After being sent hastily back to the drawing board, the building that will rise at Ground Zero to replace the World Trade Center was unveiled today.

The redrawn tower will be set further back from one of Manhattan's main thoroughfares and atop a 200-foot concrete and metal pedestal designed to repel explosions, city and state officials said.

The tower will lose the twisting, asymmetrical design meant to recall the outstretched arm of the Statute of Liberty. Instead, it will resemble a faceted version of one of the twin towers, sitting atop an identical footprint and reaching an identical 1,362 feet into the sky.

Because there will no longer be a frame of latticework above the usable space, the observation deck will now be hundreds of feet higher than the previous design. Instead of 1,100 feet (335 m), the new deck will allow views from 1,362 feet (415 m), the ceiling height of the previous Tower Two. This will be higher than the destroyed Twin Towers observation deck, and also slightly higher than the observation Skydeck of the Sears Tower in Chicago.

The Freedom Tower is expected to be completed in 2007.

The new design certainly looks a far sight better than the original one.

Posted by: mhking at 04:40 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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