Results tagged “daniellibeskind”

Architect Daniel Libeskind is taking a cue from the urban gardening minds and "has unveiled a proposal for his first New York building: a glass tower dripping with sky gardens." NY Mag reports that his vision for One Madison Avenue would surpass the 700-foot Met Life tower in height, and that "Initial designs show a glass-curtained tube with cutaways spiraling up and around the façade to reveal segments of terraced verdure, like cultivated patches on the side of a steep alpine slope." How poetic. Libeskind says that the gardens are balconies and that the design will make it "as if nature has come back into the city.” As Curbed notes, "very expensive and exclusive nature."

The NY Sun takes a look at the city's skybridges, and their place in our future. While some cities offer the plenty of the structures to their residents (Minneapolis, we're looking at you), they are often only found in parts of the country with extreme hot or cold temperatures. Do our humid summers and frigid winters warrant more indoor walkways?

, which chronicles these affairs from the point of view of the novel design team with which he collaborated. He also chucked a few zingers in the direction of the architect David Childs and former Governor Pataki. Left relatively unscathed was the developer Larry Silverstein, owner of the acclaimed new building (7 World Trade Center) in which the event was held.

The unveiling of the new buildings - Towers 2, 3, 4 - that will accompany the Freedom Tower at the redeveloped World Trade Center was met with excitement yesterday, proving there's nothing that beautiful computer renderings, a who's who of architects, and a healthy dose of optimism can't do. The NY Times updated its article about the announcement yesterday and also has an article about the pink elephant in the room: How slow progress has been at Ground Zero, thanks to battling egos and dollars on all sides.

We're up to Version 3.0: Architect David Childs revealed new designs for Freedom Tower, the centerpiece of the World Trade Center's redevelopment. The NY Times reports that the biggest change to the design is encasing the "187-foot-high, bomb-resistant concrete base in a screen of glass prisms rather than metal panels." When Childs revealed a redesign last year, one with a concrete base, people derided it for being like a "concrete bunker," albeit it one that would satisfy NYPD concerns.

Mr. Childs now proposes to cover the base in panels of laminated glass with a saw-tooth face made of prisms in a vertical array. "You know this from high-school physics class," Mr. Childs said. "The sun hits the prism and breaks into color."

Continue reading "Freedom Tower Redesigned Again"

If there's something politicians know how to do, it's to convene a committee! The NY Times focuses on how everyone wants new plans to bring the WTC Memorial budget down - there's that much agreement. But the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has one committee working on it...and Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg created another committee to work on ideas! Double the thinking, infinite times the resentment! The LMDC team includes the builder Bovis, whose $1 billion estimate of the memorial caused a lot of the agita that prompted these committees, while the Pataki-Bloomberg team, "Memorial and Master Plan Design Commitee," has memorial designers and architects, Michael Arad, Peter Walker, and Max Bond, plus WTC "master planner" Daniel Libeskind and rival builder Frank Sciame. At any rate, the LMDC committee is planning on having a couple of new ideas by next week. Hmm, maybe the LMDC can time a new memorial design by July, which is about three years after the WTC memorial competition ended.

If you want to be thoroughly depressed by the rebuilding process at Ground Zero in a matter of pages, versus a matter of years, Gothamist highly recommends reading New York magazine's cover story about the WTC Memorial and its architect, Michael Arad. It's an exclusive interview where Arad spill his guts about the process, but also gets worked over as one of the many egos in cast of a million egos and billion interests. Arad seems to have clashed with all the important players - original WTC redesign architect Daniel Libeskind, the firm Davis Brody Bond which is the associate architect, the LMDC, "partner" Peter Walker (who designed the landscaping elements for the memorial), you name it. For instance:

Arad immediately started behaving as if he had a powerful public mandate, which didn’t exactly put him in the right frame of mind to negotiate with Libeskind about fitting the memorial into the master plan. Libeskind, for his part, was enraged that Arad’s design had won. It effectively obliterated his original design for the memorial, which called for the area to remain a sunken pit with an open lawn at the bottom. “I will fight this!” he yelled during his first meeting about it with the LMDC. “I am the people’s architect!”

If you've ever wondered how the highest profile skyscraper in the world was redesigned, wonder no more: The NY Times published a look at how architects cranked out the new design, with political officials peering over one shoulder, an anxious developer at the other, and the expectations of the NYPD looming. Besides enjoying the fact that Skidmore Owings & Merrill architects would turn to Lombardi's for their pizza runs ("three meals in a row, straight - 8 to 10 pies" according to the project mananger), Gothamist found this bit about the Freedom Tower's chief architect, David Childs, and the tower's original architect, Daniel Libeskind, fascinating:

:Mr. Childs and the architect Daniel Libeskind, who created the site's master plan, said that they never approached the level of contention they had reached while working on the original tower. As Mr. Childs and his team slaved away, [John] Cahill and [Stefan] Pryor made it their mission to keep Mr. Libeskind in the loop, and ultimately he called the design "even better than the tower we had before."

