David Childs, from zoology major to Freedom Tower

Freddy Deknatel Arts Editor

On Wed. Dec. 7th, architect David Childs will visit the Vassar campus not for a lecture, as he sees it, but “to have a conversation” about his work, most notably the politically charged Freedom Tower, which will eventually stand across Fulton Street from the footprints of the Twin Towers. Childs is Consulting Design Partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which he joined in 1971, moving to their New York offices in 1984. One of today’s most recognizable architects for a firm, SOM, that has made its mark with corporate skyscrapers, airports, and other buildings all over the world, Childs’ past work includes the Bicentennial Landscaping of the National Mall in Washington DC and the recent Time Warner Building in New York. Besides the Freedom Tower, Childs is underway on another ambitious project: the new Pennsylvania Station, to be housed in the Farley Post Office Building on 8th Ave., named in honor of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The Miscellany News spoke to Mr. Childs by phone from his New York office.

The Miscellany News: How much harder is it to design a building such as this, where there are so many emotional, political factors, where it isn’t just the engineers telling you what to change?

David Childs: I would say logarithmic. I will tell you something that is not generally known, but I actually asked Larry [Silverstein, the developer and leaser of the World Trade Center site] not to be the architect on the Freedom Tower. Right after the buildings came down, he had told me that I could do that whole project, and I said no, one of my prepositions was that there be multiple architects because I thought building at that city scale, it would be better if there were a lot more hands involved, no matter how good they are.

That was one of the things the original project suffered from, a singular hand put on too big an area that became cold and monotonous. And so I thought that we ought to put our money where our mouth was, and he ought to have another architect.

Frankly, I said “you might not do the Freedom Tower first, because it’s so complicated,” but the governor [Pataki] insisted on having the Freedom Tower first and placing it on the most difficult location and doing it on an unbelievably tight time schedule.

But I had no idea how complicated it would be, not just because of the normal problems one finds, but then everybody has an opinion about it. Some people say that they like the idea so much they want to use it somewhere else; some people say they actually did the design before I did, and they should get credit; some people love it; some people hate it; some people want nothing there. I mean, on and on and on. And you just have to sort of close your eyes and ears to the newspapers and the verbal criticism and just keep forging ahead.

I’ve done a lot of projects that have had high visibility—the center of the Mall itself in Washington, the Time Warner headquarters on Central Park. They pale. And I understand that completely. But it is an extraordinarily different kind of architectural enterprise.

MN: Certainly there’s a monumentality in the shape of the building, but you had to work within restraints, in terms of the sort of bunker-fortified base of the building. From the street level, in the context of the New York City grid, how well do you think the first stories of the building will integrate with the street?

DC: These words get attached to something – a bunker, concrete, and so on. They were immediately thought of as that because the building is very strong at the bottom and it’s not transparent. But then you think of buildings such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the New York Public Library, or the Federal Reserve downtown, let alone European buildings like the Stasi Palace. These buildings are beautiful and yet they are almost impenetrable. And they have very little light. And so I never saw that as a problem.

It’s only a problem in that it’s been attached to the dense concrete. Concrete can be a back-up, but it’s the skin that you see. And that skin can be glass, it can be metal, it can be all sorts of…it can be wood! We’ve looked at all of the above, including glass.
Now the actual building itself, the base of the building is actually smaller than the core was for the old buildings. In this building, because of the new dimensions, we went to one transfer floor at the top, so actually the base of our building is just about the same size as the core was in our old building. It’s just that now the space outside of the core is now in free air and park, and open to the public at all times. So in a way, the site is more open than it was before, and I do think that through the uses that we are now going to have, we actually figured a way to have very large openings on all four sides of the building as you go in, and special ways of letting light into the building that punctures the outside as well as having air come through to the critical mechanical systems.
So this building will not be solid; it will be punctured. And it won’t be all glass, as the new buildings are, but it will have a lot more glass than many of the buildings of the Fifties and earlier.

MN: If a new age of super tall skyscraper design has arrived, why are so many more being built in Asia and the Middle East?

DC: Unless you’re in New York or Hong Kong—and maybe those are the only two cities in the world, when you’re downtown, that the land is so valuable and the infrastructure is so great that you want to amass your really great densities over that infrastructure—it just isn’t any reason to go so tall. What amazes me is to find a country like Dubai where they have nothing but land, and they’re now building the tallest building in the world. And probably at a certain point really tall, tallest doesn’t make any sense.
It’s like a tree: the inside becomes so disproportionate to the outside that it just doesn’t survive economically. You’ll have to go above about 70 stories; you’d have to go to very complicated and sophisticated elevatoring systems – double-deck elevators, or special sky lobbies, or all of these things – that people just don’t really like very much. They’re complicated, and very expensive, and the cores become much greater in proportion to the whole than they really want to be. And so, sort of the limit of a normal elevatoring system is in that 50-70 story height.

And above that you either need to have such distorted economics like Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, or you know the best piece of property in Hong Kong. Or, a desire to really make a statement, either for your country—you know, patriotic pride—or for your company. If Donald Trump wants to say his Trump Building is the tallest building in the world, that’s another reason, but it’s not an economic one, to do something so tall. And that’s why these emerging countries, in other parts of the world, build buildings to look like American or European skyscrapers.

You know, the skyscraper’s really an American invention, although we’ve fallen behind in terms of environmental technology. But they want to look like they’ve arrived. Therefore in Kuala Lumpur they built the Petronas Towers, by Cesar Pelli, and I think that it’s often reported in the magazines and they get a lot of credit for that. In some ways for Kuala Lumpur, it’s the best advertising they ever had.

MN: What do you think about students whose interests and skills do not lie in quantitative disciplines becoming architects? Is an art historical interest in architecture enough to become an architect?

DC: Of course. I went to Yale, and I went there from a boys’ high school knowing that I would be in the sciences. And I majored in Zoology. And it was only by the fact that they forced me at Yale to do a distribution program that was required to study things outside my field and discovered—which is what a liberal arts education should be all about—other things that I was interested in.

And then obviously I went into architecture, which I had never had a thought about before. And I did it because I took a course, [Patricia] Pierce and [Vincent] Scully’s history of architecture course, and I did a drawing course by [Joseph] Albers which I just loved.

My own recommendation to people is to spread your wings and study everything from philosophy to psychology to music to astronomy, and that will be the best foundation for architectural life. In our firm we have design partners—which is what I am—and I think that my course in studying of the writings of St. Paul was probably as meaningful to what I do today as some of the physics courses I took. But you could really get through an English major, and decide to become an architect, and probably do just fine.