Designs unveiled for new 5 WTC

Real Estate Weekly, June 27, 2007 by Daniel Geiger

The Port Authority authorized JP Morgan Chase's lease of the southernmost portion of the World Trade Center Site, where the bank has announced it will build a new 1.3 million s/f office tower to house its investment banking operations.

Renderings of a conceptual design of the building were also revealed for the first time, offering a glimpse of what the tower's dramatic cantilevering midsection will look like.

Jutting out from the northern face of the tower 190 feet above the ground, the cantilever is being used to almost double the area of up to seven floors that will be used by the bank for its trading operations.

The tower's development parcel, which is smaller than sites on which the other World Trade Center towers will be built, can normally accommodate floors roughly 32,000 s/f in size. The cantilevered floors will be up to 60,000 s/f. Port Authority officials presented slides of the building that presented the cantilever as a section of the building's top that had been sliced and relocated to extend the building in a horizontal, instead of vertical, direction.

Indeed, in the images of the preliminary design, which were created by the building's architects, Kohn Pedersen Fox, the slanted facade of the cantilevered floors and that of the roof seem to encourage a connection between the two and hint that the building is just one relocated puzzle piece from appearing identical to any other city tower.

"We've done studies that show that the building will actually cast much less of a shadow on the memorial," said Tony Shorris, the Port Authority's executive director, touting an advantage of the tower's design.

5 WTC, as the building is known, has nonetheless already drawn attention for introducing so late into what has already been an arduous and controversial redevelopment process for the WTC Site a design that could serve as a new magnet for scrutiny.

But Port Authority chairman Anthony Coscia said that the design had precedents in the city. "Look at the Citigroup Building," Coscia said.

The building will overhang St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which was destroyed during 9/11 and will be rebuilt on the northern section of the site next to a planned park.

When the agreement between JP Morgan Chase and state officials was announced last week at Governor Eliot Spitzer's midtown offices, Spitzer indicated that the overhanging design would allow the park's visitors to "play chess in the rain." Spitzer also said all the approvals to construct the building were in place and that it would be completed by 2012.