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Downtown Express...

Construction begins on the Freedom Tower

By Josh Rogers

construction.jpg

The cornerstone to the Freedom Tower was lifted and lowered into the ground at tteh World Trade Center site.

Officials symbolically marked the start of Freedom Tower construction July 4 by laying a 20-ton cornerstone dedicated to the people who were killed Sept. 11, 2001.

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I found this article extrememly interesting, mostly beacuse I have worked with Revit, the software SOM is using to design Freedom Tower, for the past two years. Unfortunately, I designed two houses and a restaurant, not the tallest building in the world.

Thursday, August 5, 2004

Freedom Tower architects work in 3-D

Software shortens time needed for standard drafting

b005-tower-0804n-2.jpg

The cornerstone for Freedom Tower was laid July 4. When finished, it will be the world's tallest building.

By Alex Frangos / Wall Street Journal

NEW YORK

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Plan May Be Too Much of a Good Thing

By DAVID W. DUNLAP | August 12, 2004

RISK-TAKING." That is a quality that the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation says it will seek in choosing architects for the cultural buildings at the new World Trade Center.

Judging from the turnout at an information session yesterday, the corporation will not be disappointed. Among the architects who sent representatives to learn more about the cultural projects - which is not to say they will necessarily bid on them - were Arquitectonica, Santiago Calatrava, Diller & Scofidio, Nicholas Grimshaw, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Enrique Norten, Bernard Tschumi and Rafael Vi

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WTCMural.jpg

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times A mural depicting a bird's-eye view of the World Trade Center remains in place in a Lower Manhattan lobby at the request of the tenants.

Lost From Skyline, but Not From the Landscape

By DAVID W. DUNLAP | September 9, 2004

THEY are lost, of course. But they have not disappeared. Three years after it seemed that the name and image of the twin towers would be mournfully expunged from the cityscape, the World Trade Center survives. Not on the skyline, but on street signs and shopping bags and book covers, in Fire Department insignia and the logo of the Alliance for Downtown New York, in a subway station and a parking garage, at the gateway to SoHo and in the lobby of an apartment building that was especially hard hit on Sept. 11, 2001.

It is as if the twin towers - a bold parallel that instantly conveys the idea of "New York City" - were reclaiming their inextricable place in civic iconography.

"It's a painful chapter in our history, but nevertheless it's a chapter," said Richard S. LeFrak, the president and chairman of the Lefrak Organization, the landlord of 395 South End Avenue at Gateway Plaza in Battery Park City. At the tenants' request, the organization left in place a 1997 mural by Vladimir Poutchkov that cheerfully depicts the twin towers from a bird's-eye vantage, rising through the clouds.

John A. Catsimatidis, the chairman, president and chief executive of the Red Apple Group, decided more forcefully to keep the twin towers on Gristede's shopping bags after the attack, in which one of his second cousins, John Katsimatides, perished.

"We need something to remind us," Mr. Catsimatidis said, "because if we forget, then we've made ourselves vulnerable again." So a legend has been added to the bags: "Always on Our Minds. Forever in Our Hearts. Never Forget What They Did."

Occasionally, Mr. Catsimatidis said, he will hear from an angry customer who objects to seeing the World Trade Center on a grocery sack. "After I tell them the reason I'm doing it," he said, "they're 100 percent in favor."

Readers have called Vintage Books to ask if there are plans to change the cover of Jay McInerney's book "Bright Lights, Big City," which for 20 years has featured a photo illustration by Marc Tauss showing a young man approaching the Odeon restaurant downtown. Filling the night sky are the brilliantly illuminated trade center towers.

"The author would never consider changing it," said Russell Perreault, the publicity director at Vintage. "It stood for something at the time. And it still does."

No thought was given at Donna Karan International to changing the DKNY mural that has overlooked Broadway and Houston Street since 1989. Hand-painted from a Peter Arnell photograph taken out of a seaplane window, it shows a panorama of Manhattan Island as seen through four cutout letters. The World Trade Center, framed by a soft cloud bank, is unmistakable in the upper crook of the N.

