The new designs for the other buildings at the World Trade Center have been released, and forgetting all the other arguments, the computer renderings show a glittering, rather dazzling skyline. And the buildings will be TALL. The NY Times' David Dunlap reports on the new designs and give some analysis of how the buildings would work within the city:
The developer of the new World Trade Center unveiled the designs this morning for three skyscrapers at ground zero, which in their gargantuan scale would reshape the New York skyline.
The designs offered the most comprehensive picture to date of what the finished complex might -- just might -- look like six years from now. Above, the Freedom Tower is to the left of Towers 2, 3 and 4.
Each building has a different architect — Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, both of London, and Fumihiko Maki of Tokyo — and the result is entirely unlike the monolithic uniformity of the original trade center.
... Lord Foster’s Tower 2, with a rooftop of four enormous diamonds steeply inclined toward the memorial below, would be as high as the Empire State Building. Tower 3 by Lord Rogers, framed boldly by an exoskeletal framework of diagonal beams, would reach a pinnacle of 1,255 feet at its corner antennas. Even the smallest and subtlest building among them, Mr. Maki’s Tower 4, would be taller than the Citigroup Center in midtown.
Dunlap also notes that the buildings, at first glance, might seem "like an instance of urban randomness" rather than a planned - and unified - development. He predicts that the designs will change, and that's probably the safest bet, safer than developer Larry Silverstein's promises that building will be done in six years.
