Thursday, May 2, 2013

The New 1 World Trade Center Tops Out Today


The last section of the spire goes up today.  The building will be finished completely sometime around the end of next year.













Somehow this Napoleonic fanfare seems appropriate.






I must admit that I'm very disappointed to see Kenneth Snelson's design for the spire discarded.  It would have been a worthy successor to the great Art Deco spires on the city sky line, especially the Empire State Building.







UPDATE:


The top of the spire on the roof ready to be installed

I must admit that I find the press reports unclear; was the top of the spire actually installed, or just raised to the roof?

4 comments:

JCF said...

Do you (and other New Yorkers you know), Doug, feel the Lower Manhattan skyline has been "fixed", are are you (c. 2013) more reminded of what's been lost?

Counterlight said...

I'm not quite sure what you mean. The skyline of Lower Manhattan was always chaotic, even in the days when the spire of Trinity Church was the tallest building in town.

If you mean missing the old Twin Towers, no, I don't miss those. Much as I complain about the current design (too conventional and cautious), it is a vast improvement over the old buildings.

If you mean the huge smoking hole that the 9/11 attacks left in downtown, then yes, there is a sense that the injury is healing if not yet healed.

If you mean the people that were lost in the attacks, that wound will remain open so long as there are people who knew the victims and remember them. And even after that time has passed, I expect that the sorrow and anger from those events will last.

JCF said...

It's just a phrase I heard, in the early days of "what do we do w/ Ground Zero?" As opposed to those who wanted to (basically) do *nothing* w/ the site (beyond commemorating the dead), there were those who said that they needed to "fix the skyline" (that the destruction of the Twin Towers---love 'em or hate 'em---had created a gaping hole that needed filling).

Lapinbizarre said...

Thanks for reminding me of Clemenceau's still-appropriate dictum that "Military justice is to justice what military music is to music".