All images: The Port Authority and the Durst Organization

New renderings of One World Trade Center were released earlier this week, the first to be made available to the public in five years. The images depict David Child’s 104-story tall tower soaring above the Lower Manhattan skyline, its glass-and-steel trunk incandescent with the hues of late-summer sunsets. But wait, there are some conspicuous changes afoot: namely, the skyscraper–officially the city’s tallest–is flanked by a series of erstwhile stone predecessors and not the ring of glass-clad structures originally offered six years ago. Foster + Partners’ 2 World Trade Center and Richard Rogers’ 3 World Trade Center have been excised from the plans, with only Fumihiko Maki’s 4 World Trade Center surviving the digital erasure.

Less obvious is the removal of the sculptural spire that crowned 1WTC in all design iterations up until this past May, when developers Durst Organization and the Port Authority announced its deletion citing feasibility concerns. The alteration, which removed the fiberglass cocoon that would have sheathed the tower’s antenna, would probably have gone unnoticed by both the press and public at large had it not undermined the project’s symbolic (and much-tooted) 1,776-foot height and, in so doing, jeopardized the project’s title as tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.

Further changes include the modification to the structure’s 185-foot-tall base, whose original saw-tooth glass panels have been replaced with glass fins. The new facade is broken up into 13-foot high segments, each striated with horizontal louvers embedded with LEDs.

One World Trade Center is expected to be completed in early 2014 with 3-million-square-feet of office space–55% of which has already been spoken for. Condé Nast has leased 25 floors (1.2 million square feet) to serve as its headquarters, while Vantone China Center and the federal General Services Administration have collectively leased 460,000 square-feet. Click through for all of the renderings.

by Samuel Medina

posted in Uncategorized

tagged 1 world trade center, Freedom Tower, Ground Zero, new york, rendering, world trade center

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