At the same time, it was becoming clear that the hybrid design presented in December would be costly to build. Who, exactly, was going to pay for the additional costs associated with its lofty spire and cable structure? Silverstein argued that he was obligated to rebuild the office tower only, and that the state should pay for its symbolic elements. Yet the state did not want to cover these additional expenses. Although the NYPD’s security concerns caused more delays, they came at an opportune time, conveniently breaking the stalemate over costs and initiating a redesign of the skyscraper, this time designed entirely by SOM.
Libeskind left his ivory tower long ago. Today, he waxes philosophic about his role downtown. “A lot of people talked about my frustrations. That’s part of life. Who says that life should be easy? Who said that things should be handed to you on a platter? You should struggle,” said the raised-in-the-Bronx scrapper. “New York is a tough place. You need to engage with everyone, work with everyone, and my task—and the master plan—was to make a consensus among parties that initially didn’t agree on anything. Larry had his own ideas, SOM, the city, the governors, the Port Authority, everyone. My task in the master plan, my mission, was, how do you make consensus not through a mediocre compromise, but through ideas that are profound and are practical—and that can actually be built.” And because he could not resist, he added, “By the way, the SOM building follows the plan very well. It does exactly what I asked for.” 
Larry A. Silverstein (b. 1931) is the Chairman of Silverstein Properties, a real estate development and investment firm that has developed, owned, and managed 35 million square feet (3,251,606.4 m3) of office, residential, hotel, and retail space. The octogenarian possesses an unyielding drive, a defining characteristic that, like water on stone, erodes anything in its path. Proof of his unremitting determination is everywhere, from the completion of Seven World Trade Center in 2006, when virtually nothing else at the Trade Center was visible above ground, to his near-daily presence in the papers in connection with Two, Three, and Four World Trade Center, the three properties he is developing on the site, which represent a $7 billion investment. Seemingly tone deaf to politics, public opinion, and naysaying, he has pushed ahead, relentlessly, to rebuild the World Trade Center. In many ways, he is its unsung hero.
In July 2001, he closed on the largest real estate transaction in New York history, outmaneuvering many larger companies, when he signed a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center and the other buildings on the site for $3.25 billion, only to see them destroyed six weeks later. Earlier, he had acquired the rights to develop Seven World Trade Center, also destroyed on September 11. In 2006, Silverstein relinquished the right to develop One and Five World Trade Center to the Port Authority in exchange for Liberty Bond financing for Two, Three, and Four World Trade Center. “Did we think it was fair? Not necessarily, but the important thing was to keep the momentum going,” he said.
He is criticized and lauded, often in one breath, by those who have worked with him. An assessment by Chris Ward, former executive director of the Port Authority, is typical: “Silverstein is the one who said, repeatedly, ‘Let’s get this thing built.’ And stuck with it. And stuck with it.” He adds that Silverstein “deserves tremendous credit. That does not mean he is not an incredibly difficult, opinionated, driven negotiator of the highest order and will do what he needs to do. And I say that with a great degree of respect.… His perseverance and his continuing willingness to go into the fray and keep saying, ‘This has to happen’ was incredible.”
Growing up in a seventh-floor walk-up in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, he learned his trade from his father, Harry G. Silverstein, who leased building space in the rags, woolens, and remnants district of lower Manhattan, now SoHo. “It was the best teaching I could’ve had,” Silverstein recalls. His father taught him the art of negotiating, “how to bring people together, how to cajole, how to urge. I also learned that by being a broker, I would starve to death.” Silverstein put together a syndicate of small investors and bought a building on East 23rd Street. “It was a sink-or-swim set of circumstances. And therefore we had to swim.… We went slowly but surely from modest renovations to gut renovations to total rehabs.” It was just a matter of time before they “decided to dig the foundation, pour the slab, and build the building from scratch.”
