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7 World Trade Center7 World Trade Center
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill have dropped a 1.7-million-square-foot hint for the buildings we can expect at a renewed World Trade Center.
There has been so much written on what should, could, or would be built at the site of New York’s devastated World Trade Center, the bound copies might likely fill the only tower that has actually been constructed: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)’s 7 World Trade Center, or 7 WTC.
Based on what you have seen and read about this project, how would you grade it? Use the stars below to indicate your assessment, five stars being the highest rating.
Not since the rebuilding in the 1990s of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz has there been a comparable undertaking in architecture: What do you build on a ruined site that occupies such a special place in the political, national, and cultural imagination of a people? If you’re David Childs, FAIA—perhaps SOM’s best-known design architect of the moment—you begin by building a 52-story skyscraper as a test, of sorts, of technology, aesthetics, collaboration—and will—before embarking on the adjacent 102-story Freedom Tower currently under construction.
Childs says he quickly realized the project could reconnect Lower Manhattan and the WTC site north to the city by opening up Greenwich Street, which the original 7 WTC had blocked.
SOM made two key decisions that ensured the tower’s success: the aforementioned restricted footprint, with the building on the site’s west side, leaving space for a public plaza between Greenwich and West Broadway, and the collaboration with some celebrated names—James Carpenter, the light and glass artist, and Permasteelisa, the facade manufacturer—to develop the multifaceted curtain wall.
7 WTC’s curtain wall has four surface articulations—the stainless-steel base at the substation, a ventilated glass curtain wall for mechanical rooms, 42 stories of clear glass curtain wall, and an illuminated crown similar to what SOM designed for its 2003 Time Warner Center. With Carpenter, SOM designed the base as a two-layer wall of stainless-steel, triangular-section wires, equally spaced and rotated along a support armature like a sleek, Minimalist picket fence. In daytime, sunlight bathes this facade, creating moiré patterns that activate the building along the sidewalk. Farther up, the glass curtain wall appears to dangle from the building, as a recessed stainless-steel spandrel reflects light to the backside of the glass overhang (see the top of the wall section on the opposite page). At night, LEDs installed behind small columns reflect on the interior wire layer and transform the building.
Less apparent in the building are the structural and safety innovations that have already affected skyscraper design. Silvian Marcus, the project’s structural engineer and the C.E.O. of Cantor Seinuk, designed the original 7 WTC as a total steel structure, but this time around he developed a robust concrete core and a perimeter of redundant steel columns—to address progressive collapse concerns—that leaves the interior completely open.
Formal name of project: 7 World Trade Center
Location: New York, NY
Completion Date: May 2006
Gross square footage: 1.7M gross square feet
Land Owner : Port Authority of New York & New Jersey
Architect:
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP
14 Wall Street
New York, NY 10005
T: 212-298-9300
F: 212.298.9500
www.som.com/
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