Parties involved with the design and construction of Freedom Tower were happy with tests in the New Mexico desert where a model of the structure was detonated. A partner at architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Carl Galioto, told the Observer, "The specimen performed beautifully, far exceeding our expectations." Safety has long been an issue with Freedom Tower--when the NYPD felt the design needed work, architect David Childs added a concrete base to the building.......

In yesterday’s NY Times, Nicolai Ouroussoff notes the onset of 21st-century medievalism, the siege-like architectural style that has surfaced since 9/11. Equating Baghdad’s Green Zone and Israel’s West Bank barrier with the concrete bollards that line Park Ave. and Wall Street, Ouroussoff writes that a new protectionism has emerged in contrast to architecture’s era of transparency. He compares the ethos of American military headquarters in Baghdad to gated communities of Southern California and wonders whether......

As the architect Rafael Viñoly sees it, the Freedom Tower is utterly superfluous. This was the concluding thought of his public presentation on January 18, this year's first Third Thursday lecture sponsored by the Downtown Alliance. Rounding out his half-stoic, half-bitter account of the past five years' WTC design proceedings, he plugged the new book, Think New York: A Ground Zero Diary, which chronicles these affairs from the point of view of the novel......

Today's special NY Times section, Broken Ground, which has an article, "The Hole in the City's Heart" and a timeline of the rebuilding at the World Trade Center. There are maps, a timeline, and photographs as well as interviews and looks at the relationships involved. There's a great quote from Nina Libeskind about Pataki ("Governor Pataki had great intentions, but if this is a great project, it will be despite and not because of......

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......

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......

Whoa! If you love to see giant buildings getting torn apart by wrecking balls, you should make your way up to the corner of 41st and 1st. A huge bite has been taken out of the old Con Ed Waterside Steam Plant. The smokestacks are still there-- but not for long! At this rate, the whole complex will be demolished in a couple of months. Back in October, the RealDeal reported that two towers......

Or at least that's what World Trade Center leaseholder Larry Silverstein promised yesterday, now that he and the Port Authority have agreed on terms that divvy up control of Ground Zero's various components. "I have instructed our construction team to mobilize into the site tomorrow so that we can begin construction of the Freedom Tower immediately," he told the media. The Port Authority says that the eastern section of the WTC site will be......

Sundays in August are apparently Real Estate days at the New York Times. Not that we're complaining, since today actually has two pretty good stories (and neither in the real Real Estate section!). First up is a front page look at the slew of development that is about to commence on the far east side of Manhattan. The possible U.N. office tower over Robert Moses park has been heavily covered in the news (and is......

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......

Wow, if you're Freedom Tower architect David Childs, you can just never win. When he redesigned Freedom Tower, not only did people hate the design, a Yale architecture student claimed Childs stole his design. And now, after unveiling his latest, critically panned Freedom Tower design, Childs may have taken ideas from well-known architect (and dean of the Yale School of Architecture) Robert A.M. Stern! Stern told the Post "tersely," "I'm aware of the resemblance and......

The new Freedom Tower design was presented yesterday, showing the more fortress-like design (the NY Post calls it "Fort Zero") that's supposed to meet the NYPD's standards for safer and more bomb-resistant buildings. The jury is out: It's less ugly than before (at least this design had one vision, versus two stitched together), but it's still...lacking. But safer, so it seems New Yorkers are being asked to choose between safe designs and ones that......

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......

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......

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:......

Governor George Pataki, realizing even in the waning months as a potential lame duck governor that he needs to take action with the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, has installed one of his aides to lead the effort. Other aides say that yesterday's announcement that John P. Cahill would be moving from Albany to help jumpstart the rebuilding, which has taken its fair share of knocks in the past year, from Goldman Sachs deciding......

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......

There's no wake-up like seeing Governor Pataki wax rhapsodic about Lower Manhattan in a commercial as Gothamist did this morning. NY State has launched a $5 million national ad campaign to ostensibly promote business in downtown NYC, but his critics wonder if it's more to promote his image. The commercial opens with the WTC cornerstone, with the Governor doing a voiceover that includes, "Discover your very own American success story. Build your business right here,......

A former Yale architecture student is suing architect David Childs and architecture firm Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill, claiming they stole his design and used it for Freedom Tower at the WTC site. Thomas Shine and his lawyer say that in 1999, Shine's design for "Olympic Tower" was evaluated in Yale class by Childs who said of the twisted tower and exterior grid, "It is a very beautiful shape. You took the skin and developed it......

