| Tuesday, March 18, 2008 |
07:53 - Sometimes things improve when I'm not looking
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It's been quite some time since I looked at the design for the Freedom Tower. Last I saw, it was a twisty, wispy thing with chopped-off facets and off-center spires that made it look like some kind of gnarled tree clinging to a boulder. My reaction was pretty much the same as Donald Trump's, who proposed his own plan to essentially rebuild the WTC much the way it used to look. Knowing that that plan was about as likely to carry water with the Port Authority and Silverstein as an online petition to force Disney to produce a movie about the Holocaust, I resigned myself more or less to the idea of that big hole in the ground being filled eventually by what looked like nothing so much as a giant pile of leftovers from the destruction of Krypton.
Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that the current design—having been through quite a few revisions in response to public outcry—is a whole lot better. Tasteful. Symmetrical. Tall, too:
The World Trade Center's North Tower featured an occupied floor at 1,355 feet (413 m). Though not occupied by office space, Freedom Tower's observation deck is set to be higher, at about 1,362 feet (415 m).[citation needed] Currently, only the Sears Tower and Taipei 101 have occupied floors higher than Freedom Tower.
Not the tallest, though, to be sure: I mean, holy crap. Still, way better than the early designs, whose only claim to being "tall" at all was due to the big cage of empty steel cobwebbing Elmer's-glued to the top.
Still, though: this is a heartening development, and I look forward to following the progress of the construction, now that we appear to have entered a new era of skyscraper one-upmanship. I can think of worse ways to spend a recession.
The things I miss out on when I'm not paying attention. I should point my camera upward more.
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Brian Tiemann
