I like it, except for the cheesy name.
A twisting, shimmering, glass-encased skyscraper topped by a spire evocative of the Statue of Liberty, will replace the destroyed World Trade Center towers, officials said on Friday after months of heated argument between architects over the design.
The building dubbed the "Freedom Tower" will be the world's tallest at 1,776 feet when it is completed by the end of 2008 and is intended to reclaim part of Manhattan's famous skyline shattered in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks [...]
The entire project, with a memorial to the 2,752 victims at its center, was estimated to cost up to $12 billion over the next decade, officials said. It also includes six other office buildings and a transportation hub to be designed by renowned Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.
The plan and model of the building, unveiled at a public ceremony on Wall Street, calls for 60 occupied stories, including 2.6 million square feet of office space, rooftop restaurants, and the viewing floor up to a height of 1,100 feet.
The space above reaching to 1,500 feet will contain a lacy structure of tension cables similar to those on the Brooklyn Bridge and wind-harvesting turbines to provide 20 percent of the building's energy, the architects said.
A spire, symbolic of the Statue of Liberty's arm holding up a flaming torch, will rise a further 276 feet to 1,776 feet -- the height architect and site master planner Daniel Libeskind chose to represent the date of U.S. independence when he released his initial plan a year ago.
Libeskind described the spire at the top emitting a light into the sky at night, as one that would provide "a beacon of light and hope in a world that is often dark."