Durst Comes Aboard

As the Port Authority saw it, their best move would be partnering with a private developer, one with real “skin in the game,” in the form of a minimum equity commitment of $100 million for a ten percent stake in One World Trade Center. After fielding bids from six developers, they awarded the Durst Organization a ninety-nine-year contract in 2010 to operate and lease the tower. Major changes to the building would follow—from sidewalk to spire—which modified certain design elements or eliminated them altogether.

The Durst Organization’s portfolio includes some of the city’s most iconic skyscrapers, including the technologically advanced 4 Times Square, where the publishing giant Condé Nast was once headquartered. At turns visionary and controversial, Durst is credited with cleaning up Times Square back when it was a seedy no-man’s-land. Chairman Douglas Durst runs the empire with his cousin Jonathan (Jody) Durst, although many family members are involved. Floor-to-ceiling windows at their offices at the Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park frame spectacular vistas of Manhattan south to the World Trade Center. Everything is sleek and modern, with the exception of the wall of vintage photographs of earlier Dursts, who over the past century built the real estate dynasty, now worth $4.4 billion, according to Forbes.

The firm’s long game—precise timing coupled with an unerring instinct for the market’s vicissitudes—is founded on an intense focus on practical economies. That sensibility might be genetic. Douglas’s father conceived of the National Debt Clock, a giant public clock that has been keeping score of the country’s debt, and each family’s share of it, since 1989. First erected at Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street, the clock was moved two blocks north to 44th Street in 2004. But they’re hardly penny-wise. They know when to spend and when to wait, and they believed that filling the World Trade Center with tenants was only a matter of time. “The view is what’s going to solve that building,” Douglas Durst said.

Their first move was to entice their 4 Times Square tenant Condé Nast to lease one third of One World Trade Center in May 2011, giving the tower a much-needed corporate anchor, one with enough star power to attract others. As one incentive, the Port Authority agreed to take on the last four or five years of the company’s existing lease, held by Durst. Although Condé Nast received subsidies, to which all tower tenants were entitled, they “did not negotiate anything more that put city tax dollars or state money on the table,” Chris Ward said. “Condé Nast could have come to the Port Authority and gone to the governor and to the mayor and said, ‘We’ll move downtown if you do this.’… But Condé Nast never played the corporate retention game, never played the ‘you’ve got to pay for us to go downtown’ game.… I give them incredible amounts of credit for that.”

Condé Nast, then chaired by Samuel Irving “Si” Newhouse Jr., who has a keen interest in architecture, had had a pioneering influence on the Times Square area. They knew they would be moving their headquarters into one of the most significant new structures in the city. Recalling the negotiations, Ward said that Condé Nast had “kicked all the tires” before making a decision. Naturally, they were concerned about security. As he recalled it, a pivotal moment came when Donald Newhouse asked, “Will there be another terrorist attack?” Knowing the assembled group wouldn’t want to hear platitudes, Ward addressed their concerns head on. “You’ve heard from David Childs that this is one of the best-built, safest buildings you’ll ever see. I’ve spoken about the campus security plan. But none of that answers your question because that question can only be answered by people who live in a world of risk all the time, no matter where they are. That is every New Yorker’s question. You can live with the risk or you can live without the risk. You can acknowledge it and go on living and deal with it or you can allow it to define you, and then they will have won. And then we got into a good argument about what that really meant.” Ward added, “Condé Nast believed that going down there was as much a message about accepting risk and being in the new modern world as anything else.”

Less predictably, Condé Nast’s decision hinged on the availability of myriad transportation alternatives for their workforce, primarily millennials who lived outside of Manhattan. “We’re hiring young, creative people and all of them need to live by a subway stop outside of Manhattan,” they told Ward. “That’s our workforce. They don’t want to live in Jersey, they are never going to live in Westport, they’re not going to live in Greenwich, and Brooklyn is somewhat full, or getting full, so we need to see everywhere they can get to.” Once Condé Nast signed a lease on nearly 1.2 million square feet (111,483.6 m²) of space, One World Trade Center, and all of lower Manhattan, was primed for transformation.

Douglas Durst is the chairman of the Durst Organization, a century-old New York real estate dynasty, and the third generation of his family to lead the company. In addition to residential holdings, the company owns, manages, and operates a 13-million-square-foot (1,207,739.5 m²) office portfolio that includes eleven premier New York skyscrapers. The firm oversees the development, management, and leasing of One World Trade Center. Born in New York City in 1944 and a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Durst joined the firm in 1968, learning the family business from his father, Seymour, and uncles Roy and David. He is married to Susanne Durst, with whom he has three children. Two of them, Alexander and Helena, also work for the firm. Durst is a director of the Real Estate Board of New York, the New School, the Trust for Public Land, and Project for Public Spaces. A theater lover, he is a member of the board of directors of the Roundabout Theater and of Primary Stages. He is a trustee of the Old York Foundation, established by his father, which is committed to helping people understand Manhattan’s history and buildings. Durst created McEnroe Organic Farm, one of the largest such farms in New York State, which promotes field-to-fork awareness. To let people know he’s an environmentalist, Durst wears green socks every day.

