I guess if it isn't totally unlivable at ground level, I'll be satisfied. (But what are the chances of that?)

Now, to arrange for the tanker-ships of tzatziki and a pita the size of Brooklyn... do you think a single B-52 load of paprika would be enough, or should I book a squadron?

Could have been 50% less fugly without the spike.

But then it wouldn't have been as tall, and tallness is virtue and goodness and apple pie. And what good is a wonking great phallic symbol without a spike shooting from the tip?

We call that a "meat tornado."

They couldn't be thinking of that, could they?

I try not to read semiotic meaningfulness into every random bit of architecture that goes past... but sometimes they just rub your nose in it.

There it's been said.

Actually if it weren't for the spike o' doom I kind of like the twisty way it looks.

Tacky airline jokes omited.

...you will be getting a Calatrava transit center, though!

Spikes are pure evil, the evillest of all has to be the one they planted in the middle of Dublin. Only a spike, without a building beneath it. Does it get any crazier? It's so ugly it's making people dream up conspiracy theories to explain its existence.

But I looked them up. Out here, we just call them gyros.

The new design to me looks like the business end of a Flash Gordon laser gun, especially if the spire gets a ring around it and the whole thing's set up to glow.

As for the design of the base with the long narrow windows, might as well just make them proper arrow slits and add a few murder holes while you're at it.

I'm also a fan of making a building the height you want, and not counting the pointy bit on top. A 5'6" woman with a 1'6" beehive cannot claim to be seven feet tall. If so, Marge Simpson should be in the NBA.

Something with two towers joined by bridges joining up into one tower high above might be nice, from both the symbolic and aesthetic end, but oh well.

I'm thinking something Art Deco, with autogyro landing pads outside of the Chock Full O' Nuts on the 131st floor.

"And that one, that one stayed up!"

That's what the America I remember would have done. And I'm not yet forty.

The message is "You knocked down our building? Fine! We can build another. And while you're figuring out how to knock that one down, we'll build six more. You're wasting your time."

This design gets worse and worse with every revision.

Thanks for mentioning, and thus giving me a chance for referencing:
Eric W. Weisstein. "Antiprism." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource.

The link takes you to 3-D images that you can rotate with your mouse, and paper cut-outs that fold up to those shape, and more formulae than anyone wants. But the 3-D pictures, really...

That building is a nice symbol of Fortress America. Megalomania with paranoia at its base.

Yugh.

This is just cheap and ugly.

Vendor-"Khlav kalash! Khlav kalash!"
Homer-"Can you get me some pizza?"
Vendor-"No pizza only khlav kalash."
Homer-"Ok i'll take a small bowl."
Vendor-"No bowl! Stick! Stick!"
Homer-"Now what do you have to rinse that awful taste out of my mouth?"
Vendor-"Mountain Dew or Crab Juice."
Homer-"Yuck! I'll take a Crab Juice please! More,more,more. Uh oh! You got a mens room in there?"
Vendor-"Mens room in tower! Observation deck!"

The Monstrowucans of Dublin will exert their brain-elements and call out and within the Great Redoubt of New York, lit and protected like the Spire of Dublin by the Earth Current tapped deep beneath the darkened surface, the last Sensitive Ones atop their towering fortress may feel the solemn throb of the Master Word from far across that waste where once there was an Ocean, even as they gaze out past the vast bulk of the Watching Thing to the West:

"Howayez?"

Me, I'm a liberal reform Gozerian. Happy Sloar roasting day, BTW.

So, if we set up a bunch of Döner/Donner/Donair Kebab stands in Manhattan, they might soak up the Döner karma and we'll get the Liebeskind design back. Seemed to work with Berlin and the Jewish Museum.

(Agreed with Kevin Andrew Murphy that "Donner" Kebab is scary, never heard that variant before!)

Advisory Note 16 - The Safe Preparation of Donner Kebabs

1. Ensure, when cooking, that meat is thoroughly cooked through on the inner side of the slice.
2. Ensure that employees have received adequate training to be able to cut thin slices. Consider the use of a mechanical donner kebab slicer as a means of ensuring thin slices of meat.

There are fourteen more rules.

Back on the topic, the requirement that the building be, to be honest about it, a bunker pretty much screwed its looking like anything from the ground. One of my several architectural crotchets is large buildings that are intended to look good from some undefined position in space (which may not even be an achievable view), with no concern at all for the street view. They usually have snazzy renderings (or Photoschleps) and swell models, but that's about it. (We have a notably ugly Peijira downtown. I finally saw the model, and from defined angles, without the surrounding buildings, it's not all that bad. In context, it's junk.)

