Friday, December 19, 2003 |
18:33 - Sorry, we're only budgeted for 30 polygons
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/031219/480/nyr10412192112
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CapLion isn't wild about this, but I think I could really get used to it:
Remember what Libeskind's original proposal looked like? It was essentially just a big spire, like a knitting needle jabbed into the sky. This new design is apparently the result of a big pitched battle between Libeskind and David Childs, Larry Silverstein's own chief architect, and the result is something that actually has some interior space and a more prismatic aspect. Yeah, it's tapered still, and has those sharp icy edges that look like someone's a little bit impatient for cities to start looking like Bicentennial Man-- but it could be (and was) a whole lot worse. This design even evokes the WTC a little. Not much. But a little.
What I don't like, though, are those new secondary office buildings-- the things that look like they were hacked off of the Fortress of Solitude with a machete. The tower-- okay, the tower can be futuristic and post-modern and wind-powered, whatever. But these other buildings look like they're trying to force the issue. They don't look like New York one bit. San Diego, maybe, but not New York.
Maybe it's just because none of the other buildings around there are blue. They're all stone and cement, and don't spend all their time reflecting the sky like utopian structures from the 80s. The WTC was like a solid block of concrete. (Which is part of the silly appeal of this.) This thing looks fragile. And as determined as they are to eschew surface detail of any kind whatsoever, the secondary office blocks are going to look like cheesy raytraced CG models even when you're standing at street level and looking up at them. Look at the other buildings all around them. They all have something from the 19th century in them, even the most modern ones. But the new proposals are from the "blend into the sky" school of design, which I thought had gone out of style years ago.
Nonetheless, I'm not going to complain much. I'm no New Yorker, so I won't presume to know what really "fits" the skyline; but I could get used to this. And we can be thankful that they're calling it the "Freedom Tower", rather than, say, the "World Cultural Center" (which is what that other finalist, the monstrosity made of two spidery ghost-towers of piping with a mysterious blob embedded between them, would have been). And it'll be tall as freakin' hell.
It'll send the right message.
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