"The critical thing is that you don't change history," said Mr. Arnell, the founder and chief executive of the Arnell Group, the advertising agency responsible for the DKNY campaign. "You don't see it differently. You understand it differently."

But he acknowledged the strong impulse after the attack to erase twin tower imagery. "There was a rush to remove the pain," he said. "Those symbols were so painful."

One institution that did change its graphic presentation was the Bowery Mission, whose logo before 9/11 depicted the twin towers dominating a silhouetted city. The new logo depicts the welcoming red doors of the mission chapel.

"We didn't want to walk away from the New York skyline," the president, Edward H. Morgan, said. "We consider ourselves generic New York. Yet of course, the fall of the towers was such a huge event that generic New York had changed."

The Alliance for Downtown New York, which runs the Lower Manhattan business improvement district, thought about changing its logo, by Chermayeff & Geismar, in which the towers form the double L in the word Alliance. But it decided to wait. "We didn't want to show an emptiness on that skyline," the alliance president, Carl Weisbrod, said.

The alliance also had to figure out what to do about street signs - designed by Pentagram and installed around the trade center site two months before the attack - illustrated with photos of the twin towers. Complicating the question is that visitors, perhaps more than ever, rely on these signs for direction in the absence of the towers themselves, which served as a kind of pole star.

RectorWTCSign.jpg

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times One of the Lower Manhattan street signs with images of the towers.

"How do you picture absence?" asked Michael Bierut, a partner in Pentagram. At first, as an exercise, he tried to substitute the famous photograph of three firefighters raising the flag. But that felt exploitative, he said. After a few months, Mr. Bierut said, "It seemed that the more obvious thing to do was to use the picture we had used."

The Lefrak Organization was ready to remove the mural from 395 South End Avenue, which was vacated for months after the attack. "We thought it would be especially right," Mr. LeFrak said. "The building that happens to have the artwork is the one that got the most damage."

But tenants thought otherwise. "It would seem like giving up if you'd taken it down," said Tammy Meltzer, who has lived in the building since 1996 and worked as a senior manager in the catering department at Windows on the World.

"It's part of our history, part of our neighborhood, part of our community," Ms. Meltzer said, "an integral part of what was and what will be again. Remembering where you've come from and remembering the past is never inappropriate."

Except for one original detail that simply had to be painted out, Mr. LeFrak said.

Two airplanes. On the horizon.

From The New York Times

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It's a hard one ie issue. We can't forget but we have to think about all of these as a constant reminder to people who lost family and friends, which realistically will always be in existance. Yet maybe they want to be reminded.

Like the squillions of copies of T.V. programs and movies that were made beforehand and have shots of the skyline with the WTC - just impossible to erase all from memory, and why should they be?

Gosh, I'm confusing myself now.

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Gehry Is Selected as Architect of Ground Zero Theater Center

By ROBIN POGREBIN | October 13, 2004

Frank Gehry, admired for his voluptuous buildings of undulating titanium and steel, is to be the architect of a new performing arts center at ground zero, his first major cultural project in Manhattan, the development corporation in charge of rebuilding the site said yesterday.

The selection of Mr. Gehry for the arts center - which is to include the Joyce Theater and the Signature Theater - brings to Lower Manhattan a celebrity architect who has been notably absent from perhaps the most closely watched architectural site in the world.

"I have stayed away from ground zero," he said yesterday by telephone from Los Angeles. "It just felt like, 'I'm not in New York, it's so emotional.' "

A little-known Norwegian firm, Snohetta, whose most prominent building is a new library in Alexandria, Egypt, was chosen for the other major cultural building at the World Trade Center site. That structure is to house the International Freedom Center, which will focus on human rights, and the Drawing Center, which will exhibit historical and contemporary drawings.

