World Trade Center Design Proposal

In Urban Design

Posted: Aug 22nd, 2009 / Last Edited: Jun 1st, 2010 Print

Description

Beginning with a discourse on how the new urban center could successfully function as a collective enterprise beyond, but including, commemoration led us to question the appropriateness of the tower paradigm for this particular site. Our conclusions led to a scheme that lays the towers down horizontally: low, long structures that frame the site and lead to the river. In the optimistic spirit of rebuilding, the project provides new connective tissue for the dense downtown. To reclaim the program area formerly provided by the destroyed towers, the horizontal structures interweave retail, commercial and office space, cultural amenities, and residential units with open park space. Built form bends, folds, and penetrates the earth; it spirals into the site, where light streaming into the cavernous forms illuminates the lower floors. An open public plaza covers the footprint of the south tower, and a park swells up and covers the footprint of the north tower, which is expressed as a large underground volume that houses an official memorial to the victims of 9-11.

In response to the disorientating experience of attempting to navigate the grid of New York without the World Trade Center as a conspicuous marker, a single “virtual tower” serves as an orienting device. Above the tenth floor, this narrow, tower-like form houses communications equipment, but is not habitable. Rising above the tenth story is a scaffold covered by skin, each façade a screen for projected imagery of natural landscapes; the digital park deemed a more relevant punctuation for the New York skyline of the 21st century.
Beginning with a discourse on how the new urban center could successfully function as a collective enterprise beyond, but including, commemoration led us to question the appropriateness of the tower paradigm for this particular site. Our conclusions led to a scheme that lays the towers down horizontally: low, long structures that frame the site and lead to the river. In the optimistic spirit of rebuilding, the project provides new connective tissue for the dense downtown. To reclaim the program area formerly provided by the destroyed towers, the horizontal structures interweave retail, commercial and office space, cultural amenities, and residential units with open park space. Built form bends, folds, and penetrates the earth; it spirals into the site, where light streaming into the cavernous forms illuminates the lower floors. An open public plaza covers the footprint of the south tower, and a park swells up and covers the footprint of the north tower, which is expressed as a large underground volume that houses an official memorial to the victims of 9-11.

In response to the disorientating experience of attempting to navigate the grid of New York without the World Trade Center as a conspicuous marker, a single “virtual tower” serves as an orienting device. Above the tenth floor, this narrow, tower-like form houses communications equipment, but is not habitable. Rising above the tenth story is a scaffold covered by skin, each façade a screen for projected imagery of natural landscapes; the digital park deemed a more relevant punctuation for the New York skyline of the 21st century.
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