Potential treatments of the communications platform on One’s roof.

 

Dozens of paper models illuminate the search for exactly the right form for the building.

 

Solutions for the tower’s planes, spire, and spire cabling were explored using physical models made of polished acrylic, wood, aluminum, stainless steel, paper, and combinations of those materials.

Dozens of investigatory models broke open SOM’s thinking about One’s design and moved it beyond the constraints of the open-air cable superstructure proposed in 2003. Remnants of earlier designs remain, but their geometries have been blended in new ways, yielding the final design of 2005.

Relief that the washers were safe was quickly followed by surprise that windows on skyscrapers are still washed by humans bearing sudsy squeegees. Although the rigs are controlled electronically, robots cannot “see” dirt like people can. And automated systems cannot properly clean the irregularly shaped buildings that have been made possible by advances in glazing technology and computer software. Tractel, a global manufacturer of scaffolds and window-washing platforms, designed the custom rigs. Those rigs engage with the curtain wall, riding on the tracks formed by the vertical mullions of the glass units. The Durst Organization estimates workers from the Local 32BJ union will be washing Tower One’s windows 200 days a year.

SPIRE

The tower is crowned with a 408-foot (124.4 m) steel spire that is encircled by a three-level communications platform. When measured from the roof slab, which rises to 1,334’ 8” (406.8 m), the spire is actually 441’4” (134.5 m) tall. However, it rests within a 33’ 4” (10.2 m) rooftop well that screens the cooling towers and other equipment. Michael Stein, a managing director at Schlaich Bergermann, likened the spire’s telescoping geometries to those of a tree. It rises from a wide base, eighteen feet (5.4 m) in diameter, gradually tapers, and culminates in a steel and glass beacon. Along its length, the spire is punctuated with circular platforms that allow maintenance access. It is anchored to the roof with four sets of paired cables made of aramid, a plastic much lighter and stronger than steel, which allows radio waves to be transmitted without interruption.

In addition to the spire’s symbolic importance, it has the practical function of housing broadcasting equipment that supports radio, television, and data communications. For New York, the nation’s largest media market, this broadcast infrastructure is vital, replacing the facilities that were lost on September 11. Currently, most major broadcasters operate transmission facilities at the Empire State Building, which has a 200-foot (61 m) broadcast tower, and has been operating as a radio transmitter since 1930. One World Trade Center’s spire, twice as tall, has enough space for every station in the market to install transmitters, according to Durst Broadcasting, which runs the facility.

Defining the building from a distance was critical. Creating a signature architectural flourish on the skyline required lights of extreme intensity to compensate for the altitude of the installation, more than 1,400 feet (426.7 m) up, and also had to factor in the climate, which is different above the clouds and influences how light is perceived. Barbizon Lighting, in tandem with SOM and others, developed a module consisting of 264 fifty-watt LED chips—each three feet (0.9 m) across—that throw intensely focused light down the length of the spire. (In contrast, a handheld LED flashlight uses a one-watt bulb.) The modules are contained inside the rotating beacon (which slows or stops in strong winds to prevent the motor from shearing or burning out in gale-force winds). Barbizon devised an efficient spinning assembly that allows the 264 LEDs to shoot light up and down into mirrors, concentrating the lights into a focused beam, which the human eye reads as a single column of light. This beam is not designed to be seen close up; it can best be perceived as a single column only from a distance.

ENVIRONMENTAL ADVANCES

One World Trade Center is a practical beauty, with an agenda beyond mere dazzle. It is an efficient office building, in terms of financial return, ease of operation, and occupant comfort. Inside, it is a place that simply feels good, endowed with abundant daylight and fresh air. Increasingly, worker performance and well-being, rather than lower energy costs, are sustainability’s best yardstick.

The beacon, the last piece of the tower, was hoisted to the top of the spire in May 2013. Kammetal of Brooklyn fabricated the seven-ton (6.3 metric ton) stainless steel and glass beacon.

The radome’s fate recalls that of the George Washington Bridge (1931), which was to have been clad in pink granite. The bridge’s exposed latticework structure is now considered a treasure of modernist design.

