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Silverstein Says 2004 WTC Plans Must Stand
Full text at GLOBEST.COM
Responding to the buzz created by a New York Daily Newsstory Monday that details an "incredible shrinking World Trade Center," Janno Lieber, president of Larry Silverstein's World Trade Center Properties, says in a statement that the developer is "committed to the plan all stakeholders agreed on in 2004 and reaffirmed in 2006."
Primarily blaming symptoms from the recession, the Daily News reported that Port Authority of New York and New Jersey wants to do away with three skyscrapers at the site by shrinking Towers 2 and 3 to four or five-floor stumps, suited more for retail than office.
But sources familiar with Port Authority goings-on tell GlobeSt.com that the information in the Daily News story has been in the public domain for weeks, if not months. They say that the Port Authority's position is that Silverstein's Tower 4 should be built while 2 and 3 shouldn't move up to skyscraper status until there's a market to handle the office space Downtown
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There is no need for the office space. In fact, it is doubtful whether any more office space of the Manhattan skyscraper type will ever be needed.
The tall office building is the architectural analogue of the filing cabinet. The cubicles, aisles, floors and building are the people housing equivalent of the information housing sheet, folder, drawer and cabinet.
The whole thing was designed to house the paperwork in file cabinets, the reference materials in bookshelves, and to expedite the routing of documents among the office worker's desks during the years of the paper-based service economy. Due to the lag in moving documents being processed and the lag in accessing reference materials not in the immediate space, a large tall building was necessary for efficient operation.
The digital service economy does not have these requirements for spatial proximity. Cubicles with workstations, phones, cameras, etc. can be located anywhere on earth and fed with digital workflow technologies, to the extent that people have to be involved in the service delivery process at all. When face-to-face meetings are required, conference facilities and workspaces specialized for group collaboration can be reserved at a convenient location.
The tall office building is obsolete.
May 12, 2009 6:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
That would make sense if a single mega-corp had owned the whole building. But wasn't it hundreds of smaller companies each with their own equivalent of a private office building that filled the Trade Center?
People haven't stopped using offices just because offices have gone paperless. Even if "cloud computing" realizes half it's hype, there are critical IP assets that no IT professional would ever dump out to Goggle's servers. The need for fully interactive collaboration and collection/protection of intellectual assets will ensure that offices play a part in most business structures for decades to come. A company has to put the cubicles somewhere ... and a cable strung between them ensures zero downtime - a far better option in many cases than basing core productivity on the hope an employee's cable modem doesn't go down again.
It seems to be more a product of how many people want to have that office on Manhattan Island. The more people who want to locate there, the higher the buildings need to be.
May 12, 2009 8:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
The WTC 1 and 2 had a lot of tenants, probably because the small dimensions of the floors made it inefficient as an office building. Also being a marquee address encouraged a lot of firms to have sales and marketing offices there. The more typical building is like the adjacent Deutsche Bank building which had fewer tenants.
The Deutsche Bank site was to be reconstructed as an office building for JP Morgan Chase complete with special trading floors for the investment bank. This has been placed on hold, since JP Morgan Chase has a better solution with the Bear Stearns headquarters. There is now talk of reconstructing the site with a mix of luxury hotel and residential space, since there is a glut of downtown office space.
Since 911, major fims have moved critical IT resources out of the city and into purpose-built, hardened data center buildings in the hinterlands. The same is true for operations centers for the staff. IT infrastructure is generally not colocated with the employees that use it, except for certain delay-critical applications. Critical applications are redundant and backed up to sites more than 200 miles apart, with periodic vaulting to additional locations.
May 12, 2009 11:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Tall buildings are completely a function of the density of human activity. If you have one person per square mile you do not need tall buildings. If you have a million people per square mile you certainly do need tall buildings. If a building is residential or commercial it still is a function of density.
I think Mr. Silverstein should go fuck himself because his miserable greedy bullshit has prevented the WTC site from being rebuilt long long ago with any of the outstanding iconic designs that were rejected so Mr. Greedystein could be more of a super multi millionaire asshole that he already is. Nothing is sacred to the super rich. They are all sociopaths who will stuff their fat asses with cash from little people until they mercifully drop dead.
May 12, 2009 8:56 PM | Reply | Permalink