Libeskind and the Freedom Tower

We can officially assume now, I think, that Daniel Libeskind and the Freedom

Tower are barely connected any more, let alone in any kind of one-designed-the-other

relationship. My guess is that when all is said and done, the name and the location

– at the north-west corner of the World Trade Center site – will

be Libeskind; the rest will be David Childs.

In the time since my last WTC

update, a number of crucial court decisions have gone against Larry Silverstein,

the leasholder of the original towers. They were insured for about $3.5 billion,

but Silverstein spent untold millions of dollars in a desperate attempt to get

double the amount that the towers were insured for, saying that he should be

paid out in full for each of the two attacks. In the end, he failed, and now

he simply doesn’t have the money to start building the spiral of skyscrapers

that Libeskind imagined in his site plan. I’m sure that Normal Foster, Fumihiko

Maki and Jean Nouvel – the architects slated to design the other office

towers – still have some kind of contract going, but if I were them, I

wouldn’t be holding my breath.

What that means is that the Freedom Tower is going to be a self-standing landmark

for the foreseeable future, much more than a single element in a much larger

scheme. There will be lots of interesting stuff going on at ground level, of

course, but as far as the skyline is concerned, the Freedom Tower is pretty

much the beginning and the end of what’s going to rise at the WTC site.

As a consequence, it makes little sense for Childs to compromise his own vision

overmuch in the service of a greater unity which might well never happen. (Even

if the other office towers do get built, there’s no guarantee that their architects

will pay any more obeisance to the Libeskind master plan than Childs has done.)

So the sloping roof is likely to go, the height of the tower is likely to increase

from Libeskind’s symbolic 1,776 feet to the CAA’s maximum allowable 2,000 feet,

and the spire could well be jettisoned entirely.

I haven’t seen any new designs which make me say this. But I have seen the

news

reports, and it’s clear that Libeskind and Silverstein are barely on speaking

terms any more. Libeskind wants $800,000 for his work on the Freedom Tower;

Silverstein has offered $125,000 and clearly has no interest maintaining a good

working relationship with the avant-garde architect.

The difference seems to come down, at heart, to the question of whether the

Freedom Tower is an integral part of the site plan, on which, there is no doubt,

Libeskind has done a lot of work. Silverstein says that it’s his building, he’s

got his own architect, and that insofar as Libeskind did work on the tower as

part of the master plan, he was compensated for it out of his $2.25 million

fee from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

Both the New York

Post and Miss

Representation are pretty dismissive of Libeskind’s claims, which are backed

up with no time sheets or other documentation. But I can kind of see where Libeskind

is coming from: any officially-designated "collaborating architect"

would feel he was owed something substantial from the building he was collaborating

on, especially when that building was probably the single most important skyscraper

to be built in many decades. Ultimately, however, I imagine that history will

treat Libeskind’s contributions to the Freedom Tower as even less important

than Philip Johnson’s contributions to the Seagram Building: Johnson is much

more famous for designing the Four Seasons restaurant on the inside than he

is for designing the building itself. Maybe Libeskind should angle for the gig

as lead architect on the new Windows on the World.