Mr. Gehry said that designing a building for dance and theater was what attracted him to the project, and that he had no interest in designing any of the commercial space at the site. Nor did he enter the competition for the memorial to those who died when the World Trade Center was destroyed.

Still, Mr. Gehry said, he has always had grand ideas for ground zero. "I thought they should build a five- to six-acre covered space with gardens," he said. "It could be used by the Philharmonic, by theater - a cultural park that had the ability to be quiet and contemplative and to be used for public events."

While the performing arts center is considerably more modest - 250,000 to 300,000 square feet - Mr. Gehry said he was excited about its potential. "It's a complicated project because it is a small footprint that is vertical," he said. "You will have to put theater on top of theater."

Mr. Gehry and Snohetta - a relatively young firm named for a Norwegian mountain peak - are to submit their schematic designs in February, including a conceptual site plan, preliminary building plans, sections and elevations.

Each of the cultural buildings was originally expected to cost $200 million to $300 million, but those involved said a more specific price tag for the projects had yet to be fixed. Also unclear is who will be responsible for the fund-raising.

Tom A. Bernstein, who created the idea of the Freedom Center, said he expected to raise most of it. "The lion's share of the fund-raising will be on us," he said.

Mr. Gehry said that he had been asked by the development corporation to make appearances to help the fund-raising, and that he had agreed, as did Snohetta.

At the performing arts center, the Joyce International Center for Dance will be a 900- to 1,000-seat theater, distinct from the Joyce's current sites in Chelsea and SoHo. The Signature Theater Center, which on West 42nd Street has devoted each season to a single playwright, plans a three-theater complex. The arts institutions themselves selected the architects, together with the development corporation, the Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts and other consultants.

Mr. Gehry said he was well aware that the trade center site has been fertile ground for conflicts among developers and architects. But he said he believed he could work with the others who are already in the mix.

"I'm excited about Santiago's building," he said of Santiago Calatrava's transportation hub, and added, "Michael Arad and Peter Walker's memorial, I'm pretty comfortable with that."

As for David M. Childs, the architect whose Freedom Tower practically abuts the performing arts center, Mr. Gehry said, "David and I are reasonably good friends."

For now, the rebuilding plan calls for the loading docks for Mr. Childs's Freedom Tower to be situated in the performing arts building. Asked whether he felt comfortable with that, Mr. Gehry said he had not been aware of it. "I don't know what I've got myself into yet," he said.

Linda Shelton, the executive director of the Joyce, said that Mr. Gehry's self-confidence was part of what gave her confidence in him. "It's a tough place to work in because of all the buildings that are around it," she said. "And I just felt that he could hold his own."

Mr. Gehry was raised in Canada, but he said his father was born in Hell's Kitchen in New York. Looking out over ground zero recently from the development corporation's offices, Mr. Gehry said the emotional impact of the site overwhelmed him. "The fact that I couldn't contain tears the other day means this is much more loaded for all of us than we really understood," he said.

The other cultural building is to be 250,000 to 275,000 square feet. Aside from the new Egyptian library, Biblioteca Alexandrina, Snohetta has designed the Norwegian Embassy in Berlin, the almost completed National Opera in Oslo and the Turner Contemporary Museum in Margate, England. This will be the firm's first project in the United States.

"To have some of the spirit of Norway come to ground zero is a big deal," Mr. Bernstein said. "It sets the tone for what we want to develop."

Craig Dykers, a partner at Snohetta, said the project would be a challenge in that it is the only building to be situated directly on the memorial itself. "It should be a building that is open and clear and has a relationship to the memorial that is respectful, but is also lively," he said.

Mr. Gehry said that he had not submitted a proposal for the Freedom Center, but that he would have had it been an art museum. "That wasn't interesting to me," he said.

His other cultural projects include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.; and the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, an outdoor music stage in Millennium Park in Chicago.