The height requirement is merely a numerological cantrip, and what does it say about the men behind the curtain that it's essentially a fib? (The Chrysler Building cheated in this fashion, but only in terms of relative height . . . and of course, it's a good building regardless of its numbers.)

Buildings can't help making statements, whether it's "wouldn't you like to live here?" or "Our firm is not cooking its books, really," or "Clowns eat here." No physical structure could possibly carry the psychic load demanded of the site. The answer that makes sense from an urban-design point of view -- provide a memorial, but assume that people are not bleeping stupid and do not need a Two-Minute Hate Pavilion, and build something that would grace the location and serve practical, rather than ideological, uses. (In the not-absurd case that another giant office block would be inappropriate, an open public space, with all the kinds of things that would attract walkers, and no damn revetments or barbed wire, could certainly have been put there, though we know why that didn't happen.) Cities change as they age, and every time someone builds a building to last until the end of time, either it falls down or Lord Elgin pries something off of it.

A long time ago, an architect was showing off some urban models to this other guy, and the other guy reminded the designer that he hadn't put flak towers on the tall buildings. He said --and, according to the architect, he didn't say it cheerfully -- that flak towers were the new essential for urban architecture. The architect was Albert Speer; you probably know who the other guy was.

The other guy being a vegetarian utopian occultist victim of a posion gas attack (weapon of mass destruction), and frustrated semiprofessional painter, denied entrance into art school, with deep interest in urban renewal, his way. Really wanted to add Paris and Moscow to his city collection, too.

The right answer is to rebuild them, in thier hideous, former glory, exactly the same. "Oh, you knocked down what? Those buildings? The ones standing there? They don't look knocked down to me."

The only acceptable answer that's likely to happen is to build nothing at all.

This? This is just awful. "Freedom tower. Go away."

We thought Government Center was bad.

I found that Alton Brown had a lovely episode and recipe for creating gyro meat slabs either in a loaf pan or using a rotisserie grill. I keep meaning to try it, perhaps using my mother's 1950s-era electric rotisserie (infidel that I am).

A 200 ft. plinth shouts "Bank vault!"

But this is also the financial center of the known universe, to the degree that something so networked still has a center. The many business tenants would probably like to have offices pretty much where they did. Heck, Windows on the World was pretty cool, though American Harvest probably had better food. I really don't want to cast it as a "do we do an appropriate building, or do we make rent?" split, because I don't think those are mutually exclusive. If it's not apparent, I'm not committed to one particular answer, but I want the answer to be in response to the real questions of use, not a gigantic statue of Stalin giving the bird to foreigners while pissing on the workers below. As Erik said, rebuilding is a positive response, and a public statement, in its own right.

I'll admit that I like open urban spaces, and Manhattan does not have many of them -- actually, it wasn't meant to have any, until someone paused to think and Olmstead and Vaux started moving dirt around. And "pocket parks" like Paley, that take up a fraction of a block, do a lot to open up the city. If I really wanted to get kicked out of Bloomberg's office, I might suggest extending the West Side Line as an elevated pedestrian way in an arc through the WTC plaza to South Ferry. And then to the Electric Telegraphy Interdome at One NY Plaza, right up to the Port Authority Zeppelin Terminal.

Alas, it's been closed for the holidays every time I've been home in the past decade.

. . . if the GWB were destroyed, it would be physically necessary to replace it.

refers, of course, to the George Washington Bridge, and not . . . anything else. At all. Nohow.

Not sure what the exact design would be -- using one of the bridges, probably the GWB, would be obvious, and would certainly work, though I'm not sure if its image requires a permission. (I would doubt it, but, well, IP, you know.) Type arranged in a bridge shape, with some supporting lines, would work, and wouldn't pick on one particular bridge.

Not that I have time for this. Though I'll bet Henry Petroski would buy one.

On the top floor of the Berlin Pergamon Museum there is now a set of models for a proposed expansion of the city’s Museum Island. They invited three schools to participate, offering young architects an opportunity to dream up a building on an unusually-shaped plot, and in dialogue with some substantial historic existing buildings.

The three schools were Harvard, UT Austin, and the Dresden Polytechnic Institute, and the results very thought-provoking. To wit: all the Germans could do was boxes, either horizontal or vertical. Austin was consistently more interesting than Cambridge. But across all schools, the best designs were 1) Asian students, and 2) US women, and especially the former. I have no idea if their buildings were structurally sound, but the level of creativity, ingenuity, respect for surroundings, and sheer beauty was sharply in contrast with other entries.

So I went for Indian food to celebrate, and Larry is right: it’s oddly cool and flavorless – and counterintuitive in that the sauces that look innocuous (green and yellow) are scathingly hot while the deep-red-danger-Will-Robinson one is mild and sweet.

