Las Urbanistas

Silverstein Properties

A rendering of the Freedom Tower plaza at West and Vesey Streets.

Ground zero has gone through its own kind of war fatigue. With every step forward in the reconstruction process, New Yorkers were asked to buy into the rhetoric of renewal, only to be confronted by images that reflect a city still in a state of turmoil and delusion.

Silverstein Properties

A rendering of the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site.

Perhaps if we close our eyes, one might wishfully imagine, it will all just go away.

But the widely anticipated announcement that Gov. Eliot Spitzer will support the construction of the Freedom Tower may signal an end to any hope that a broad vision — or even a level of sanity — can be restored to a project tainted by personal hubris and political expediency.

The most recent debate over the tower has centered narrowly on real estate values. With the developer Larry Silverstein set to build six million square feet of office space in three buildings just alongside the Freedom Tower, some have questioned whether it will be possible to lease enough of the $3 billion project at a high enough rate to make it profitable. The tower’s symbolism alone is likely to scare off tenants who will see it as a potential targets for terrorists. The suggestion that we simply pack the building with government offices is almost perversely Strangelove-ian.

Yet the problem is not simply whether enough bureaucrats can be coerced into working there one day; it’s also what the building expresses as a work of architecture. Governor Spitzer may recall the looming presence of the twin towers on the downtown skyline, at once proud and intimidating; the Freedom Tower will have an equally powerful effect on the daily lives of New Yorkers as well as on the city’s image throughout the world. Yet its message will be very different from the old towers.

Hurriedly redesigned more than a year ago after terrorism experts questioned its vulnerability to a bomb attack, the Freedom Tower, with its tapered bulk and chamfered corners, evokes a gargantuan glass obelisk. Its clumsy bloated form, remade by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, vaguely recalls the worst of postmodernist historicism. (It’s a marvel that its glass skin hasn’t been recast in granite.)

Recently cities like Paris, London and San Francisco have held major architectural competitions for towers that will reshape their skylines. All of them drew on an array of ambitious architectural talents; many of those designs pushed technological and structural limits while reimagining the skyscraper as part of a holistic urban vision.

Even in New York, which has lagged behind much of the world in its architectural ambitions over the last decade or so, projects like Norman Foster’s new Hearst Tower suggest that a higher standard is demanded in the design of our urban structures.

If built, the lamentable Freedom Tower would be a constant reminder of our loss of ambition, and our inability to produce an architecture that shows a genuine faith in America’s collective future rather than a nostalgia for a nonexistent past.

Nowhere is that failure of ambition more evident than in the tower’s base. In a society where the social contract that binds us together is fraying, the most incisive architects have found ways to create a more fluid relationship between private and public realms. The lobby of Thom Mayne’s Phare Tower in Paris, for example, 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.

There is no reason to accept this as fate. Although construction has begun on the tower’s foundations, we are still a year or so away from the point that the building will begin to rise. The foundations could even be completed while a process is set in motion to begin rethinking the design. Meanwhile construction could begin on Mr. Silverstein’s towers to the south, which should prove much easier to lease.

Governor Spitzer of course would have to summon the will to venture into one of the most emotionally and politically charged sites in the world less than two months into his tenure. To do so he must first accept that the Freedom Tower’s message is not directed solely at real estate-obsessed New Yorkers but at the world, and that the message it’s sending now is the worst of who we are.

Although some New Orleanians still express skepticism that it will happen, especially in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s body blow to the city’s economy, one of the lead developers of the proposed 70-story Trump International Hotel & Tower on Poydras Street promised last week that the project is going to become reality.

With New Orleans City Planning Commission approval in hand, Florida developer Cliff Mowe said, “we don’t see anything at this point” that could derail the construction of what would be Louisiana’s tallest building.

The City Council still needs to approve the plans, but that is considered almost certain. With no opposition to the project having surfaced, Mowe said, council approval “should be pretty smooth.”

Mowe said he hopes to break ground this summer, with construction expected to take 28 months, putting completion in late 2009. “We’re very excited about moving forward,” he said.

The 1.6-million-square-foot tower, estimated to cost about $400 million, would fill most of the largely vacant block bounded by Poydras, Camp, Natchez and Magazine streets. It would be 716 feet high, plus a 126-foot spire, and would contain 734 luxury condominium and hotel units and a 715-space garage.

Mowe said the developers want to shift “in the very near future” from taking reservations for the building’s condos to signing sales contracts for them.