Continue reading "How Freedom Tower Was Redesigned"

The supposedly safer Freedom Tower designs will be unveiled today, and it's more streamlined. And maybe more boring - but any hopes of something interesting went away when Larry Silverstein got more involved with the design. The NY Times writes that the tower's "height and proportion, centered antenna and cut-away corners, tall lobbies and pinstripe facade [evokes] - both deliberately and coincidentally - the sky-piercing twins it is meant to replace." The tower, designed by David Childs and his firm, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, is now set further back and has a more reinforced base; there's no more spire, windmills on the roof, latticework, and other elements of the Daniel Libeskind deign. It will be, however, still be 1,776 feet tall. The wild card is when Freedom Tower will be completed (2009? 2010?); an interesting point is that now the simpler design may help save money and time.

There's a very cool article in the NY Times about the "kinetic, interactive stainless-steel wall" being designed for 7 World Trade Center. Because the base of 7 WTC is a Con Ed substation, architect David Childs is sheathing it in glass, and has worked with James Carpenter Design Associates to design a sort of sculptural installation: There are panels of prisms that will cause pedestrian's reflections to move along the wall. Gothamist loves the idea of capturing the movement of people walking during their day; one of our favorite things is seeing people cross the walkways in the windows of Grand Central. Plus, inside the lobby will be a "floor-to-ceiling, 14-by-70-foot wall of acid-etched translucent glass illuminated by whitish light-emitting diodes, created by Mr. Carpenter and the artist Jenny Holzer." Who knows when Freedom Tower will be built (yes, Daniel Libeskind, we read your Op-Ed last week) but there will be 7 WTC, which has gone really fast...and it's really tall.

Forget Saddam in his underwear (people, this is like seeing your uncle absent-mindedly walk around the house without his pants, only if your uncle is a murderer and despot), the truly awesome photograph that the NY Post has today is this shot of Governor Pataki and polarizing international architect Daniel Libeskind getting cozy. Photographer Josh Williams captured the moment, to which the Post writes, "What will Libby Pataki and Nina Libeskind say when they see their husbands locked in this loving embrace?" Libeskind and Pataki were together, along with other World Trade Center poobahs, to see the unveiling of the Cultural Center designs for Ground Zero. While pols say the design is "respectful," some victims families think the design is too close to the WTC Memorial. Regardless, all involved emphasized that the design met security standards.

This is what Donald Trump's proposed World Trade Center design looks like: Pretty much like the old one. The Daily News points out that Trump's model was on MSNBC last week, and that engineer Ken Gardner and architect Harry Belton's model and plans can be seen at MakeNYNYAgain.com. No joke, Trump is serious about hating Freedom Tower. Gardner is a Trump crony from plnning his tower in Chicago. Gothamist is reeling from this Trump chestnut: "Why are we building this monstrous 'skeleton' known as Freedom Tower? If Freedom Tower is built, the terrorists win." UGH. What a cheap way to rile up people, because the terrorists win when capitalists act stupid, okay?

would have seen it; we know there is bureaucracy, but we are also sometimes terrible optimists.

NY1 reports that the WTC Memorial, Reflecting Absence, has been tested by a fountain consultant. The consultant constructed a "full-scale mock-up of some fountain configurations" to look for "potential problems with freezing and winter conditions"; the design has two pools in the footprints of the old World Trade Center Towers, with waterfalls around them. Outgoing Lower Manhattan Development Corportation President Kevin Rampe says that memorial groundbreaking is still "on track" for 2006, even in spite of the Ground Zero issues. You can learn more about Reflecting Absence at the LMDC.

Just about a year and a half after a final design had been revealed, Governor Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg and even developer Larry Silverstein have agreed Freedom Tower needs a design to address safety and security concerns. The past week had been filled with the NYPD's very public unhappiness with the current design and its "unsafeness", citing things like the building being too close to the street. This could delay construction for at least another year - and construction is already way off track. It's unclear what the political ramifications will be, but there's been a bit of hoo-ha-ing already, with Assembly Leader Sheldon Silver criticized Pataki and Bloomberg last week for the floundering development and Senator Schumer commending them yesterday for making this decision.

LMDC's site on the Freedom Tower design. Gothamist on the fighting between Childs and Libeskind and the building's aspirations to be the tallest.

Gothamist saw Libeskind with wife Nina in Tribeca the other weekend, and boy, they are tiny and are their glasses hip. A great Shining parody: The Simpsons' The Shinning. Daniel Libeskind's official site and the plans for Freedom Tower at the WTC site. Plus Gothamist on Libeskind.

Frontline's own site for sacred ground will go up after the show airs - we look forward to the page on Libeskind's and Childs's respective design philosophies. And Curbed notes how NY Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff thinks New York City will be "Totally New" after certain buildings are built.