Exploratory sketches show the process by which SOM arrived at One’s symbolic and physical form.
Interviewing Daniel Libeskind is like downing three cups of espresso. He’s energetic, voluble, and supremely optimistic as he talks about the World Trade Center years after his master plan was selected in 2003. We first spoke then, when he was on top of the world. Years later, my understanding of his contributions to the World Trade Center broke wide open. Like many of his designs, his impact is impressionistic, the sum adding up to more than their many jagged parts. If you choose to linger in the morass that is the figuring out of who was responsible for what at the Trade Center, you will miss a profound truth—Libeskind’s fingerprints are all over it—as well as a paradox: his name does not appear on any building.
His “Memory Foundations” master plan met with an enthusiastic reception. Anchored by the asymmetrical Freedom Tower and other skyscrapers that encircle a deep open pit, it laid claim to the entire site. Libeskind’s plan also defined the Trade Center’s outer spatial limits: Today, one can traverse the site’s full dimensions in a day—from the 9/11 Memorial Museum’s lower level at bedrock, seventy feet below ground, to the observation deck on top of One World Trade Center. His aesthetic sensibility emerges too in Snøhetta’s Pavilion, the fractured wedge atop the 9/11 Memorial Museum. At the Transportation Hub, the skylight is positioned to catch sunlight at the precise angle he had proposed for the Wedge of Light park. A phalanx of architects has designed towers of graduating heights that swirl upward toward the northwest corner of the site, just as he proposed. His plan specified cultural amenities, including an interpretive museum. Perhaps his greatest coup was exposing the slurry wall, now a compelling symbol of American endurance.
Despite these powerful remnants of Libeskind’s original vision, much of what he proposed was swiftly dissected. After the initial, euphoric planning stages, his influence receded as the Port Authority and Silverstein Properties reasserted control. The leases they had signed prior to September 11, which entitled Silverstein to 10 million square feet (929,030.4 m2) of office space, drove the program that ultimately reiterated Beyer Blinder Belle’s earlier plans. Enormous pressure was exerted by the public and the media, which eagerly tracked every modification to the Freedom Tower’s design.
The question of who would design the Freedom Tower was undecided. As a result, its design would undergo many iterations from 2003 to 2005, as these pages illustrate. Libeskind, sanctioned by the public as well as Pataki, felt entitled to design the tower. Silverstein insisted that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), his architects, take the lead. Back in the summer of 2001, Silverstein had hired SOM, a firm that had been involved at the World Trade Center since David and Nelson Rockefeller conceived of it some sixty years ago, to renovate the Twin Towers. Well before the LMDC selected Libeskind’s master plan, SOM was working on its own site plan for Silverstein in collaboration with Cooper, Robertson. Also within weeks of September 11, Silverstein commissioned SOM to design a replacement tower for Seven World Trade Center and was so enamored of the outcome that he asked the firm to design all the buildings at the Trade Center. Libeskind, on the other hand, had never built a skyscraper. Janno Lieber, who directs Silverstein Properties at the Trade Center, recalled Silverstein saying, “Dan, if I’m gonna have open heart surgery I want somebody who’s done it before. And a building of 1,700 feet in height is the architectural equivalent of open heart surgery.”
SOM saw themselves as seasoned guides who could help Silverstein, who did not have extensive experience with exclusive Class A office buildings, navigate the shoals of design and planning. In response to Silverstein’s exclamation, “You’re our new Yamasaki!”—referring to the architect of the Twin Towers—David M. Childs, SOM’s lead architect, and T. J. Gottesdiener, the affable and meticulous managing partner who oversees SOM’s finances and contracts, laid out the conditions of their involvement. “We spent quite a few months with Larry on a very close basis, a couple times a week, having conversations with him, talking about ideas, sketching things out, not only about Seven, but really about the larger site itself,” Gottesdiener said. They discussed the site’s most charged elements—“the issues of the families, the issues of open space, the issue of the connective tissue of the streets, the issues of Larry’s financial investment.… There were a lot of different things at play.”
“You’re experiencing a certain meaning as you walk through a city street or a museum or Ground Zero. That story is not told through words because architecture can’t use words. It uses the means of architecture: shaping space, shaping light, carving the space in a certain way in which you would feel the intimacy, individually, of what that space is.”
