Hard-Nosed Practicality Reflects the Vision of David Childs

The besetting sin, as well as the defining virtue, of New York’s architecture is a hard-nosed practicality that subordinates imagination to safety and cost effectiveness. At its best, this practicality saves us from some of the gaudier awfulness of other cities. At its worst, it extinguishes the soul of architecture in the five boroughs. At any given moment, it can go in either direction.In the case of the revised plans for the Freedom Tower, which were unveiled yesterday, the odds seem to have tipped decisively in the right direction. Although there are clear similarities between this and the earlier design – both envision torqued and tapered pylons crowned by an antenna – the spirit of the two buildings could not be more different.The new building, altered to accommodate the safety concerns of the NYPD, will have less than ever to do with Daniel Libeskind and even more to do with David Childs, chief architect of that most typical of New York firms, Skidmore Owings and Merrill. You could say that the new design is a de-Deconstruction of Mr. Libeskind’s version, which exemplified to the point of platitude the imbalance and asymmetry that have made Deconstructivism the dominant building style of the past five years.At a symbolic level, the supposed intellectual matter of Deconstructivism – its calling into question of order and common sense, its presumed challenge to complacency and the status quo – made no sense for a project undertaken by the very forces of order, the city and state governments of New York. There is also excellent reason to believe Deconstructivism’s aggressive and often clumsy asymmetries represent a quality inherently hostile and disturbing to the expectations and the sensibilities of the human eye.What was needed – at an intellectual as well as visual level – was some sense of order emerging out of chaos, of centered rectilinearity, so that the eye could finally come to rest and feel consoled. This, to judge from the preliminary renderings, is what the new Freedom Tower provides.Recessed further from the street, it has a smaller footprint than Mr. Libeskind’s design, one almost exactly the size of the original towers. From its base, fortified with all the concrete allowed by law, it rises up in a chamfered shaft that – once again to judge from the renderings – has about it the sinuous grace of a swan. Gone is the ill-conceived meshwork that disrupted the last few dozen stories of Mr. Libeskind’s building. In its place is an integrated structure whose antenna (rising to the 1776 feet that Mr. Libeskind wanted) no longer dangles from the ledge but is placed firmly in the center of the building.Many critics and concerned citizens – myself included – were quick to criticize Mr. Childs and Governor Pataki when the initial plans for the Freedom Tower were scrapped a few months ago. This was because, according to all our experience of both men, there was every reason to expect that the radical structure designed by Mr. Libeskind was about to be replaced by an equally objectionable banality. In the event, Mr. Childs has come back with a design far better than I ever expected. In fact, it seems to be his and SOM’s best in years.In the process, Mr. Childs has given us the palpable sense that, despite all the delays and trip-ups, he has arrived at the right design in the end, one that placidly and elegantly asserts its benign authority without falling into dull ness or trite contextualism. This looks like a building that New Yorkers and Americans will take to, that will assume its proper function as a landmark, and that will energize and enliven the skyline of Lower Manhattan.All New Yorkers, and Americans in general, ever wanted from this whole process was a design that could be viewed with pride and without embarrassment. Now, it seems, we have that.

Hard-Nosed Practicality Reflects the Vision of David Childs

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