Hot on the heels of One World Trade Center’s completion, plans for another tower on the World Trade Center site have been revealed. Two World Trade will, according to architects BIG (yes, “BIG”), be made up of a collection of differently sized cuboids, stacked on top of one another.
Finding that hard to visualise? It should look a little like this:
From this angle, the tower looks a little, well precarious. But two walls are actually straight, with the decreasing size of the cubes on the way up, and the higher sections slightly jutting over the edge of the lower on one side, giving the illusion of a municipal game of Jenga.
The building’s main tenants wilil be two Murdoch companies, News Corp and 21st Century Fox. They actually rejected earlier, more traditional designs for the building from Foster + Partners because the tower looked too much like an “investment bank”, not a media headquarters. We’re assuming this funkier design is more up their street, as they signed a lease deal with developers last week.
The building will rise to 408m, more than 100m shorter than the One World Trade tower. That’s not the only way in which it feels like it’s intended as a supplement to the main tower. Diagrams released by BIG show how the tower is meant to appear to “lean” against its big brother:
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The shape, meanwhile, was chosen to reflect both the architecture of the financial district, and the older buildings in Tribeca, the area just to the north of the site. BIG have provided this handy equation to illustrate what they’re calling the tower’s “new hybrid” style:
If all goes ahead as planned, the new skyscraper should be completed by 2020.
All images: BIG.
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