Comment by seanemmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanemmer | Hacker News Reader

I've admired this building throughout its construction and reading this critic's postmodern teardown really irked me. I'm a hardcore modernist in that I think a building's elegance is measured by it's functionality. This structure has multiple, in many ways contradictory functional requirements, needing to simultaneously be a supertall office building, monument, and fortress. This is no simple task.

Given these requirements, I think SOM did an excellent job - the building manages to simultaneously be reverent and purposeful. It's clean, modern, and evokes the Twin Towers without parroting them. True, it doesn't have the postmodern panache of the Shard or some rippling Gehry building-sculpture hybrid. But I for one don't admire such deviations from function. Insofar as the critic values postmodern features, that is a matter of taste, not objective civic merit.

Furthermore, I think it is incorrect to conflate its design with other, unfortunate circumstances surrounding its construction (delays, budget, security, politics). The broad strokes of the design have been in place since 2005 (with the admittedly unfortunate scuttling of plans for the base and antenna array).

> This structure has multiple, in many ways contradictory functional requirements, needing to simultaneously be a supertall office building, monument, and fortress.

I think the article deliberately questioned a lot of those requirements, to its credit:

> There had been talk after Sept. 11 about the World Trade Center development’s including housing, culture and retail, capitalizing on urban trends and the growing desire for a truer neighborhood, at a human scale, where the windswept plaza at the foot of the twin towers had been.

> But the idea was brushed aside by the political ambitions of former Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, a Republican, and the commercial interests of Larry Silverstein, the developer with a controlling stake at the site, among other forces pressing for a mid-20th-century complex of glass towers surrounding a plaza. Stripped of prospective cultural institutions, as well as of street life and housing, the plan soon turned into something akin to an old-school office park, destined to die at night — the last thing a young generation of New Yorkers wanted. In retrospect, had 1 World Trade been built last, after the site was coaxed back to life (and yes, many added years later), a very different project might have evolved.

So you and the author of the article are talking past each other: you're saying the building is a fine, elegant solution that fulfills the requirements stated, and the author is saying it's an ill-suited building because the initial requirements were bad in the first place.

That's a fair point - the author does spend a fair bit of time questioning the functional requirements themselves. I am not informed enough on urban planning or the circumstances surrounding the site to make a judgement there. I will, however, say that making the building 1) secure and 2) historically aware seem to be non-optional requirements given the nature of the site.

I was more so addressing the critique of the structure itself:

>One World Trade is symmetrical to a fault, stunted at its peak, its heavy corners the opposite of immaterial. There’s no mystery, no unraveling of light, no metamorphosis over time, nothing to hold your gaze

My point is primarily that such traits as those advocated by the critic, that the building be be ‘immaterial', ‘mysterious', and ‘metamorphosing', are highly subjective. I could just as easily state that the building ought to be ‘substantive', ‘familiar', and ’stable'. My architectural preference is for buildings that avoid trying to achieve any of these "qualities" of taste, but rather buildings that deliver elegant solutions to their objective requirements. If ‘mysteriousness’ is a necessary trait in order to achieve the function of the building, then so be it. But the critic simply attacks the building for lacking certain qualities that he has not adequately tied to the purpose and nature of the building.

Yeah, it's not a very good or well-focused article, but it's hard to write convincingly on why a building looks ugly, right?

Was it strictly necessary to make the new WTC tower so secure against terror attack that it looks like a bunker from street level? The original Twin Towers weren't even destroyed from a street-level attack. They couldn't and didn't make the building airplane-proof, and if you're going to bomb something in NYC from street level the WTC is hardly the only or best target. So I think the security requirement was poorly thought through.

As for historical awareness, I think American culture is in the grip of sentimentality and nostalgia. This is the same country that stubbornly rebuilt a gradually sinking city that lays below sea level when it was inevitably destroyed by a hurricane. What's wrong with putting up a tasteful memorial and redeveloping the site in a way that meets the needs of the community?

Yea, at the end of the day there is just a ton of emotion tied up with this site - so you're right in that the security requirements / monumentality of it probably go beyond what the optimal specifications should be. It's kindof a timeless debate, how to balance the emotional with the rational (going way beyond just architecture). The emotional aspect is definitely supercharged in this case.

I'm glad it wasn't made into a ridiculous display of post-modern art, because more often than not, when architects want to show off their creativity, the building ends up being an eyesore many years later. Look at any building made with too much artistic flare 20+ years ago.

The building is beautiful, and will stay looking beautiful for a very long time.

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