Governor Spitzer who once called the Freedom Tower a “white elephant” and questioned its economic viability announced his support of the project today in lower Manhattan alongside the Mayor and NJ Governor John Corzine. Spitzer said that after looking into alternatives, he decided that it was best to proceed as planned, citing the strong real estate market. Plus, it's a good photo op.
The site’s financials could change. The Associated Press is reporting that private investors are in talks with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey – which owned the World Trade Center and is developing the Freedom Tower – over the site’s ownership and development rights.
The 1,776-foot tower has been faulted for both its design and business sense. The NY Times’ Nicolai Ouroussoff rails against its new form, calling it “clumsy” and “bloated” - vaguely recalling “the worst of postmodernist historicism.” Last year’s redesign prompted by fears that the building was susceptible to terrorist attacks led to “tapered bulk and chamfered corners, evok[ing] a gargantuan glass obelisk,” writes Ouroussoff. We love the phrase he uses to describe the notion that the building will be filled with government offices: “perversely Strangelove-ian.”
While Ouroussoff points out that New York has lagged behind the rest of the world with respect to embracing ambitious architecture, he advocates for a higher standard, citing Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower of an example. It’s almost as if Ouroussoff has Phare envy – Thom Mayne’s Phare Tower in Paris, he says, “is conceived as an extension of the public realm, drawing in the surrounding streetscape and tunneling deep into the ground to connect to a network of underground trains.”
By comparison the Freedom Tower is conceived as a barricaded fortress. Its base, a 20-story-high windowless concrete bunker that houses the lobby as well as many of the structure’s mechanical systems, is clad in laminated glass panels to give it visual allure, but the message is the same. It speaks less of resilience and tolerance than of paranoia. It’s a building armored against an outside world that we no longer trust… [T]he message it’s sending now is the worst of who we are.
And, in a recent NY Times op-ed, Guy Nordenson, a structural engineer and architecture professor at Princeton who helped design the first version of the Freedom Tower,
questions whether the building makes financial sense. He writes that building 2.6 million square foot of office space in a $3 billion tower means - assuming the space is leased at $50-$60 per square foot - a less than 4 percent return on the investment.
We’re not experts on the development's financials so we’ll just quote Nordenson:
The Port Authority would do better buying back its bonds, which now offer a return of greater than 5 percent. What is more, the property is probably uninsurable, so the Port Authority will be spending billions for a below-market return and a substantial risk.
He even claims that the security concerns are unresolved!
Last January, I sat in a meeting in the New York City police commissioner’s conference room and listened to a debate on various security plans and blast-resistant designs for the different projects at ground zero. In the end, James Kallstrom, Governor Pataki’s senior counterterrorism adviser and the security coordinator for ground zero, closed the discussion by saying, “Structural engineers will have to certify that the design meets the threat basis.
I understood this to mean that as long as the engineers signed off on the design, everything would be considered fine. This is worrisome, especially given that that the computer software that is being used to simulate the blast effects is proprietary and classified by the federal government, and that the structural engineers being asked to certify the building do not have clearance or direct access to the program, only the data given them by the software.
Pataki comes out looking as bad as ever. But with Spitzer now supporting the Tower, we’re not sure the pleas for his help will be heard.
Photograph of Bloomberg, Spitzer, and Corzine discussing the Freedom Tower today by Louis Lanzano/AP