He is to design the proposed Nets basketball arena in Brooklyn, and, with Hugh Hardy, a theater next to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Mr. Gehry also designed a New York headquarters, currently under construction, for the Internet- and television-shopping magnate Barry Diller in Chelsea, and he said he was doing studies for a luxury high-rise across from Pace University.

The ground zero project would seem to be a major accomplishment for Mr. Gehry, but he said, "I don't covet jobs; I don't go after things."

Mr. Gehry was to have designed a $950 million downtown branch of the Guggenheim Museum on the East River, a project abandoned because of finances. He designed a possible glass enclosure for Lincoln Center's fountain plaza, which was ultimately rejected by the Metropolitan Opera and Beverly Sills, then Lincoln Center's chairwoman.

Mr. Gehry's firm and Snohetta were among 68 architectural firms that submitted their proposals in August. They were chosen from a short list that included Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Polshek Partnership Architects and Rafael Vi

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Ah, beautiful pic posts guys. It's fun to see people having a bit of fun up there. They of course bring back wonderful memories (silly me didn't take any pics on my visit).

Does anyone know the height above ground of the observation deck for Freedom Tower?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I think it is going to be at about 1500 feet if I am not mistaken. I cannot wait!

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Update from the LMDC:

Update on Construction of the Freedom Tower and World Trade Center 7 Progress

"On July 4th we laid the cornerstone as promised. The original stone was placed deep inside the trade center and I am pleased to announce a replica of this stone will be created. The replica will be on display at ground level

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Pataki's exact words on the Freedom Tower construction timetable

In 2006, we will begin to see Lower Manhattan's greatest sign of progress when Larry Silverstein fulfills his promise to have steel in the sky for the world's largest building -- the freedom Tower.

We laid the cornerstone on July 4 as promised.

The original stone was placed deep inside the Trade Center site and I am now plesed to announce that a replica of this stone will be created.

This replica will be on display at ground level - for the public to see - and has also been incorporated into the final plans for the Freedom Tower, so that for years to come, it can serve as a visible reminder of our resolve to build a new symbol of American strength and confidence.

And work has already begun in preparing the site for construction.

Now I'm pleased to report what we can expect to see in the coming months.

In February, excavation will begin for the construction of the Tower's foundations.

Using hydraulic drills and diesel-powered digers, workers will break up and remove 18,000 cubic yards of bedrock, creating cavities of up to 25 feet in depth for the building's column footings, which will serve as the roots upon which the Tower will grow.

By April of 2005, concrete and steel will arrive for construction. Workers will fill the hollowed-out bedrock with 6,000 cubic yards of concrete that is reinforced with steel rods, forming the foundation for the Freedom Tower.

And work will begin on the slurry wall - the bathtub that envelops the trade center site. A new, three-foot-thick concrete liner will be created in order to reinforce the wall. This liner will also - literally and symbolically - tie the slurry wall of the old World Trade Center to the new structure of the Freedom Tower.

Later in 2005, the below-grade floor slabs and tower columns will begin to rise off the foundation level and climb into the air.

Taken together, these milestones herald the future, when steel meets sky and touches the stars - and New York is blessed again with the tallest tower ever built.

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LibertyStreet.jpg

New York State Department of Transportation and Vollmer Associates Artist's rendering of the Liberty Street portal that would lead into the proposed West Street tunnel at the south end of the underpass.

Long Tunnel, Short Tunnel, No Tunnel? State on Spot

By DAVID W. DUNLAP | December 2, 2004

TO understand why the fate of the West Street-Route 9A tunnel in Lower Manhattan remains unsettled 20 months after Gov. George E. Pataki publicly embraced it, you should stand on Park Avenue at either 33rd Street or 40th Street.

What you will see are the mouths of the Park Avenue tunnel, which sluices two lanes of traffic to and from the viaduct around Grand Central Terminal. The ramps at both ends create ceaseless, impassable incisions in the streetscape. "A pedestrian was killed crossing here," says a traffic sign at the north end. "Be alert. Cross with care."

