1WTC review

Here in New Jersey we will be looking at the new 1 World Trade Center a lot. We see it from Jersey City, West Orange, and Hoboken as well as every time we fly into Newark. So this review of the new building from the Chicago Tribune is of interest to us, too.

The spire, on the other hand, has regressed.

Skidmore's plan called for One World Trade Center's communications mast to be sheathed in a tapering fiberglass and steel enclosure, known as a radome, which would have provided a sculptural flourish to the sculpted tower.

Yet when the skyscraper's developers, the Durst Organization and Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, eliminated the radome, claiming it would be impossible to maintain, they saddled the tower's top with an exposed mast ringed by circular maintenance platforms. It's all prose, no poetry. Libeskind, in contrast, envisioned an off-center spire filled with gardens spiraling toward the heavens. The gardens, he said memorably, would serve as "an affirmation of life."