David Childs

Location: You have a number of publicly funded—or at least very public—projects: the Fre  read more »

After an engineer and an architecture critic took a couple more whacks at David Childs' Freedom Tower, Governor Spitzer on Tuesday morning said in a statement that it "may not have been the one we would have designed" but that it "must be built and we must get moving," according to the Associated Press. - Matthew Schuerman

From left, the Freedom Tower (David Childs) as we know and love it; and designs unveiled today for 200 Greenwich Street (or Tower 2, by Sir Norman Foster), 175 Greenwich Street (or Tower 3, by Sir Richard Rogers), and 150 Greenwich Street (or Tower 4 by Fumihiko Maki).  read more »

-Matthew Schuerman

It’s been almost 10 years since Consolidated Edison decided to sell off its nine prime waterfront  read more »

The state agency behind the creation of Moynihan Station unveiled a new design today by David Childs, but the biggest question was not answered: What is happening with relocating Madison Square Garden? If the Garden does hop a block west, to the Ninth Avenue backside of what is presently the Farley Post Office and what will become the train station, it would almost certainly require design changes. But the agency's chief, Charles Gargano, would not touch on that, saying that he had seen no proposal. Nor would Vishaan Chakrabarti, whose company, The Related Companies, will lease and develop the non-train portion of the building along with Vornado Realty Trust, show his cards.  read more »

Notice from the adjacent rendering that Childs did not reinstitute the so-called potato-chip skylight that was lost when HOK and Jamie Carpenter took over the project last summer (only to be replaced by Childs shortly afterwards). Why? It would have destroyed the building's facade and hindered the ability of Related and Vornado to qualify for historic preservation tax credits.

Steven Roth lost the deal to lease the World Trade Center five years ago this month.  read more »

Remember 2003, when the Governor showed up at a big breakfast bash near Ground Zero to spank the rebuilding effort into submission? A lot of his focus was on the Freedom Tower. He promised a ground-breaking for this April, and a 2008 opening. According to Charlie Bagli at the Times, nobody thinks he'll get it:

Officials no longer put any stock in a 2008 completion date. Indeed, under the current schedule, Larry A. Silverstein, the developer who controls the lease at the trade center, would not finish building and leasing the tower until the end of 2011.

But the Freedom Tower and the decisions made in 2003 loom large today over the very public slugfest involving Mr. Silverstein, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the land, over what is going to be built, who is going to build it and when.

And then, how much of the building's nearly three million square feet of office space will be rentable? Nobody knows.  read more »

- Tom McGeveran

The panelists, and audience members, at the Municipal Arts Society’s event on Wednesday night, lamented the loss of the “potato chip”—the dramatic arched skylight that would have risen up from the middle of the proposed Moynihan Station. But it turns out that the potato chip’s designer, David Childs, has returned to the project. In August, when The Related Companies and Vornado Realty Trust won the contract to transform the Farley Post Office into a retail-hotel-office complex, with a nice train station thrown in, they had replaced Childs, hired first by the state, with James Carpenter and Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum. We must have missed the press release, but a state official at the event confirmed that soon afterwards, the developers fired that team and brought Childs back. Nonetheless, he has been put on a low-carb diet and no snack forms are expected to creep back in the picture. -Matthew Schuerman  read more »

Governor George Pataki and architect David Childs are so confident in the safety of the Freedom Towe  read more »

Governor  read more »

We try to figure out why Manhattan insiders are so interested in the race for Surrogate judge.

And Ron Rosenbaum starts the no-Freedom-Tower drumbeat with a good question: would you want a family member to work there? And Matt Scheuerman reports that if it does get built, David Childs will have a lot to do with it.  read more »

And John Stewart has a new Tribeca pad.

On June 2, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation will formally adopt plans for rebuilding at G  read more »

After the very public brouhaha over the design of the Freedom Tower, after all the press accounts of  read more »

The signature tower of the rebuilt World Trade Center is taking shape, and not a moment too soon.  read more »

At 2 p.m. on the afternoon of Oct.  read more »

For months now, Larry Silverstein and his house architects, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, have been qu  read more »