One World Trade Center
Written for Karrie Jacobs’ class “Contemporary Issues in Design”
One World Trade Center’s glassy façade vacantly stares back at New York City, nonchalantly deflecting the city’s gaze with its mirrored skin, sleek with capitalism. It could be here, or it could be anywhere - Dubai, Shanghai - it doesn’t seem to care. Aside from a few symbolic elements, like the beacon at the top of the spire, the building shies away from confronting the horror from which it emerged.
The safety and security challenges presented by rebuilding at Ground Zero required sophisticated and fortified concrete construction. The tower was designed like a bunker to guard against the fate of the last structures that stood on the site. But One World Trade Center conceals this fact, as much as possible.
The strange hard line between the sea-glass green louvered panes at the base of the tower and the darker, bluer solar-panel-like glass that climbs the rest of the structure is a product of this concrete construction. The base is an almost-solid, 185 foot tall perimeter of thick concrete blast walls; the glass louvers cover these blank walls. The cavernous lobby is one of the few places where the tower’s polished mask slips - the narrow light wells to the north and south and the ‘clerestory’ light details can’t quite overcome the fortress-like feeling.
All told, over 200,000 cubic yards of concrete were poured at One World Trade Center, with strength in excess of 14,000 pounds-per-square-inch, and at heights higher than had ever been done before in the Americas.
But you wouldn’t know it by looking at the building. Its shiny wrapper looks like every other shiny wrapper of any tall tower constructed in the last decade or so anywhere in the world.
Architects today are still working within the modernist paradigm; the use of materials should be ‘honest’. Imagine, for a moment, if the architects, The Port Authority, Larry Silverstein, and all the other stakeholders associated with the project had made the call to expose this concrete super structure - to make raw, rough concrete the defining material and architectural feature of the tower. Exposing or even celebrating the concrete construction would have been more truthful than sheathing the building like any other typical structure. One World Trade Center could have been Neo-Brutalist, maybe in the vein of Herzog & de Meuron’s Public Hotel on Chrystie Street, but larger and much more brutal.
This béton brut quality would have suited Ground Zero. Despite the fact that Brutalist architecture was never meant to brutalize the eye or the user, most people perceive this style of architecture as particularly inhospitable. But why shouldn’t the building that rises from the ashes of September 11th be intimidating?
Brutalist structures can also be beautiful, in a sublime way—like Boston’s City Hall. Designed by architects Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles, the monumental building was completed in 1968. Gerhard Kallmann later said that the building “had to be awesome, not just pleasant and slick,” and should “remind you of ancient memories, history.”
This quote is resonant for Ground Zero. What happened on this site was terrifying, and we should not forget it. There are the Memorial Fountains, contemplative and profound. But unless you’re standing at Ground Zero, you don’t see the fountains. From every other vantage point in the city, you see One World Trade Center. Whether it wanted to be one or not, the tower is a memorial writ large on New York City’s skyline. We could have honored the lives lost on September 11th with the creation of something awesome: sublime, strong, beautiful, honest, haunting. A building that didn’t run away from what happened, but acknowledged it; and bravely, proudly stood its ground—the American way. Would office space in a building like this have been hard to rent out? Maybe. So instead, what got built at Ground Zero was a large, anonymous, slightly boring office tower: pleasant and slick.