Farayand Virtual World

* World Trade Center Plans, Rising Above the Squabbles

The firm designed Silverstein’s 7 World Trade Center now rising on the northern edge of the site

We are now at a point where we actually can begin to picture the site as it is likely to look in four or five years. There will be the Freedom Tower, a bold new pinnacle on the downtown skyline. A scintillating, multitiered train station surrounded by active open space. And, as a centre-piece, a pleasant public park and moving memorial to the victims of the 2001 attacks.

Four big city blocks, set aside for future office towers, will have to be temporarily patched in. Cultural facilities still have to chosen and then designed.

The architects took advantage of the opportunity to conceive a vastly improved underground rail network for the whole of Lower Manhattan. Calatrava’s station for New Jersey comuters is to be joined underground to a new transit hub nearby. It is being designed by a team headed by British high-tech architect Nicolas Grimshaw. Direct rail links to the major airports and improvements in ferry connections are being discussed.

As alluring as they were from over an unfriendly, isolated domain of tunnels and stores underneath a windswept plaza. In the new version, view corridors to the Hudson River and streets dead-ended by the trade centre compound will be re-opened..

Like the Hancock building, this one tapers from bottom to top and, like both the Hancock and the twin trade centre towers, it is preliminary held up by a tube-like system of structural supports on its periphery.

(Source: Los Angeles Times-Washington Post/ News Service)