What is the root of their conflict over the design of the Freedom Tower?
Well, Childs and Libeskind have fundamentally different ideas of what a skyscraper should be. Libeskind tends to begin with an idea and figures that it’s the role of the engineer to make the idea of the architect possible and buildable. And often the idea for Libeskind is something rather pictorial, such as the notion in his Freedom Tower design that the Statue of Liberty would form the basis for the form of the skyscraper. David Childs believed in the skyscraper as a much more rational object, and that when you’re dealing with something that vast and that dependent on engineering, then the structural idea should come first, and that the architecture should in some way respect and reflect the structural reality of it and not be a sort of pictorial representation of something else. Now, Childs has done plenty of different kinds of buildings over the years; he’s not just a structural rationalist. He did the Worldwide Plaza in New York 20 years ago or more. That is a sort of neoclassical
