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It'll be an alley of cray architectural all-stars downtown! After turning over Freedom Tower reins to the Port Authority and getting a pretty sweet deal, given everything, developer Larry Silverstein has annointed British architect (and Sir) Richard Rogers to design Tower 3 and Japanese Pritzker-winner Fumihiko Maki to design Tower 4 at the World Trade Center. Rogers is making a splash in New York lately - he'll be designing the Javits Center expansion, the Silvercup Studio expansion, and the downtown east River waterfront development; Maki has a big NYC commission himself - the the UN expansion. So, the other architects at Ground Zero are Norman Foster (Tower 2), Daniel Libeskind and David Childs (for the Freedom Tower mashup), Frank Gehry (a performing arts center), Santiago Calatrava (Path Transit Hub), and wunderkind Michael Arad (the memorial), with Jean Nouvel possibly be in the mix for Tower 5. All you need is Rem Koolhaas or Rafael Vinoly! Even though it's questionable whether or not the millions and millions of square feet of office space will be occupied, it'll probably be a pilgrimage for New Yorkers and tourists alike, whenever the structures are completed.
The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has a Freedom Tower construction fact sheet (PDF). Curbed has a spiffy visual so you can put the architects' faces to the empty lots.
Photographs at top are of Sir Rogers' Millennium Dome on the left and Maki's Fujisawa Municipal Gym
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That's AMAZING news. Even though we're going to have to face that atrocity of a Freedom Tower glowering over the entire city, at least we will have some gorgeous architecture after all. See what happens when you let an actual developer do his thing? He got Tower & built and now he's actually going to give us something interesting to look at with the remaining towers. I can't wait to see what this stellar team creates. Maybe one of them will go even higher than the Freedom Tower and that thing won't be the dominant feature of our skyline for the next 50 years.
Is I. M. Pei still alive?
I like the Freedom Tower's design. Its simple but not as boxy as the twin towers.
It is more like the 1962 Mets of architects as they are all uninspired hacks who seem to mostly come from the crushed soda can school or failed sculptor school of architectural design. Basically these guys design crap and lay on the blarney to sell it.
99.9999% of contemporary architecture is garbage and we will be happy to see it torn down in 20 years and replaced with something else.
Thank you Jesus!!!! Richard Rogers is my favorite of the two. Now we are talking. Real designs. Hopefully, this guy will be as inspired as Guggenheim. New York 21century architecture should make it into some of the history books. I haven't heard of I.M. Pei having passed away. He would have been great for the project. I like his building in Cleveland, Ohio for The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Javits Center does not move me much.
I would love to see Vinoly get involved, and maybe Fred Schwarz as well, as it was their design that I wanted to see at GZ from the beginning.
Tim N, yes, I co-sign on Vinoly. When I thought all was lost for beautiful architectural design in NYC, he came up with the new mall and Jazz at Lincoln center. Can you believe the coliseum (eye sore) sat there for so long. The beauty is truly from top to bottom on the new structure at Columbus Circle. I would have preferred that the interior theatres and performance spaces to take on a little more interior decoration or lush surroundings. I guess America has stopped importing European architectural crafsman. Or did they just leave out the Interior Designer or limit them. Fred Schwarz is a little angular for me, but his lines are clean and easy to take in.
I would have much preferred that the second place finishers (Think Team) build their "scaffolding" towers than the Libeskind thing that, in the end, is not even going to be built as he proposed it. Now we have a "winning" design didn't really win. The Freedom tower to be built is really one of the those first five designs that caused so much consternation originally and led to the bogus constest rigged by Pataki.
Calatrava has a design for a "giant corscrew" skyscraper in Chicago (Fordham Tower) that's way better looking than what we are getting here.
wasn't lincoln center a mashup of starchitects? putting great people together can just as easily make krap as it can a masterpiece.