Silverstein prefers not to discuss his wide philanthropy. However, he contributes his time and resources to organizations that are dedicated to education and medical research, humanitarian causes, and the arts. A graduate of New York University, Silverstein served as vice chairman of the NYU Board of Trustees and continues to serve on the board of the NYU Langone Medical Center. He is the former chairman of the Board of UJA-Federation and a founding trustee of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. He has served on the boards of the New York Philharmonic and National Jewish Health in Denver. A classical music enthusiast, passionate yachtsman, and devoted New Yorker, he is married to Klara Silverstein, a union of nearly six decades.
One World Trade Center’s lead architect, David M. Childs, FAIA (b. 1941), is chairman emeritus and a consulting design partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). Urbane, magnanimous, and patrician, Childs attended Deerfield Academy before studying architecture at Yale. He joined SOM’s Washington, D.C., office in 1971 and, in 1984, relocated to SOM’s New York office, where he became the firm’s first chairman and senior design partner.
Like the elegantly detailed buildings that his firm is known for, Childs’s edges are polished after years of dealings with an international clientele. Although some disparage his designs as being “polite,” he has the political chops to see projects, especially complicated, messy ones like those at the Trade Center, to completion. He makes it evident, with a sincerity that goes beyond self-deprecation, that he cares deeply about what people say about One World Trade Center, his skyscraper, the project he says they’ll write about in his obituary.
Childs built his reputation on buildings and spaces that sensitively respond to their settings and programs, a refined sensibility that is evident in his projects around the world. They include the JFK International Arrivals Building, the renovation and preservation of Lever House, Time Warner Center, Seven World Trade Center, and 35 Hudson Yards, all in New York City. In Washington, D.C., Childs designed the Washington Mall and the Constitution Gardens master plan, the Four Seasons and Regent hotels, headquarters for National Geographic and U.S. News and World Report, and the Dulles Airport main terminal expansion. Internationally, Childs has completed such projects as the Toronto International Airport; the Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv; and Tokyo Midtown, a mixed-use development in the Roppongi District, which reclaimed a site that had not been accessible in sixty years.
A vigorous advocate for the public good, he has chaired the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts in Washington, both presidential appointments. He has also served as chairman of the boards of the American Academy in Rome, the Municipal Art Society, and the National Building Museum, and has been an active member of the boards of the Museum of Modern Art, the Architectural League, and the National Housing Partnership Foundation. He has participated as a visiting critic or studio leader at leading schools of architecture, and has shared his knowledge at conferences and symposia internationally.
“America didn’t lose its freedom on 9/11. We were free before and we were free afterwards, and the attack did not destroy our freedom.… Draping the entire site forever in that moment denied its future—for where it could go, or should go, and would go over history.”
CHRISTOPHER O. WARD
Like few other architects, Daniel Libeskind is able to communicate architecture’s spiritual, aesthetic, and moral responsibilities. Buildings, he believes, must do more than provide shelter. They are an expression of both body and soul, concrete proof of things invisible, and the means by which life’s mysteries are understood.
Born in postwar Poland in 1946, Libeskind and his family settled in the Bronx. He became an American citizen in 1964. A virtuoso pianist as well as an accordionist in his youth, he switched to architecture, attending Cooper Union and eventually establishing a practice in Berlin in 1989. Until his “Memory Foundations” master plan garnered international attention, he was best known for his theoretical explorations of architecture.
His first building, the zinc-clad Jewish Museum in Berlin, with its zigzag shape and evocative void, opened in 2001 to wide acclaim. It was followed by numerous museum commissions, including the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, England; the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco; the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen; and extensions to the Denver Art Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and the Zhang Zhidong and Modern Industrial Museum in Wuhan, China.
After receiving the World Trade Center master plan commission in 2003, Libeskind moved his firm to Manhattan. Since then, Studio Libeskind, which he co-founded with his wife and business partner, Nina Libeskind, has designed a variety of commercial and residential structures worldwide, including Westside, a mixed-use project in Bern, Switzerland; the Crystals at City Center in Las Vegas; and Kö-Bogen, an office and retail complex in Düsseldorf. He has also realized residential towers in Busan, South Korea; Singapore; Warsaw; Toronto; Manila; and Sao Paulo.