TRIBECA, an affluent neighbourhood of meticulously restored brick and cast-iron loft buildings in Lower Manhattan, is not an obvious inspiration for the latest addition to the World Trade Center (WTC). That site is better known for icy, oversized towers sheathed in acres of glass, marching in lockstep around the memorial to the 9/11 bombings. But now Bjarke Ingels, a Danish architect, has been invited by Silverstein Properties, with Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox and News Corp, to redesign a tower there. His aim for the project, known as WTC 2, is to create a “vertical village” as richly textured as TriBeCa.
The 2.8m-square-foot WTC 2 will rise from foundations already poured in preparation for an earlier, discarded design by Foster & Partners. (It will not be missed: it was a sloped-roof glass shaft, yanked from 1980s Dallas and inflated to twice the size.) Looked at from the World Trade Center’s Memorial, Mr Ingels’s tower rises sheer to its full 1,340 foot height, encased in a wrapping of glass and seems to differ little from its neighbours. These—Skidmore Owings & Merrill's WTC 1, Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners' partially built WTC 3, and Fumihiko Maki's WTC 4—create a district of supersized banality.
Perhaps, you think as you stroll down the block to Church Street, the commercial corridor that runs behind the WTC, all is not quite lost. From this angle you see that Mr Ingels carves the tower into a pyramid of stacked boxes, making room for 6,000-square-foot planted terraces. The boxes shift to one side, each overhanging the one below by 10 foot.
But although Mr Ingels’s design pares back the formulaic primness of the earlier towers he has failed to triumph over the respectful but vapid monumentality enforced at the WTC site. The acres of glass are an unrelenting, utterly exhausted design stratagem, here just senselessly reflecting back reflections of reflections. And while Mr Ingels corrugates the surface to make WTC 2 feel substantial, shingling the glass vertically on the two sides facing the memorial and horizontally on the others, the building is just too big. In computer renderings, the shingling has all the heft of shiny gift wrap and turns the terraced side of the building into a geometric abstraction rather than a humane, urban presence.
The design for WTC 2 is especially disappointing because Mr Ingels, a 40-year-old architect wunderkind, is known to invert expectations to create buildings of subtle intelligence. The warped pyramid shape of a residential building rising near the Hudson River looks gratuitously flamboyant until you realize how cleverly the shape takes advantage of the best views, without blocking those from a tower behind, which also happens to be owned by his client. Working with Thomas Heatherwick, a British designer, Mr Ingels brought extraordinary and innovative imagination to the design of a bubble-domed campus for Google.
In choosing the Dane, it looked as if Silverstein Properties was finally ready to reinvent the American skyscraper, with its huge floors built only to cram in more cubicles far from windows. There is clearly need for reinvention too. The developer’s other WTC towers, built faithfully to those 1980s norms, have leased slowly even with substantial tax breaks, lease discounts, and government-backed, taxpayer-subsidised financing.
Inside the tower Mr Ingels has had more success manipulating, if not discarding, the tired high-rise formula. Lounge and meeting spaces break open the hermetic tower floors to reveal skyline views, and cascade down several levels to culminate in outdoor terraces. A cafeteria opens onto another terrace; one garden folds down to allow two other floors to share the amenity. Design elements that aid informal collaboration and fluid, migratory work style are increasingly common in high-intensity workplaces favoured by startups and tech companies.
Mr Ingels could have made such shared spaces part of the expression of the building, here they are only tentative gestures. But there is still time to make WTC 2 better: a final lease with News Corp has not yet been signed. With insight, this tragic 16 acres could yet see a structure of exuberant faith in the future.
