One World Trade Center: A Monumental Building, 10 Years Later

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Architecture, at its best, can prove the power of emotions. And nowhere is this more evident than New York City’s One World Trade Center—also known as Freedom Tower, which was completed 10 years ago this month on the site of the tragic September 11 attacks. The building has such cultural potency that, for some, it’s become the embodiment of freedom itself.

In the years since One World Trade Center was completed, I have been working as an editor for Architectural Digest at the offices of Condé Nast within this very tower. And though on September 11, 2001, I was not in New York but rather my home state of Ohio, I can easily recall images of dense smoke filling a clear, jewel-blue sky, of an unprotected new century foretold by its current chaos.

By the time I first stepped foot into the new One WTC, more than 5,000 days had passed since the unfathomable events. Yet, within the span of those years, there was an enormity to the work in rebuilding what had been so publicly destroyed.

On the morning of September 12, 2001, real estate magnate Larry Silverstein responded to a phone call from then New York governor George Pataki. “We need to rebuild. There’s no doubt in my mind,” Silverstein recalled telling the governor in his new book, The Rising (Knopf). A mere 51 days before the terrorist attacks, on July 24, Silverstein had purchased a 99-year lease on the Twin Towers for $3.2 billion. After their destruction, the billionaire staked his fortune and reputation on rebuilding One World Trade Center and the complex that was to surround it.

“We designed the building two times,” Ken Lewis, partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the firm responsible for One World Trade Center’s design, explains to me. Lewis, who was the project manager for the new building, worked with design partner David Childs, and managing partner TJ Gottesdiener, to complete the herculean task. “The NYPD feared that our first design was too close to the highway and would be built with too much glass, leaving occupants more exposed than necessary.” The first design, according to Lewis, was done hand in glove with Daniel Libeskind, the Polish American architect responsible for the master plan to develop the 16 acres destroyed in the tragedy. Yet after the initial plans were scraped, SOM had to take a slightly different path in filing the void of New York's skyline. It was agreed upon that three elements would play a vital role in One World Trade Center’s design. “First was the need to replace the symbolic hole in our skyline that was made with the loss of the Twin Towers, and the 10 million square feet they occupied,” Lewis says. “Second was configuring ways in which multiple companies—from media organizations to financial firms—could seamlessly occupy floors within the building.”

The third requirement was arguably the least obvious, yet most metaphorical. “Our focus, which was led by David Childs, was to lean into specific memory elements of the old Twin Towers.” Childs and company accomplished this by sculpting the structure into a “platonic solid”—in other words, a square at the top and bottom, but with 45-degree lines that connected to make an eight-sided figure. “Due in large part to its proximity to the harbor, Lower Manhattan has a particular quality of light that’s different from the rest of the city,” Lewis explains. “And the best way to reflect that [light] is through an antiprism composed of a series of alternately oriented triangles.”

What’s more, SOM pushed for a specific (and expensive) type of thick glass throughout the building that was uninterrupted for the span of an entire floor. (Each individual glass window unit is 13 feet 4 inches tall.) This is one reason why, when viewing One World Trade Center from a relatively close distance, it becomes an event; a solid surface transferring an ethereal moment of clouds moving, shaping, and disappearing. “And if viewed from a distance, the stainless steel corners of the new tower glow at dawn and dusk, just as the old Twin Towers did. What we didn’t anticipate, however, was how on certain days, an entire glassed triangle, from the top of the building to its bottom, just lights up.”

“Architecture isn’t just steel, cement, and glass being erected, and then we move on to something else,” Libeskind explains to me from his studio office, mere blocks away from One World Trade Center. “Architecture is the atmosphere, the story being communicated to the viewer directly through light, proportions, and materials.” In designing the master site plan, Libeksind’s fingerprint would be on nearly every part of the World Trade Center’s 16-acre plot, a tall order that required deep consideration. “For any architect, optimism isn’t an attitude, it’s a requirement. To build a strong foundation, to build something where people will inhabit, to build for something that’s still to come in an unknown tomorrow, architects must maintain an optimism.”

Libeskind exuded this sense of hope into the master plan by tapping into our collective memory since, as he puts it, “the future is always tethered to what’s come before.” He pushed to leave voids—in the form of a memorial later designed by Michael Arad—of where the original Twin Towers once stood.

Listening to both Lewis and Libeskind muse on the skyscraper I’ve worked in for nearly a decade forced my own contemplation. It’s rare to be in the presence of a work of architecture that occupies the past, present, and future all in one: It’s a symbol of freedom, a defiant daily reminder of two heinous attacks, and also a place with 94 operational floors for roughly 8,000 employees to work. Beyond the facts, spending hour upon hour in One World Trade Center is a deeply meditative experience. I often walk past the reflection pools and make a point of reading a few names of those who died, which are inscribed in inch-and-a-half-high letters cut into bronze panels that surround the memorial. By partaking in this small daily ritual, I remind myself that these lives will not come back, but life in Lower Manhattan has returned. That I both mourn for the victim's families and feel pride for the city's resilience shows the power of these two truths standing side by side in the form of this singular structure.

From where I sit each day to work, I've come to understand a metaphorical connection to the unthinkable that happened on the hallowed ground my office was built on. Yet the building’s tall windows allow me to look down upon a bustling city, where there’s space for each person—New Yorker or visitor—to ruminate on their own thoughts. Architecture, I've come to learn, is an art because not only can it deliver us a series of services, but it can provide powerful emotions, too. There is no better way, in my opinion, to measure design than to consider the emotional reaction it triggers within you. There was always a chance that One World Trade Center would not live up to its tremendous expectations. But I ask everyone who has witnessed the building up close, and felt its power, to be the judge.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest