Home > News > United Architects Team Proposes Visionary Design for the World Trade Center Site Creating Five Interconnected Towers Surrounding Living Memorial

United Architects Team Proposes Visionary Design for the World Trade Center Site Creating Five Interconnected Towers Surrounding Living Memorial

Carolyn Campbell (ccampbel@arts.ucla.edu) (310) 825-6540
For Immediate Use Friday, January 24, 2003.

UCLA faculty member, alumni and student are part of design team

The international team of United Architects presented an innovative and responsive design concept for the World Trade Center site, creating a new model for urban living and dramatically enhancing the New York skyline with a symbol of unity and interdependence.

The United Architects team comprises six progressive design firms including Foreign Office Architects, London; Imaginary Forces, New York and Los Angeles; Kevin Kennon Architect, New York; Reiser + Umemoto, RUR Architecture P.C., New York; UN Studio, Ben van Berkel & Caroline Bos, Amsterdam; and Greg Lynn FORM, Los Angeles.

Lynn is a studio professor in UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design. FORM staff members working on the project include Florencia Pita, current UCLA M.Arch. student, and UCLA graduates Rafael Cardena ’02, Jackilin Hah ’02, Amanda Salud-Gallivan ’01, Elena Manferdini ’01 and Patrick McEneany ’01.

This international coalition of young architects shares a commitment to define new visions for buildings and cities that reflect the way we live today, and they will continue to work together as United Architects following the World Trade Center project.

United Architects is one of seven teams invited to participate in the design study of the World Trade Center site and surrounding areas. All of the teams’ designs will be on display in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center through Feb. 2.

For more information and images of United Architects’ design concept for the World Trade Center site, visit their Web site at www.unitedarch.com.

Entire site is a memorial
United Architects has proposed a scheme that is, in itself, a memorial, consisting of an interconnected series of five buildings that creates a cathedral-like enclosure. A vast public plaza and park are formed around the connected footprints by a protective ring of towers. The inspiration for the United Architects design was to create a living memorial that develops over time, with the entire World Trade Center site — from the earth to the sky — becoming both a monument to the past and a vision for the future.

Preserving the footprints of the World Trade Center, the memorial experience entails descending 75 feet below ground along a spiral walkway, where one then looks up through the footprints to the sky and the majestic new towers that create an urban sanctuary. Rather than having visitors looking down into the earth, the memorial proposes they look upward in remembrance. A Sky Memorial, a public space at the top of one of the towers, will allow visitors to complete the memorial pilgrimage by looking down over the hallowed ground.

United Towers
In this sacred space of the memorial, immense arches tower over the plaza and expansive public spaces are designed to optimize the flow of people and create an inviting sense of openness. The result is radically new shapes combined with an integrated strategy of development, serving commuters, nearby residents and tourists alike and reflecting the rich urban fabric that has evolved in Lower Manhattan over the past 30 years. United Towers encompasses more than 10.5 million square feet in a single contiguous building to be built in five phases. The highest tower measures 1620 feet — approximately 112 floors — and would be the tallest building in the world.

City of tomorrow
The interconnection of the five towers provides for unique commercial and public space. For example, at 800 feet in the air — approximately the 60th floor — an immense 200,000 square-foot “City in the Sky” connects the towers with gardens, shopping, cafes, a sports center and a conference center. Restaurants, theaters, cultural facilities, an observation deck and lounges will be located in various levels of the building, including 1 million square feet of retail space. The possibility of very large connected floor spaces invites new public functions at unprecedented heights and also large functional floor spaces that can attract businesses back from the suburbs into Lower Manhattan. Throughout the complex, vertical sky gardens are arranged every five floors to enhance the working environment and allow a maximum amount of sunlight into the floors, saving energy and improving the views from within.

The safety of the building is a fundamental element of the design. Each of the sloping towers contains its own independent stairway; in total, 29 separate stairways are connected by 43 areas of safety. From any point in every building there are multiple ways for people to exit, with the option of going down or moving horizontally into an adjacent building.

Reconnecting the city grid
The United Architects design creatively addresses the issues posed by the project including the natural and artificial geography of the site, dominated by the proximity of the Hudson River and a massive transportation infrastructure, safety and access concerns, relationship to the adjacent neighborhoods and pedestrians, and planned mixed use. The proposed underground train station is designed to promote the flow of pedestrians, avoid bottlenecks and provide a wide range of intuitive connections to the streets, the plaza and the memorial.

A major five-story civic space dedicated to the multi-modal connections of MTA, PATH and Air trains is located at the same subterranean level as the base of the memorial competition site, allowing a connected experience of monumental public infrastructure and the memorial. The site surface is returned to grade where pedestrians can walk across the site freely in all directions. Greenwich Street connects Tribeca with Lower Manhattan through the site and from Liberty, Cortlandt, Dey and Fulton streets, vast view corridors framed by 60 story archways between the United Towers connect the city to the river.

United Architects
United Architects has convened a global team of top architecture firms that will continue to work together as a group following this project. Each firm has a proven track record of work in the United States and abroad, as well as a long history of collaboration and exchange. The team — representing a new generation of architects — has been recognized internationally in publications, competitions and exhibitions as having forged an innovative design philosophy that includes a common quest for new urban models, influencing both older and younger generations of architects. As a whole, the team is inherently interdisciplinary, engaging in urban, transportation infrastructure, mixed-use, residential, cultural and commercial design.

Among the notable projects designed by the firms of United Architects are Yokohama International Port Terminal, Japan, by Foreign Office Architects; Transformation of Kleiburg Housing, Bilmermeer, The Netherlands, by Greg Lynn FORM; 745 Seventh Avenue in the Times Square area of New York City, by Kevin Kennon Architect as KPF Design Partner with Imaginary Forces for exterior LED signage; West Side Convergence, West Side of Manhattan, NY, by Reiser + Umemoto, RUR Architecture P.C.; and Arnhem Central, The Netherlands, by UN Studio, Ben van Berkel & Caroline Bos.

Contact: Carolyn Campbell
Phone: (310) 825-6540
Email: ccampbel@arts.ucla.edu