DANIEL LIBESKIND
Silverstein said Childs “is a gem of a human being, a superb architect.” Childs described the developer’s efforts at the Trade Center as a “mission he was entrusted to undertake, and he focused on every aspect to make certain it lived up to the challenge.” Some said it was a Faustian bargain. Childs could give Silverstein “enough cachet to survive the byzantine political process and ruthless public scrutiny” at the site, while Silverstein had the power to hand Childs the nation’s most visible and coveted commission, and the recognition that had eluded the architect. Their chemistry worked. Silverstein was determined to heal the hole in the city’s heart with an extraordinary ensemble of buildings and, with guidance from SOM, he did so.
It was soon evident that Libeskind and Childs were designing two very different towers, both of which had some claim to being the “official” design. Their approaches were fundamentally at odds as well: Childs conceived of buildings in terms of their materiality, function, and contextual appropriateness, rather than in the metaphorical imagery that Libeskind preferred. While Libeskind worked on modifying his Vertical World Gardens scheme, SOM was developing a new design, a sophisticated tensile structure with wind turbines in the upper superstructure. To accommodate the turbines, they devised an internal cable system, which they discovered, as they got into the details, would be “unbelievably expensive.” This scheme was developed to a high level of detail, requiring almost two years of serious effort, testing, and expense.
At the same time, the Port Authority continued to implement their own plans. Their mandate to secure the site and restore its transportation capabilities was unquestioned, and they forged ahead—rebuilding structural foundations, replacing below-ground utilities and infrastructure, and, in conjunction with reestablishing the PATH line, planning a vast new underground network of transportation corridors. Their work proceeded entirely apart from the results of the Innovative Design Study, but it determined the placement of many of the planned features. Indeed, in July 2003, well before the Libeskind master plan was finalized, the authority announced that they had selected Santiago Calatrava to design the new transportation center; a few months later, in November, the temporary PATH station designed by the Port’s chief architect, Robert I. Davidson, opened.
Pataki, frustrated that things were not moving ahead as quickly as he’d like, strong-armed an uneasy alliance between Childs and Libeskind, which the latter frequently described as an “arranged marriage.” The governor told the LMDC to call a meeting and not to let Childs and Libeskind leave until an agreement was reached. On July 16, 2003, after an eight-hour negotiating session, the two agreed to design the Freedom Tower together. Childs, however, retained fifty-one percent voting capacity on the design, which, in all practical ways, relegated Libeskind to an advisory role. In September, a refined master site plan was presented to the public. At the end of October, Pataki surprised everyone by announcing that the architects would deliver a new design by December 15—giving the architects, already mired in aesthetic and structural contretemps, a mere six weeks to come up with it.
A new design for the Freedom Tower emerged in December 2003 with its original name, location, and symbolic height—though little else. Actually 1,500 feet tall (457.2 m), with an asymmetrical spire that reached to 1,776 feet (541.3 m), the glass-clad tower would be the tallest in the nation. Its seventy occupant floors would sit on a parallelogram-shaped base and wrap around a concrete core. The skyscraper would twist as it rose, culminating in an open, steel-lattice superstructure supported by two concrete cylinders. This lacy truss would minimize wind loads while maximizing the energy collected by the wind-harvesting turbines housed inside.
That design survived until 2005, when it underwent a seismic reconfiguration. The New York Police Department insisted that the tower’s security standards, comparable to those of a federal courthouse, were insufficient. They demanded that the tower be moved deeper into the site, from twenty-five feet (7.7 m) to an average of ninety feet (27.5 m) from West Street, and that its base incorporate a blast-protection strategy. The NYPD also wanted to enforce 1,000-pound (453.6 kg) truck-bomb standards at all Trade Center towers, but Silverstein refused to turn the bases of his buildings, each one of which would include glass façades and shops at the street level, into bunkers. Instead, standoff zones with sidewalk barriers and sally ports to restrict traffic and building access were used. These security requirements changed the design of One World Trade Center and had an impact on the entire site, which, to the disbelief and anger of many at that time, was still a seventy-foot-deep (21.4 m) hole in the ground.
Libeskind’s original 2002 proposal included a 1,776-foot (541.3 m) tower with a spire. The scheme was called “Vertical World Gardens,” because its upper reaches were to be filled with plants and trees, but it never progressed beyond the conceptual stage. However, the tower’s symbolic height and location on the site’s northwest corner were retained.