Posted Mar 14, 2016, 1:48 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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http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minut...ollar-designs/
"Starchitect" Bjarke Ingels' billion-dollar designs
He's young, Danish and the current star of the world's architectural scene, handling over 60 major projects including the Googleplex and Two World Trade Center
Mar 13 2016
CORRESPONDENT
Morley Safer
Quote:
...Bjarke Ingels: If you're just reaffirming the status quo, then you are missing the point that the city is never complete. So every project we do somehow has to count.
Particularily this one. The design for Two World Trade Center -- the final tower set to rise on the site.
Bjarke Ingels: Two World Trade is roughly gonna be as tall as One World Trade, but without the spire. And if you see it from here it would appear as a series of seven city blocks of different proportions stepping up towards the sky.
Morley Safer: It must have been a very difficult assignment given that so much part of New York is hallowed ground.
Bjarke Ingels: Oh, yes. Also, because the site is so complex. There's, like, 11 subway lines. There's, like, multiple like highways, service roads, power plants. Like, the entire underground is like an anthill of complexity. So I w-- I was, like, really scared that now we were getting, like, the opportunity of a lifetime, and we would be so restricted that it would be almost impossible to come up with something.
Larry Silverstein: His designs can be counted on to be different.
Developer Larry Silverstein bought the original Twin Towers just weeks before the attacks on 9/11, and has spent the last 14 years on the site's redevelopment.
Morley Safer: Did you have any qualms about this very, very young architect? I mean, most architects don't come into their own until their 60s or even 80s.
Larry Silverstein: And here he is, 40 looking like 20. I said, "Silverstein, it's time for you to realize, right, we're in-- we're in another era." Right. The fact that I'm almost 85 years of age, maybe it's time for me to begin to be a little more flexible when it comes to these things.
The seasoned developer who has seen it all and the young starchitect have become an architectural odd couple.
Larry Silverstein: I find this very tough for women to walk on for anybody in heels. If you talk to our people, our maintenance people they will tell you this has become an unmitigated disaster.
The rebuilding effort at the World Trade Center has been long and tortured full of false starts and unrealized plans. Tower 2 is no different. In 2005, the job designing it had gone to preeminent architect Norman Foster, a British lord no less but the proposed tower was never built. When Rupert Murdoch and his son James decided to move Fox's headquarters to the site, they brought in Ingels and Foster's design was scrapped.
Michael Kimmelman: There was a palace coup and Foster was out. But Foster was designing really a different project for another client.
Morley Safer: You were chosen over one of the world's leading architectural firms--Norman Foster. How'd you pull that off?
Bjarke Ingels: The design that had already been designed for the site was very much designed in the thinking of the old financial district and as the whole neighborhood has changed what was needed was a different kind of building. And sometimes the set up needs to change.
Which it did yet again when Rupert Murdoch went from Daddy Warbucks to Scrooge and pulled out of the deal to move to Two World Trade, leaving Silverstein on the hook to find a new tenant and get the building built.
Bjarke Ingels: The second we have designed them and built them they belong to everybody.
As for Ingels, he is acutely aware of his responsibility with the tower's design, knowing that 9/11 is forever etched in all of our minds.
Bjarke Ingels: I got a letter from a brother of a firefighter that gave his life at the 9/11. And he just wrote me to say that, I see it as a giant staircase to heaven evoking the heroic stair climb of the first responders at 9/11. And to him he thought the skyline of Manhattan itself would commemorate the heroism, and sacrifice of 9/11. I couldn't claim that we had, that we have thought of it like that. But now, I can't think of the building without also seeing that interpretation.
Morley Safer: The-- I-- it must be a great honor to have gotten that commission.
Bjarke Ingels: It's probably the most watched skyline in the world. So it's definitely a place where you better get it right.
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