They should have stayed in. Duffy’s intelligent plan called for nine leaning, bending mid-sized towers rising to the same height, topped by gardens. It ignored the demand, widespread among the public, that whatever was built at Ground Zero should restore something striking to New York’s skyline. Instead, Duffy’s contribution insisted on keeping a low profile. This approach meant the scheme would hold out a welcome gesture of reconciliation to the largely mid-rise lower Manhattan neighbourhood from which the World Trade Center towers always seemed to stick out egregiously.
Despite not being popular at the time, Duffy’s design had a conceptual rigour and a confident modesty that pointed forward to new possibilities in American tall buildings. To be authoritative, for example, and to provide the large quantities of square footage demanded by big-city clients and tenants, a large building need not loom.
The other highly suggestive proposal came from the group formed for the purpose by Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey, Peter Eisenman, and Steven Holl. Instead of trying to touch the sky with long fingers of steel and glass, as did most designers who entered the competition, the so-called New York team proposed a grid-like composition of five massive rectilinear upright structures, each 1,111 feet tall, linked by horizontal elements several stories thick.
These buildings were to stand in two perpendicular rows, forming a ninety-degree angle. Their elevations, it appears, were intended to reproduce the Manhattan street grid, as though lifted from where it lies into vertical position. The design was surely strict, imposing, and minimalist. But it drew on and refreshed the history of the midcentury skyscraper as pioneered by Mies van der Rohe — the famous box, in particular, along with the once-omnipotent grid — and the belief in the expression of structure’s plain geometry, as well as the conviction that buildings arise as mindful responses to their sites on the face of the earth. The architecture itself was refined and majestic and as intellectually aristocratic and conceptually taut as anything Mies thought up in his American years.
Each tower plan offered to resupply the World Trade Center site with some architectural attribute lost on 9/11: grandeur, vertical drama, a metallic gleam in the sky over Manhattan, or mere hugeness. But all of them, memorably, also featured inventive treatments of how architecture is encountered intimately and where it fails or succeeds most tellingly: at ground level. In most ids schemes, the bases of towers and the terrain around them are permeable and welcoming, often vast but still unmenacing. In no other aspect do the ids proposals contrast more sharply with the less visionary work that has come since.
Perhaps the best example of this discrepancy is the Freedom Tower, for which construction officially began in 2004: a ponderous building braced for attack, corseted in glass camouflaged antibomb concrete up to its twentieth storey. Childs’s structure is a curious, crabwise move in the historical development of skyscraper design in America. Since the birth of the tall building form in Chicago more than a century ago, American skyscrapers have tended to exhibit ever-greater democratic openness at the base, inviting the public into a ceremonial space — a majestic lobby, a handsome banking hall — from which the shaft springs up toward heaven. The flair and sophisticated urbanism long notable in the best American skyscrapers have always begun at the ground, typically gracing the structure’s rise right from the earth to the crown, through carefully calibrated changes of scale and form. By contrast, the Freedom Tower, clutching its concrete skirt anxiously around its mighty feet — as the police and “security specialists” have said it must — will, when completed, almost certainly seem frightened, reactive, and defensive — traits we have come not to expect from the American skyscraper.
With last September’s announcement of what’s to come next now that the Freedom Tower is under way, it appears that the various controlling interests at Ground Zero have gotten what they wanted all along: a group of large, classy, responsible, and unexciting office towers by senior, mainline architects. We should not expect much from this ensemble. The mise en scène of four very big, quite different buildings, crowded into this tight location — each piece branded by its architect’s unique style and idiosyncratic moves — will almost certainly make the renovated Ground Zero seem less like an engaging new swatch of urban fabric than a boutique of luxury architecture.
The Innovative Design Study was a brilliant interruption in the architectural history that gave us the Freedom Tower. For sheer imaginative power, the event has not been matched by any comparable development in the culture of tall buildings. It is true that several beautiful tall-building proposals for American cities have captured the public imagination in recent years: Santiago Calatrava’s ravishing apartment stack in New York, Renzo Piano’s sleekly urbane headquarters for the New York Times, and Calatrava’s sensuous and graceful Fordham Spire in Chicago. The restless quest of every developer for the special something that will set a building apart in the eyes of tenants and buyers will surely summon forth many more noteworthy skyscraper designs for North American cities before the current business cycle goes south.
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