THE US: A twisting, shimmering, glass-encased skyscraper topped by a spire evocative of the Statue of Liberty will replace the destroyed World Trade Centre towers, officials said yesterday after months of heated argument between architects over the design.
The building, dubbed the Freedom Tower, will be the world's tallest at 1,776 feet when it is completed by the end of 2008 and is intended to reclaim part of Manhattan's famous skyline shattered on September 11th, 2001.
The governor of New York, Mr George Pataki, said: "We will build it to show the world that freedom will always triumph over terror and that we will face the 21st century with confidence."
The tower will overtake Taipei 101 office block in Taiwan as the building regarded as the world's tallest. The Taipei building has not yet been completed but reached its maximum height of 1,667 feet in October. The original twin towers stood at 1,368 feet.
The entire project, with a memorial to the 2,752 victims at its centre, was estimated to cost up to $12 billion over the next decade, officials said. It also includes six other office buildings and a transportation hub to be designed by renowned Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.
The plan and model of the building, unveiled at a public ceremony on Wall Street, calls for 60 occupied storeys, including 2.6 million sq ft of office space, rooftop restaurants and the viewing floor up to a height of 1,100 feet.
The space above reaching to 1,500 feet will contain a lacy structure of tension cables similar to those on the Brooklyn Bridge and wind-harvesting turbines to provide 20 per cent of the building's energy, the architects said.
A spire, symbolic of the Statue of Liberty holding up a flaming torch, will rise a further 276 feet to 1,776 feet - the height architect and site master planner Mr Daniel Libeskind chose to represent the date of US independence. Mr Libeskind said the spire would provide "a beacon of light and hope in a world that is often dark".
Best known for designing the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Mr Libeskind collaborated with Mr David Childs. The pair feuded for months over the design of the site's signature tower but reached a compromise in time for this week's deadline. The architects acknowledged the process had been difficult, even "a struggle", but they praised each other's work.
Mr Childs said the building would probably be the world's safest, with extra strong fireproofing, biological and chemical filters in the air-supply system and other emergency features.
The site rebuilding has been overseen by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and driven in part by leaseholder Mr Larry Silverstein's determination to rebuild.
"This will work and it will work well," said Mr Silverstein, who bought the World Trade Centre lease from the Port Authority landowner just weeks before the attacks and is fighting a legal dispute with insurance companies over their payout. - (Reuters)