sky, the tragedy that has happened here." ^[4]

The World Trade Center's North Tower featured an occupied floor at 1,355 feet (413 m). Though not occupied by office space, the Freedom Tower's observation deck is set to be higher, at about 1,362 feet (415 m). The Sears Tower, Taipei 101, and other buildings currently have occupied floors higher than the Freedom Tower. Union Square Phase 7 and the Shanghai World Financial Center will have roofs and floors higher than Freedom Tower's highest roofs and floors.

If the spire and antenna height (the criteria of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat) are included, the Freedom Tower might, when completed, qualify as the tallest office building in the world, if no other rival towers are completed first. Emaar, the builders of the Burj Dubai tower, are keeping the final height of their building secret, but speculation is that it will surpass all existing structures at a height of over 2,300 feet (700 m) when it is finished in 2008, three to four years before the Freedom Tower. The height of the Freedom Tower will probably not be increased before completion, due to the symbolism of having an exact height of 1,776 feet. The tip is a total of 440 feet (124 m) and it resembles in structure a spiked stiletto.

At its expected height the Freedom Tower will still be shorter than many existing buildings. At 553.33 metres (1,815 ft., 5 inches) the CN Tower continues to be the Tallest Freestanding Structure On Land, a title it has held since its completion on June 26, 1976.

Rebuilding at the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan began four and a half years after the Twin Towers were destroyed by terrorists on September 11, 2001. The project had been delayed due to acrimonious disputes over money, security and design but the last major issues were resolved on April 26, 2006 with a deal between developer Larry Silverstein and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The site will include three other high rises plus a residential tower that will surround a memorial, museum and cultural center dedicated to what relatives of the September 11 victims consider a sacred site. Construction is scheduled to be finished by 2011 or 2012.

Larry Silverstein of Silverstein Properties, the leaseholder and developer of the complex, will retain control of the surrounding buildings, while the Port Authority gets full control of the tower itself. The Port Authority estimates the Freedom Tower to cost US$1.5 to 2 billion alone, or about $675 per square foot ($7,300/m²). The Port Authority plans to occupy at least one-third of the office space, but no private-sector tenants have yet been found.

The master planner of the World Trade Center site is architect Daniel Libeskind of Studio Daniel Libeskind, although David Childs of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, an architect hired by Silverstein, has largely supplanted Libeskind as architect of the Freedom Tower itself.

Some of the tenants of the World Trade Center are expected to return to the site in the Freedom Tower, including a new Windows on the World, which was formerly on the 106th floor of One World Trade Center.

The design of the Freedom Tower has generated some controversy due to the limited number of floors (a maximum of about 80) that were designated for office space and other amenities. The floor limit was imposed by Silverstein, who expressed concern that higher floors would be a liability in a major accident or terrorist attack. While the tower's 82 floors are more than the initial limit, it will lag significantly behind its peer group such as the Sears Tower (with 108 occupied floors) or the Taipei 101 (with 101). In this respect it will have more in common with the Empire State Building, which despite its 102-floor total height has almost no usable space beyond the 86th floor observation deck. Additionally, some architects contend that a taller building should have been considered, suggesting that for reasons of cost and engineering, taller buildings may actually be safer.^[5]

There have also been accusations of cronyism on the part of New York Governor George Pataki, using his influence to get the winning architect's bid picked as a personal favor for a close friend.^[6]

Other Freedom Tower opponents saw the previously-proposed latticework and antenna on top of the tower to be a mask of the reality that the tower's inhabited stories were to have been fewer than the Twin Towers, and in this way would therefore have been shorter than its predecessors. These critics saw replacing two towers with a single, shorter tower to be inappropriately humbling and contrary to the proud nature of New York and the United States, even as a symbolic retort in the face of terrorism.^{[citation needed]} Many of them believe the absence of the iconic Twin Towers creates an ongoing emotional wound that can only be healed by rebuilding the towers as they looked before, as tall or taller.

Before the empty frame of latticework entered the picture, an earlier design of the site, called Memory Foundations, was fairly well received in public opinion. The latticework concept was actually a compromise between the Memory Foundations architect Liebeskind and Childs, who is largely responsible for the final redesign. That intermediate design was probably the least popular of the three designs and appeared to be a predictable shortcoming that should have been foreseeable from such a compromise between diametrically opposed visions for the trade center site. It was most widely criticized for its immense latticework which many observed to look rather skeletal.

In the original Memory Foundations proposal, the Freedom Tower was to include a vertical garden memorial known as "Gardens of the World." This idea appeared to have been rejected on the basis of a lack of rentable value, and the gardens were replaced in the intermediate design by the wind turbines and latticework that proved to be less popular. As of the latest design, there appears to be no attempt to integrate either concept into the tower.

Some critics have noted that the initial choice for this design of the Freedom Tower was based on the elaborate latticework, the vertical gardens, and an otherwise unique shape after all the other design contenders were eliminated for being too unoriginal. After the choice, practically all these unique features have been removed from the updated designs in favor of a more simplified monolithic structure, putting into doubt whether or not the public would have chosen this new design had it been the one originally presented.

• Buildings and architecture of New York City
• 50 Tallest buildings in the U.S.
• World's tallest structures
• List of Skyscrapers
• Freedom Tower Silver Dollar
• Memory Foundations
• World Trade Center
• World Trade Center Memorial
• World Trade Center site
• Twin Towers 2
• Hotel Attraction
• WTC Towers Memorial (unofficial)

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• World Trade Center Official site for new WTC.
• Skidmore, Owings & Merrill News about the Freedom Tower.
• Lower Manhattan Development Corporation
• Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
• Project Rebirth Documentation of the reconstruction of Ground Zero.
• Google Earth Hacks Freedom Tower plug-in for Google Earth.
• Freedom Tower Facts & WTC Image Gallery
• Freedom Tower on Emporis
• Larry Silverstein Surrenders Control of Freedom Tower