Gallery: Revealed: The Inside Story of the Last WTC Tower's Design
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In a nod to the media industry’s heritage, Ingels came up with the idea of placing tickers on the underside of the building’s cantilevers, which will flash the latest news down to the corner of Vesey and Church Streets at night.
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At Two World Trade Center, Bjarke Ingels didn’t start with a blank slate: Much was dictated by the awkward fact that he was building on a foundation constructed for a previous design by Lord Norman Foster. “The reason you have these slanting lines is basically because of the exercise of connecting the dots,” Ingels says of the lobby. “From the ground floor and below, you have the inherited footprint of the tower that was. From the second floor and above, you have the ideal organization of perfect function.”
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Two World Trade Center will be the headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s media companies, 21st Century Fox and News Corp. “They had a lot of interest in figuring out how to capitalize on the location by creating views from the studios,” Ingels says. The structure in the background of this rendering of a Fox News studio is the new $4 billion commuter train station at Ground Zero.
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"James Murdoch was really interested in having this creative, loftlike environment," Ingels says. Common areas like workplace cafeterias will be positioned adjacent to the large landscaped terraces created by the tower’s setbacks.
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Usually an office view is a precious perk for top executives. But to create interior openness and interconnection, Ingels placed stairways along his facade.
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“The idea is that from any point in this block, you can walk to a terrace,” says Martin Voelkle, an associate at BIG who is working on the project.
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“Not only is the tower composed of seven different buildings that have been tailored to specific needs and requirements,” Ingels says, “but each building has its own outside. They’re not just flat terraces. They have little valleys or mounts or courtyards. So they are not just balconies, they are 6,000-square-foot gardens.”
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Larry Silverstein, who has overseen much of the World Trade Center’s redevelopment—including the rebuilding of Seven World Trade (right, foreground) and the ongoing construction of Three World Trade (left)—was initially leery of the teetering look of the building. But Ingels—and the desires of his prospective anchor tenant—won him over. “Everything fit together,” Silverstein said. “Everything worked.”
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Designing a World Trade Center tower has required Ingels to consider not just the needs of his client but the public symbolism of the redevelopment. In the foreground, one of the two memorial pools that commemorate the deaths of more than 3,000 people at the site of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
DBOX10In the World Trade Center redevelopment’s master plan, laid out more than a decade ago, architect Daniel Libeskind envisioned a semicircle of gradually taller buildings that would crescendo with One World Trade Center (far left), which has a spire that
In the World Trade Center redevelopment’s master plan, laid out more than a decade ago, architect Daniel Libeskind envisioned a semicircle of gradually taller buildings that would crescendo with One World Trade Center (far left), which has a spire that reaches 1,776 feet. Ingels’ building (second from left) will complete the ensemble.
