BY JOSH ROGERS | The plans of Rupert Murdoch and sons’ to move their film and media empire to Lower Manhattan is not yet a done deal, but the project’s high-profile architect last week released an eye-catching video showing what the new 2 World Trade Center will look like.
The news was mostly welcomed Downtown, particularly because Two is in danger of languishing undeveloped since it does not have the public subsidies that allowed construction of the three other towers on the site.
2 World Trade Center in New York City, a BIG design, Squint/Opera production from BIG on Vimeo.
Bjarke Ingels, the 40-year-old Danish architect who was dubbed the “whiz kid” by the New York Times architectural critic in 2013, proposes a skyscraper of seven stacked boxes in a stairway-like shape which will “frame the memorial.”
He sees the box shape as akin to Tribeca’s historic warehouse buildings and Two as a bridge between Tribeca and the memorial.
“From Tribeca, it will appear like a vertical village of singular buildings, each tailored to their individual activities, stacked on top of each other,” he says in dramatic tones on the video, which was first posted at Wired.com June 9.
Ingels, who lives in Tribeca and works in FiDi, has designed a series of “hanging garden” terraces, which would overlook Church St. away from the 9/11 Memorial. The video shows open work/play spaces with amenities like a basketball court.
Commenters on Facebook’s FiDi Fan Page, in general reacted favorably to the new design, although more than a few lamented the loss of architect Norman Foster’s design for 2 W.T.C.
“I definitely preferred the exterior of the original design much more, but the interiors and the terrace are all pretty sweet,” wrote one poster.
Luis Vazquez, the page’s creator, was excited by the news even though he also liked Foster’s renderings.
Vazquez, a real estate broker and local resident, wrote in an email to Downtown Express that the investment that has already been made on the redesign “makes it far more likely that it will happen. I am an eternal optimist, but this is not a cheap expense. And it clearly is a much better option for Fox than what they have now on 6th Ave. which is kind of sad.”
Silverstein Properties, the building’s owner, and Fox have a non-binding agreement, but Silverstein put the new design on the firm’s web site the day it became public.
Jessica Lappin, president of the Downtown Alliance, said she was “thrilled” to hear the news.
”A lease is never signed until a lease is signed but it’s certainly a good sign to have two parties, it seems, who are very interested in working together,” she said in a phone interview.
Architect Bjarke Ingels
Ingels said on the “Charlie Rose” show last week that W.T.C. developer Larry Silverstein’s first reaction was that the plan was “disturbingly different. He needed some digestion time…
“Silverstein has been working on this for like 14 years, of course we needed to make Larry want to build this building.”
Ingels and his colleagues at the Bjarke Ingels Group or BIG, reached out to Silverstein’s architect David Childs, designer of 1 and 7 W.T.C.
Ingels presented the plan to Childs and Silverstein at 7. According to Ingels, Childs said “I love it,” and that was the turning point.
Ingels said that James Murdoch, Rupert’s son, was the driving force behind the planned move of 21st Century Fox and News Corp. from Midtown to the W.T.C.
“The first thing James said to me is he didn’t want to build a tower,” Ingels told the Wired news site.
A few days after the video was released, the Murdochs signaled that James would soon be taking over leadership of 21st Century Fox.
They hope the building opens in 2020.
Diagram of the World Trade Center buildings surrounding the 9/11 Memorial.
This is not the first spalsh Ingels has made Downtown. His firm’s Big U design to form a U-shaped ring of flood protection in southern Manhattan was selected by the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development.