It looks like a renovated Penn Station on Eighth Avenue is closer to being a reality. The project has been gestating for a while - check out this 2002 press release from the Governor and this 1999 NY magazine article - but according to New York Region > State's Project for a Grand New Penn Station Is Moving Again" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/nyregion/28penn.html?oref=login">an article in the NY Times, NY State, who is overseeing the plan, has two anchor......

Tonight at 9PM, PBS (Channel 13) will air the Frontline documentary, sacred ground, by Nick Rosen and Kevin Sim about the wrangling to develop a tower for the redesigned World Trade Center. At the heart of the documentary are Daniel Libeskind, the chosen master planner of the whole site, and David Childs, the architect brought on to steer the design of the Freedom Tower. Gothamist will be watching, because we've been following the redesign drama......

After a lot of worrying, it seems that most commutes during the convention have been pretty easy. Some areas, especially Penn Station and Grand Central, are thick with police presence, but others, like Times Square, have had unusually empty sidewalks - when the protesters aren't around. Of course, this is probably due to the fact that many people have left the city, letting Gothamist feel like the city is a ghost town, in some parts.......

How unlikely is it that after the public fuss of choosing a new building and complex for the WTC site and a WTC memorial, the Port Authority now seems like the smartest city agency for simply choosing a brilliant designer to design the new transit hub? Daniel Libeskind seems like a tyrant, David Childs is Silverstein's man, the LMDC seems hopelessly caught between a number of constituents. Whereas Santiago Calatrava swoops in and proposes......

The new design for Freedom Tower of the redesigned WTC site was unveiled today. The tower, the product of compromises between architects Daniel Libeskind and David Childs, will be the tallest building in the world with its spire and antennae reaching 1,776 feet. Governor Pataki, during the unveiling of the tower on the Today show, said, "This represents a melding of two very, very talented creative geniuses." Childs said he and Libeskind "a spectacular time......

In time for Governor George Pataki's deadline, WTC master planner Daniel Libeskind and WTC tower architect David Childs have come to a compromise in the design of the WTC tower: The tower will both have an assymetrical spire (Libeskind) AND a wind farm (Childs), "1,500 feet tall — 1,100 feet enclosed and 400 feet open — with a 276-foot spire to claim the symbolic height, and an antenna reaching beyond that, perhaps to 2,000......

The infighting between WTC redesign master planner Daniel Libeskind and tower architect David Childs get nuttier: Apparently, there was some sort of break–in at Childs' offices (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill), and Childs' team thinks it was perpetrated by Libeskind staffers. Former police commissioner Howard Safir is investigating, and the Post reports a source as saying, "[Childs' team] wanted to know what happened. They were very angry and they wanted to see what was behind......

The Times reveals that the main building of the redesigned WTC will vastly different from Daniel Libeskind's design. The new design, from tower architect David Childs and engineer Guy Nordensen, will be revealed next week by Governor George Pataki. Times reporter David Dunlap's description: Those who have seen the design of the Freedom Tower, as Mr. Pataki calls it, describe a torqued and tapering form culminating in an unoccupied, open-air structure filled with cables, trusses,......

The Post reports that WTC developer Larry Silverstein is trying to get his chosen architect, David Childs, to continute to work with WTC redesign architect Daniel Libeskind, in order to reach a plan of some sort, after the widely publicized uneasy stalemate in the decision process. The Post calls it's "making peace," we call it his only option as Governor Pataki is breathing down their necks to get the project started. Gothamist thinks that Silverstein......

When it was announced that David Childs would be designing the Freedom Tower part of the WTC, with Daniel Libeskind remaining as visionary for the project as a whole, many wondered if this interesting but magnet for ego-colliding collaboration would work. Three months later, some tensions over the design have emerged. As Childs' and Liebeskind's visions differ, Times reporter David Dunlap writes, "Without an agreed-upon aesthetic approach, there can be no detailed drawings. Without......

WTC redesign architect Daniel Libeskind is shopping around his memoirs; the Post also reports that he intends to donate the a portion of proceeds to children of September 11 victims. His agent says, "It's going to be a solid memoir for the general reader. It's not going to be experimental or avant-garde." Perhaps a shrewd PR move shrouded in philanthropy, Gothamist was confused at first when we read the Post article: Our eyes skimmed over......