Standing at these intersections, it is not hard to figure out why Goldman, Sachs & Company would not want anything resembling such a portal - actually, a portal three times wider - outside the main entrance of the headquarters it is planning at West and Vesey Streets in Battery Park City. Goldman's unhappiness has prompted state officials to rethink the north end of the tunnel plan.

The basic idea is to depress West Street, which is also a leg of Route 9A, and create an underpass for through traffic, with two lanes and a shoulder in either direction. On the deck above the underpass would be a four-lane roadway for local traffic, divided by a landscaped median. This is meant to bridge the 260-foot-wide right of way that divides the World Financial Center at Battery Park City from the rest of downtown.

West Street will become "a distinguished stretch rather than a barren divide," Governor Pataki promised in April 2003. "Adjacent to the World Trade Center site, a new short tunnel from Vesey Street to Liberty Street will divert loud, fast-moving highway traffic underground to protect the dignity of the memorial, while also providing an elegant welcome at the front door of the World Financial Center."

Plenty of people, many of them residents of Battery Park City, disagreed with this assessment. Opponents envision years of disruption on top of what they have already endured. They say that the tunnel ramps would create almost as long an obstruction as the deck would cure. And they question the need to spend $860 million on such a project when there are so many other transportation needs.

THE portals are of particular concern because of the potential noise, fumes and mixing bowl of traffic. With a tunnel mouth at Vesey Street, northbound through traffic on its way to Battery Park City would have to drive through a residential neighborhood, since the first left-hand turnoff would be at Warren Street.

A draft environmental impact statement on the Route 9A reconstruction looked at three possibilities: a $175 million, eight-lane surface roadway; a tunnel from Liberty to Vesey Street; and a slightly longer tunnel with a southern portal at Cedar Street.

Now, in the wake of Goldman's objections and other responses to the draft impact statement, state transportation officials are studying the possibility of moving the north portal two blocks uptown, to Murray Street, or one block uptown, to Barclay Street, with a landscaped roof deck over the portal mouth.

Asked whether the alternatives now being explored would affect the environmental review, Tim Gilchrist, the director of policy and strategy at the New York State Transportation Department, said, "We are continuing to work within the framework of the current environmental impact statement."

Decisions must be made soon, since Goldman Sachs appears all but ready to begin construction of its building, which has been designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners to have an expansive presence along West Street, including the main entrance.

While open to finding "creative solutions" to the problems posed by the tunnel design, the governor remains committed to "ensuring that the sanctity of the memorial is preserved," said a spokeswoman, Lynn Rasic. In other words, he still favors a tunnel.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation also sees the tunnel - officially known as the short bypass - as a way of sparing the memorial from being next to an eight-lane surface highway, said its president, Kevin M. Rampe.

Would a tunnel with a Vesey Street portal be a deal breaker for Goldman? Would a Murray Street portal solve many of the company's problems? Besides saying that the governor "has been extremely responsive to our concerns," a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, Peter Rose, said he had no further comment.

At the northeast corner of West and Vesey Streets, Verizon has a switching center, 140 West Street, with several hundred conduits and cable and fiber optic lines that would have to be relocated for a tunnel, the impact statement said. A spokesman for Verizon, Daniel Diaz Zapata, would not say how the company feels about the tunnel but said it "will work with the construction command center to address all concerns."

At the southwest corner, American Express has its headquarters in 3 World Financial Center. The center is largely owned by Brookfield Properties. At the southeast corner, Silverstein Properties is planning to build the Freedom Tower. None of these companies would offer a comment on the tunnel or the portals.

It is a fairly reliable rule of thumb that when executives have nothing to say publicly about a project in which they have a large stake, big things may be happening behind the scenes. If that rule applies at West and Vesey Streets, something is up.

Perhaps as far up as Murray Street.

From The New York Times

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