“This is not just any development project—this is the World Trade Center. Yes, we must build it to create jobs and continue the transformative progress downtown and build it so that a completed World Trade Center can realize its full potential as an economic driver for the region. But, just as importantly, we must build it because completing the World Trade Center site is our collective duty.”
PATRICK J. FOYE Executive Director of the Port Authority, addressing the agency’s board, April 23, 2014
THREE WORLD TRADE CENTER
Boldly designed by the architect and urbanist Richard Rogers, Three World Trade Center rises eighty stories, a sculptural and steely presence in a neighborhood of sleek glass. A compelling building, whether considered aesthetically or politically, it illuminates the financial considerations that determined the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, and sheds light on how skyscrapers, structures that are particularly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the economy, are funded. The story of its financing reveals how public and private funding influences large-scale commercial construction, and also offers a rare look into the Port Authority’s internal governance.
Architects Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners designed the tower with a façade layered with steel screens and braces that catch sunlight, reducing the visual bulk of the 2.8 million-square-foot (260,128.5 m2) building. This treatment also allows the public to “read” the building and understand the structural logic of its construction, a hallmark of Rogers’s work ever since he designed Paris’s no-frills Pompidou Center, or Beaubourg, in 1977 with Renzo Piano, both of them unknown architects at the time. Since then, Rogers has shaped understanding of what makes cities livable—density, lively communal spaces, renewable energy, and access to mass transit—giving early voice to an urban ethos when there was almost no discourse on the subject. Knighted by Elizabeth II in 1991 and a 2007 Pritzker laureate, Rogers likes to quote an ancient Athenian oath, which young men had to swear to before they became full citizens: “We will leave this city not less, but greater, better, and more beautiful than it was left to us.”
On all four sides, the façades are set back, angled, and undercut, so the building becomes progressively more slender as the tower rises to its full height of 1,170 feet (356.6 m). The stepped profile enhances views for tenants on the upper floors and, in a civic gesture, views from the other towers as well. Per the master plan, the building had to complement the memorial precinct. Accordingly, its low, eight-story podium frees up air and light around the plaza. On Greenwich Street, the triple-height glass façade subtly reflects the memorial.
The tower is built around a concrete core, yielding column-free floors with unobstructed views, collaborative work environments, and reduced build-out costs. “The efficiency that comes from column-free space is staggering,” said Larry Silverstein, who is developing the property. “We can fit more people with their rear-ends on chairs at desks on each floor in any one of our buildings much more effectively and efficiently than you can in buildings that are fifty, sixty years old, where you have a ton of columns.… Even though the rate per square foot is higher, the density is so much greater.” Tenants can build out their floors with fewer materials, lowering their construction costs. All Trade Center tenants receive additional economic benefits, including city and state tax incentives and the right to buy electricity for less than it costs elsewhere.
Rising from an eight-story base, the tower houses five trading floors, fifty-four office floors, and eight mechanical floors. With energy costs that are significantly lower than a typical Manhattan office building, it is slated to earn LEED Gold Certification once it opens in 2018. Adamson Associates was the architect of record; WSP USA was the structural engineer.