More Visions of the Future

All of this week (and much of last) has been spent in reflection and rememberance of the attacks on America five years ago. It's preferable to think about the future, however; certainly we should not forget but we also should look ahead and make things better.

So with that in mind, and with a futuristic focus (variously optimistic and pessimistic depending on the subject) in the past several posts, here is a vision of downtown Manhattan in 2012, at what today we call Ground Zero:


I like it.

The tallest of the new buildings, the Freedom Tower (officially named World Trade Center Tower 1), will be 1776 feet tall and will shoot a beam of light up into space. Its next-tallest companion, World Trade Center Tower 2, has a very distinctive look to it, with its four diamond faces appear to be many buildings combining into one. World Trade Center Tower 3 will have a diamond-shaped lattice which reflects from WTC 2. The profile of World Trade Center Tower 4 is not as remarkable but it will still be taller than the New York Life Tower and nearly as tall as the Empire State Building, and its lower stories, more visible from the street level, promise to be elegant and graceful.

Hopefully the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation comes up with some better names for WTC 2-4. But now that I think about it, LMDC will probably sell the naming rights for those buildings, so they will become the T-Mobil Tower or the FedEx Building or the AIG Tower or things like that. Still not terribly interesting but better than "World Trade Center Tower 4."

The four towers will gather around a large memorial park with the footprints from the original towers kept intact, like so:



Whatever the buildings are called, the World Trade Center will once again rule New York's skyline. The old towers were, while overwhelmingly impressive feats of engineering, not terribly beautiful. These new towers add an artistic element befitting one of the world's great cities.

I would see tremendous significance in the new site being dedicated by President Rudolph Guiliani, but it's still a little early to make a prediction of that nature with any degree of plausibility.