Traffic impact studied

The Planning Commission approved plans for the tower 6-0 last week, after getting the results of a traffic impact analysis from the developers. The commission had delayed voting on the project last month until the traffic study could be reviewed.

City planners said the staff of the Department of Public Works “agreed that the additional traffic generated by the proposed structure would not likely decrease the level of service on the surrounding streets below what is acceptable to the city.”

New York real estate magnate Donald Trump announced on Aug. 25, 2005, that he would join a team of Florida developers in building a 70-story tower in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina hit four days later, but within two weeks Donald Trump Jr. said the developers would go ahead with the project.

Although financing has not been nailed down, “we will have no issues with financing,” Mowe said last month. “There are several large lenders that want to do the deal,” in part because of Trump’s involvement, he said. That remains the case, he said last week.

No one spoke against the proposed tower at the Planning Commission’s public hearing, and the planning staff said it thought the structure would “become a landmark for the city.”

Edward Suffern, an attorney for the developers, said the Poydras site is ideal for the building that would replace One Shell Square as the city’s tallest structure because the Poydras corridor is widely recognized as “the place to concentrate high-intensity developments.”

No 13th floor

Although Trump Tower would have almost 20 stories more than any other office or hotel building in the city, it would be only about 20 feet taller than the 51-floor One Shell Square, which is 697 feet tall. The 52-story Place St. Charles rises about 650 feet.

The new building’s first two floors would contain restaurants, retail space and a public arcade cutting through the building from Poydras to Natchez. Floors 3 through 15 would be used for parking. Vehicles would enter the garage from Camp and exit onto Magazine.

Because is planned with no 13th floor, the building would contain 69 floors but would be numbered through 70.

Floors 18 through 32 would be a condo hotel, or “condotel,” offering 435 units — 29 to a floor — that would be sold as condos but could, when the owners agree, be rented out on a nightly basis like hotel rooms. Owners of the condotel units would get a percentage of the room revenue. The hotel’s lobby would be on the 17th floor.

Above the condotel would be 299 conventional condos. Floors 39 through 56 would have two-bedroom units, with larger units on floors 58 and above. Pools, lounges and other amenities would be offered on floors 38 and 57.

Mowe said most of the condos are being offered for $575 to $675 a square foot, with many units selling for $390,000 to $500,000. Penthouse units on the top-most floors are going for $700 to $725 a square foot. Those units would be reached by private elevators that would bypass the hotel and smaller condo floors.

Zoning waivers needed

Although there is no overall height limit at the site, construction of the tower would require several waivers to city zoning laws. One would give the developers a waiver of the maximum permitted floor-area ratio, a measure of a building’s total mass, from the allowed 14 to 17.2.

Another would let them build the portions of the building touching Camp and Magazine streets to a height of 85 feet, 35 feet higher than normally allowed.

The Planning Commission’s staff recommended approval of the waivers, saying the project “will both complement and enhance the high-intensity urban environment in which it is proposed and will become a landmark for the city.”

The tower site is in the Picayune Place local historic district, and there are two three-story historic buildings in the block, both on Natchez Street. One would be incorporated into the project and the other would be maintained as it is.

One of 15 provisos the Planning Commission attached to its approval would require the developers to get Historic District Landmarks Commission approval “for all exterior design components.”

Suffern said the Landmarks Commission’s staff is “comfortable” with the height and mass of the proposed tower but has requested some changes in the design of the lower floors.

Plans for a $220 million, 1,200-room hotel on the same Poydras Street site won Planning Commission approval in 2000, but developer Larry Sisung abandoned the project in early 2001.

Although some other developers and business leaders warned last year that the layoff of most Planning Commission staff members after Katrina was delaying the commission’s review of Trump Tower and other major projects so severely that they might die, Mowe said he and his colleagues never complained about delays at the commission. “We knew they were short-handed,” he said.

Despite sharp increases in construction costs after Katrina, Mowe said, “we are trying to make this a reasonably priced project,” although the $120 million price tag announced in 2005 has more than tripled. He said a $400 million estimate “is in the ballpark.”

“We still feel that for the clientele we’re trying to sell to, it will be very affordable, and certainly affordable compared to other Trump projects” in cities such as Chicago, New York, Las Vegas and Miami, he said. Mowe was not involved in building those towers.

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Bruce Eggler can be reached at beggler@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3320.