It is well known that the shawarmoid-and-spike configuration is the best for a nearly omnidirectional deflector/effector; this building will protect itself and the entire Wall Street area from planes, bombs, ambitious attorneys-general, and (of course) body thetans.

Y'know, I thought the current draft of the building was an improvment upon the one they were going to foist off before... until you guys told me that those weren't windows in the "casement".

The upper works should look much better than that silly bird-cage contraption they had up there before, but basing the light and airy upper on a bunker sends the wrong economic and political message entirely. (And would probably be oppressive to work in on the lower levels... light, more light...)

Mike: You could sell me at least 2 of those t-shirts, one in an adult size and one in a youth size, particularly if the bridge was small on the front and bigger on the back.

I do wish I'd thought to mention this before the redesign, but I have a much more elegant and cost-effective solution to the bomb-proofing problem of the Freedom Tower than building a giant concrete encasement at the base. It preserves the natural light in the interior, saves on building material, and frees up valuable office space with no reduction of safety.

Put a mosque on the roof.

A perfectly normal and quite common phenomenon, known as L'esprit de l'Escape-Key.

Micheal Turyn: I said that my bomb-proofing technique is as effective as the casement. Which does not mean that I think it is effective, just cheaper and less of an esthetic atrocity.

I get it now - Chicago Trump tower will probably look great from Warren Dunes. Too bad I work 2 blocks away from the future site of the thing.

There is some good Vietnamese food to be had in Berlin (but skip Mr. Vuong), which can be had at the authentic heat level if you ask.

Oh, yeah. Talk about "Be careful what you wish for."

"They're tearing down the Sun-Times? Cool! Who's replacing it?"

"oh, fuck."

There are Chicagoans with fond memories of that building. I'm not one of them. The only thing the Sun-Times building had going for it was that it was Small and Ugly -- worse, it was on Chicago's Great Corner, the Mag Mile and the River.

(The differences between the Sun-Times and Tribune buildings did make for easy allegory. But it was still ugly.)

I don't want to know how bad Chi-Trump will be. I'm still trying to cope with the Toilet Bowl.

At least The Bean does not, in fact, suck. Matter of fact, it (and the whole park) are amazing. But when you read "They want to put a 40,000 silver jelly bean on the lakefront", you don't exactly have much hope.

Maybe we'll get lucky, Trump will screw up, and we'll get a decent building there. Hell, the Cubs almost won. The Bean doesn't suck. It could happen. Sure. Yeah. That's the ticket.

I wonder sometimes if Wright didn't do that deliberately, to prevent anyone from putting another building, or at least a conventional box, there.

*shudders*

And here I'd hoped that was only the working title.

*wonders if they'll sell Freedom Fries on the observation deck*wants a falafel now*

I'm getting used to the new Soldier Field, though, AKA the toliet bowl, AKA the eyesore on the lakeshore. It's still ugly, I just don't notice it anymore when I drive by it. My husband went to a game there and said from the inside it looks good, so that's something, I guess.

Different directors, very different films, same decision.

There's something very . . . Airstrip One about the name "Freedom Tower." Something sort of . . . Victory Gin about it.

Of course, it could be worse. It could be much worse. An administration official could get killed and we'd end up with the Rove Memorial Pinnacle.

I suppose they didn't want to date the films with the inclusion of the Towers, or with the lack of Whatever Comes Next.

But in The Gangs of New York there's a very effective fade from the New York of 1865 to the New York of 2001--and there are the Towers. This despite the fact that the film came out in 2002. It was a little jarring...

For me, I regret that the memorial being planned missed its opportunity. (I would have had a reflecting pool, with the last remaining bit of the old tower -- that twisted wreckage that was so often on the news -- at its center, and the names of the lost inscribed either at the edges, or under the water. Simple, and IMO, sufficient. *sigh*)

Mmm. Pita. Just about time to order dinner (right after midnight, before the delivery guys get surly). Thanks for the reminder :-)

Maybe I should've based it on a big, ugly block of concrete instead?...

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003067.html#more

Though I must admit that I'm more eager to see the medical applications come with allografts of more complex structures than skin. (And I'm dreading the sound of a "add toner" warning on the meat-jet printer they talk about... it's hard enough to get Central Stores to cough up in a timely manner when it's just carbon dust.)

http://www.dprkstudies.org/documents/nkpics/1pg072.html

Doesn't look as good as those pies Jesus was admiring, but one must allow for cultural differences:

http://www.dprkstudies.org/documents/nkpics/1pg076.html

More farmers, fewer cows:

http://www.dprkstudies.org/documents/nkpics/1pg092.html

Hey, instead of a mosque on top of the Freedon Tower, how about Saddam's prison cell? Although I'm sure the same convulted arguments could be made to apply and it would become a target too...