What I Didn’t Design At Ground Zero

Guy Nordensen’s piece in the Times today may be to Ground Zero what Joe Wilson’s Niger op-ed was to Iraq.

First, the idea of the symbolic number wagging the dog:

Some four years ago I began working with David Childs, the principal architect, on the first version of the Freedom Tower. This was a 2,000-foot-tall structure of torquing glass and steel; the bottom half contained the office building while the top half was a broadcast tower composed of an open framework of cables and trusses. . . . The structure would have given the tower the widest TV broadcast capacity possible, at the maximum height allowed by the Federal Aviation Administration. The office floors ended at about 70 stories, matching the tallest downtown office building, with as much overall floor area as the current design and with every floor having direct access to the ground level by elevator. The open, cable-stayed upper 1,000 feet of the structure would have had wind turbines that would have met more than 20 percent of the building’s energy needs, a fitting symbol for a city whose seal includes a windmill.

While the basic design won over almost everyone involved with the project, including many of the governor’s advisers, Mr. Pataki asked the architect to amend it in late 2003. Specifically, he wanted Mr. Childs to reduce the upper structure from 2,000 to 1,500 feet, and to add a slender 276-foot antenna to make it a symbolic 1,776 feet tall. The alterations, unfortunately, made the design impossible to build, and eventually the entire concept was abandoned.

So Mr. Childs presented the revised Freedom Tower, which meets Mr. Pataki’s interests but bears no resemblance to his initial design. It is in every way inferior, and those flaws — in terms of aesthetics, economics, security and ethics — are all rooted in the way in which it was conceived.

Then there’s the notion that the building will never be economically viable, no matter how you build it — sort of like a Frank Gehry-designed ledger book:

. . . [T]he finances of the new building are a disaster. The Freedom Tower will most likely cost around $3 billion to build, for 2.6 million square feet of office space. The cost of $1,150 a square foot is nearly twice what it cost to build the new Museum of Modern Art, for which I was also the engineer. Of the cost, about $1 billion will be paid with insurance money collected by the ground zero leaseholder, Larry Silverstein.

Assuming that the owners of the Freedom Tower, the Port Authority, are able to sign government or other tenants on at market rate rents of $50 to $60 per square foot, the income on the entire property, after expenses and taxes and including the rent on the TV antennas, will be at most $100 million dollars a year, which is less than 4 percent return on the investment. The Port Authority would do better buying back its bonds, which now offer a return of greater than 5 percent. What is more, the property is probably uninsurable, so the Port Authority will be spending billions for a below-market return and a substantial risk.

Talk about things that make you go “oy.” Will anyone take responsibility for the Freedom Tower?