Location, location, location—always applicable to New York City real estate—is also the foundation of sustainable design. Wide access to mass transit is the backbone of eco-efficiency. Approximately ninety percent of those working at the World Trade Center commute via one of the subway, rail, and ferry lines that converge there. Additionally, One World Trade Center incorporates strategies for water and energy conservation, reclaiming one hundred percent of rainwater, operating on one hundred percent renewable energy, and using twenty percent less energy than required by code. Tenants control their own electrical meters, which encourages them to use less.

Floor-to-ceiling windows made of low-e glass maximize the use of natural light and minimize heat gain. Interiors achieve up to ninety percent daylighting, bright enough to read a newspaper without additional lighting; light dimmers kick in on sunny days to save energy. Low-e glass is standard for this building and most others. The e stands for emissivity, referring to the amount of solar radiation that penetrates the glass. Low-e coatings keep inside temperatures at reasonable levels and also offload the huge amounts of heat generated by the mechanical systems. The tower’s windows are fixed and don’t open, further improving thermal performance. On the mechanical floors, an open, louvered system is used.

Throughout the building, the air is filtered twice, using charcoal and MERV-6 filters. To ensure that the air is as pure as possible, it is brought in from the top of the tower, where the air is nearly free of particulates, then filtered, and then filtered again by air handlers on each floor. Air from up high is also cooler, which reduces air conditioning costs. Lower energy costs are also attributable to an unlikely source—the elevators. Even though some of the tower’s elevator motors weigh as much as 50,000 pounds (22,679.7 kg), they are not the biggest energy hogs. More energy, about sixty percent, is typically consumed by air conditioning and ventilation needed when the elevator cabs are in standby mode. At One, however, the elevators actually produce energy. They are equipped with regenerative drive technologies that harness energy from the braking system, generating enough power to feed the entire lighting system and also reduce the amount of air conditioning needed.

Above all, the architects wanted to create a place where people “are the happiest,” Childs said. To understand what future occupants would want, SOM filled the building with hypothetical tenants of diverse professions. Based on those studies, they constructed an “exemplar space,” a high-performance office space that would help tenants design their spaces to “maximize their energy efficiency” and show “how improved the lives of their employees are going to be,” Kenneth A. Lewis of SOM said. A means of green advocacy, the exemplar space was supported by quantifiable energy savings, environmental benefits, and suggestions for low-emission paints, fabrics, and carpeting.

In the United States, a building’s sustainability is typically measured using the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system, which allots points for energy efficiencies. While not proof-positive of environmental responsibility, the rating does quantify certain sustainable features and shows that green office space is an increasingly critical aspect of corporate identity. The early points are easy. “Some of them, quite frankly, are getting so embedded in the building codes, you just do it anyway. You would not put anything but a low-volume flush toilet in a building today,” said Dan Tishman, who managed construction. “As you get towards the higher end ratings, there are more difficult points to consider—do you put a green roof on, or do you put a cogeneration plant in, or do you produce your own power?” Every structure at the Trade Center, including the plaza itself, will apply for its own LEED certification.

The beacon, hoisted to the top of the spire. Together, the spire’s base and mast weigh 1,800 tons (1,633 metric tons). Because of its weight, the spire was shipped in eighteen sections and moved by barge from Montreal to Pier 25 in lower Manhattan.

 

Off with Their Heads

On August 5, 2010, the day the Port Authority said they would partner with the Durst Organization to develop One World Trade, they also announced “a value engineering effort” that would save approximately $26 million. The most visible of these hotly contended design revisions occurred at the very top and bottom of the tower—its spire and the podium on which the building sits. The story of these changes presents in microcosm the many forces that ultimately shaped the tower.

Durst’s agreement with the Port Authority entitled them to a $15 million fee and, as an additional incentive, a percentage of any changes that they initiated that would “result in net economic benefit to the project,” initially pegged at seventy-five percent of cost savings up to $12 million and fifty percent of savings in excess of $12 million. That equation later changed, with Durst receiving seventy-five percent of savings up to $24 million, with percentages stepping down to fifty percent, twenty-five percent, and fifteen percent as savings increased. In other words, Durst would recoup a portion of all design changes that saved the authority money, in addition to a percentage of the tenants’ first-year rent. When asked if the design revisions were driven by these financial incentives, Durst’s lawyer, Gary M. Rosenberg, said that they only made recommendations and the “Port decides whether they are free to do it or not.” “We don’t cut costs,” Douglas Durst said. “We tell them how they can do it. Many times they prefer to spend a dollar rather than save seventy-five cents and give us twenty-five cents.”

