At Ground Zero, not size but significance

One World Trade Center has reached 100 floors. 

It is the world’s most famous construction project. (It was before construction began.) And while disputes continue over costs and contracts, One World Trade Center is ignoring the bureaucrats and climbing implacably upward.

I last visited this subject in January to explain the ongoing dispute between the New York and New Jersey Port Authority and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum Foundation over millions of dollars in claims over infrastructure costs and delays. (9/11Museum construction takes a $440m backward step.)

Today at the site of the Ground Zero rebuilding, the pendulum swings back to good news, if only temporarily. 

A major milestone has been achieved in the tower’s construction: It has reached 100 floors. The overall significance of this project, and the importance of the tower to the local and national community need no introduction from me, sufficed to say that it’s nearly here.

Because so much conversation around the project hangs on politics and national symbolism, very few people seem to really understand the simple architectural identity of the building.

So what is One World Trade Centre when it’s not being a symbol? The answer, to critics, is a fairly mediocre skyscraper by all normal measures. There are a great many people who find it impossible to ignore the limited ambition that the tower’s design represents.

At 104 floors and 1,776 feet tall, it will be the first major New York Skyscraper not to be the tallest building in the world (Both Chrysler and Empire State held the records when they were built, as did the original twin towers.) One World Trade Center will be 3^rd and within three years of its opening it will drop to 8^th. (Interestingly, it will be the tallest building in the western hemisphere, with all seven of its taller cousins making their homes in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, China and India.)  

There are those who claim that if One World Trade Center is a symbol of a nation’s resilience, it is also a symbol of diminishing ambition. Who could have imagined a time in the 1970s when America’s flagship skyscraper development had no plan on being the world’s tallest? They point to its decreased commercial square footage (2,600,000 square feet, the twin towers delivered 7,600,000 square feet), they will point to the reduced floor count (104, down from 110.) There are those who believe that the tower is simply not ambitious enough to be worthy of its predecessors, built the same year that the Space Shuttle program launched and just a few short years after the first American walked on the moon. In 2012 the shuttle program is closed; there may never be another moon landing and the new smaller tower is just further evidence of America’s slide back into the herd in terms of engineering ambition.

To believe this is to entirely miss the point of the Freedom Tower. It was never supposed to be a feat of engineering. It was supposed to be, and is, a reasoned and respectful balancing act that will provide a national memorial and a thriving business hub.

In achieving this it has surely surpassed the significance of any of the world’s taller buildings and it has paid a higher price than any other for its very existence. When people look at this building, they will see so much more than its height, they will see a piece of America’s history.

We don’t judge the Lincoln Memorial by its size. I have no idea how tall the Washington monument is. One World Trade Center is not a skyscraper, it is a national monument. There will always be a taller building somewhere, but it is hard to imagine one that will be more significant to a nation, or more clearly understood.  




Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.