Posted Mar 27, 2025, 7:19 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/arts/design/david-m-childs-dead.html
David M. Childs, Architect of 1 World Trade Center, Dies at 83
The antithesis of a “starchitect,” he didn’t have a recognizable style. But as a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, he helped transform the New York skyline.
By David W. Dunlap
March 27, 2025
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David M. Childs, an architect who crowned the New York City skyline with the tallest building in the Americas — a shimmering new 1 World Trade Center in place of the twin towers destroyed on 9/11 — died on Wednesday in Pelham, N.Y. He was 83.
The cause was Lewy body dementia, his wife, Annie, said. Mr. Childs had homes in Manhattan and Keene, N.Y. The couple were staying in Pelham to be near two of their children.
One World Trade Center (also called Freedom Tower) is a tapering, eight-faceted exclamation point abutting the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan. Known to millions of visitors, it is just one of a dozen transformative buildings in Manhattan that Mr. Childs and his colleagues at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed from the 1980s to the 2010s. Some are crisp evocations of midcentury modernism; others conjure the more decorative towers of the Jazz Age.
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Because Mr. Childs often tackled projects with contentious histories and competing constituencies, his work could be pushed and pulled in many directions, as it was at 1 World Trade Center. That design went through at least five iterations during the protracted rebuilding of ground zero, where the original twin towers stood until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
To admirers, the final version of 1 World Trade Center, completed in 2014, repaired an awful hole in the skyline and symbolized civic resilience. To detractors, it demonstrated how politics, commerce and fear had strangled imagination in the redevelopment of ground zero. To visitors, it was synonymous with New York itself, judging by the tchotchke market it spawned.
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Mr. Libeskind envisioned a tower with the symbolic height of 1,776 feet. But Mr. Silverstein never intended to construct it. Instead, he had Mr. Childs devise alternatives, including a 2,000-foot tower. A clash was inevitable, resulting in an awkward mash-up of the architects’ competing visions in late 2003. This plan was derailed in April 2005 by security objections from the New York Police Department.
Adding to the complexity, the architect Thomas Shine sued Mr. Childs and SOM in 2004. He contended that the 1 World Trade Center design had been copied from his graduate work at Yale, work known to Mr. Childs as a jurist critiquing student projects. Mr. Childs and SOM denied the accusation. The suit was settled in 2006.
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The final version of the tower was almost entirely the work of Mr. Childs. The building’s height, 1,368 feet, matches that of the original 1 World Trade Center. (The official height of 1,776 feet takes into account a 408-foot mast at the top of the building.) The tower’s slender triangles look diaphanous from a distance, but from the sidewalk the building resembles a fortress, with a 186-foot concrete-and-steel base safeguarding the 94 stories above from bombings.
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Last edited by NYguy; Mar 27, 2025 at 7:31 PM.
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