SOM intended to sheathe the spire in a fiberglass enclosure called a radome. They conceived of the radome as a work of art, to be made of interlocking triangles, which would complete the tower, providing the visual heft that would allow it to be seen from a greater distance. Sculptor Kenneth Snelson, known for his exquisitely balanced tensile sculptures, worked on its aesthetics. Schlaich Bergermann engineered both the spire and the radome. Eventually, they changed the radome’s structure from an enclosure made from many parts to one of fewer, but much larger, forty-foot-long (12 m) segments, which would be more economical. “We would have designed the spire differently if we knew it was not going to be enclosed,” Michael Stein, a managing director at Schlaich Bergermann, said. “We designed it to optimize function and minimize fabrication costs. It has [an] industrial look now, with all its trusses, diagonals, and platforms exposed, which were intended to be covered by a beautifully designed radome. You could say the building’s masterpiece was that enclosure.”

Here the story wants to split into three columns, labeled He said, She said, and What was built. SOM and Schlaich Bergermann have vast experience in erecting tall buildings, including the Willis Tower, the top of which features antennas encased in radomes. Radomes, in fact, are used on buildings throughout the world to protect maintenance workers and broadcasting equipment from the wind and weather. One World Trade Center’s engineers found, however, that the radome would increase the spire’s wind resistance. Durst was concerned that it would create access issues for maintenance workers, an important consideration as the mast would support future broadcasting equipment that would need periodic inspection. They also cited the radome’s cost, estimated at $20 million, a significant sum in the context of their co-ownership deal.

The mast’s role in maintaining the tower’s height of 1,776 feet (541.3 m) was critical because of its symbolism and because the title of the nation’s tallest tower was at stake. If the mast was deemed a functional antenna and not, like a spire, an integral part of the building, then the tower would be measured only to the roofline, at 1,368 feet (417 m), and lag behind the heights of the Willis and Trump towers in Chicago. But that would be decided later.

Pragmatism prevailed, to the architects’ bitter disappointment, and the radome was removed.

Devising the glass cladding for the podium kicked up another storm. In 2006, David Childs presented a revised tower design to seven hundred engineers and architects gathered for the American Institute of Architects’ New York Chapter’s awards ceremony. He showed a model of a 186-foot-tall (56.7 m) concrete base sheathed in prismatic glass that, catching sunlight, would cast rainbows of color across the base. It would, he believed, delight the public.

Two years later, the Port Authority contracted DCM/Solera, a joint venture between DCM Erectors and Solera Construction, to manufacture and install the glass. DCM/Solera subcontracted Zetian Systems, a firm in Las Vegas, to procure the glass from Sanxin Glass, the Chinese manufacturer that won the contract in 2009. That decision inflamed the three North American glass manufacturers that had also bid on the work and collectively invested “high seven figures in developing products specific to this project.”

Ultimately, although everyone acted in good faith, efforts to produce laminated prismatic glass, which had never been done on this scale before, proved futile. The Chinese glass was brittle. Under pressure, it did not crumble into small bits, as friable automotive safety glass does, but instead fractured into large, potentially dangerous shards. In 2010, Douglas Durst emailed SOM, saying, “You’ve got to stop and come up with a new design.… We had a deadline.” The Port Authority scuttled the prismatic podium cladding.

Durst saw two issues with the podium cladding that had to be solved. “First of all, we set the criteria,” architect Tony Tarazi said. “We told SOM two things, basically: We want this glass to be maintainable because we maintain things, and the second thing was we wanted it to be made modular. We gave them a design challenge. We said we want to use a curtain wall module to do that. Make it work. SOM rose to the occasion.” After exploring various options and materials, SOM designed the glass and stainless steel fin structure that now covers the podium.

Other changes were made at the sidewalk level. A small triangular plaza on the tower’s west side provides an above-ground entrance to One World Observatory and includes a block-long planter that doubles as seating. However, landscape architect Peter Walker, who designed the memorial plaza, originally conceived it as a stainless steel plaza that would have been embedded with lights, providing the tower with a “shimmering skirt.… Light would travel at night, down the base of the building, along the terraces, out into the plazas in this really beautiful, dynamic way,” Jeffrey Holmes said. Walker, equally disheartened, said, “It was going to be something quite extraordinary.… They were ideas about the use of public space that aren’t anyplace else in New York.” However, Durst deemed the design impractical. Walker stepped away, replaced by Mathews Nielsen, the landscape design firm founded by Kim Mathews and Signe Nielsen, which designed the new plaza.

Determined to go beyond LEED, however, SOM, Tishman, Silverstein, the Port Authority, the Bloomberg administration, and others developed additional environmental criteria for the entire World Trade Center. One World Trade Center was the first structure to conform to sustainability guidelines, published in 2005, that would yield “an exemplar for large-scale, mixed development in the Northeast and across the United States.” In October 2005, New York City mandated that nonresidential public buildings costing $2 million or more be built to LEED standards, a law that took effect in 2007.

“Sustainability wasn’t limited to building energy,” said Lewis, who helped develop the environmental standards for the overall site. Renewable energy sources, non-ozone-depleting chemicals, and recycled materials that minimize waste and pollution were used. Designers, engineers, and contractors worked together to identify building methodologies that would minimize light and noise pollution and control air quality during construction. In a congested city, especially on a construction site, controlling air quality reduces respiratory disease, allergies, and asthma attacks. One World Trade Center was constructed using ultra-low-sulfur fuel, catalytic converters, and particulate filters, which since have become a New York City standard. Even after construction is completed, particulate—fine road and construction dust, diesel soot, and other visible and microscopic particles—floats around. To reduce these toxins, the tower’s floors were flushed with fresh air once construction finished.

SAFETY MEASURES

Shock swept through design and engineering communities after 9/11. For professionals, the event forced a move from prescriptive building codes to performance-based design, construction, and emergency management. The public got into the act too, inundating One World Trade Center’s architects with safety suggestions that ran the gamut from helipads (not practical for moving large numbers of people) to zip lines. “The most critical question we had to ask ourselves was, ‘What problems are we solving for?’” said Carl Galioto, a former technical partner at SOM. “Our top priority was maintaining life safety during an extreme event.”

Given the tower’s location, it had to meet stringent safety demands. The designers first had to identify all threats, natural and human, plausible and otherwise, whether explosive, biological, or radiological, and assess their nature and scale in the context of the architectural program. To that end, the tower is prepared for a dark spectrum of worst-case scenarios. Its design incorporates improved building evacuation, optimal firefighting access, more reliable communications systems, dense fireproofing, biological and chemical air filters, areas of refuge for tenants, backup power sources, numerous structural redundancies, and tenant training programs. These life-safety systems meet or exceed those required by current local and national building codes even today, ten years after the start of the design process. “Brute strength veiled in prismatic elegance” is how architect Lewis describes the tower.

The overall structure is protective. Its most vital artery is its reinforced concrete core, with walls that are as much as six feet thick (1.8 m), which contains and shields its life-safety systems, including stairs, elevators, sprinklers, ventilation shafts, and communication antennas, along with multiple back up systems. With the exception of the lobby, there are no occupied floors on the lower 186 feet (56.7 m) of the building, which removes occupants from harm’s way in case of a street explosion. To avoid a progressive collapse of the structure, as happened at the Twin Towers, they implemented a system for protecting the perimeter columns. “Should one or more columns fail, for whatever reason, the building would stand,” Gottesdiener said. The upper glass curtain wall is also blast-resistant. To test it, a full-scale mock-up, three stories tall, was built in a New Mexican desert. Galioto was in a bunker a quarter mile (0.4 km) away, watching the detonation. Even from that distance, he could feel the ground shake, he said, yet the glass remained intact.

It was critical that the design be based on real-life emergency criteria. SOM sought practical advice from the New York City police and fire departments to better understand their operations and firefighting techniques. It was “a process of listening and learning,” Gottesdiener said. Fire chiefs from several battalions attended a planning meeting held early in the design process. “You’re our client,” Galioto told them. “We want to understand what you need to be effective.” Stunned, they replied, “No one has ever asked us that before.” They wanted the lobby, in the event of a fire, to be dedicated to firefighting operations, so all tenant staircases empty into the surrounding streets, not into the lobby, freeing the room for firefighters. One elevator has a shaft and doors designed to ensure safety in a fire. In an emergency, the shaft is pressurized and an emergency door opens into a pressurized, dedicated vestibule that connects to a stairwell reserved for firefighters. And because of the failure of communications systems on 9/11, the tower incorporates multiple wireless systems for emergency responders, as well as tenants, that are closely monitored and, if necessary, can be diverted to transmitters or amplifiers.

In the United States, there has never been a major fire in a commercial building with a functioning sprinkler system. To ensure the effectiveness of One’s sprinkler system, they increased the number of sprinkler heads and the amount and reliability of the water supply. Standpipes, used on both sides of the building, are interconnected on alternating floors: if one breaks, the other one will still work. Each Trade Center building has its own system of capturing and storing rainwater, which is used for fire protection, irrigation, and cooling. Air intakes, which bring fresh air into the building, are on the roof, as far as possible from ground level, to limit the impact of a biochemical attack.