NY's 'Freedom Tower' design unveiled

A new design for the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Centre has been unveiled in New York showing a structure with a gracefully sloping spire rising 1,776 feet.

The new plan – which comes after months of contentious negotiations between designers Daniel Libeskind and David Childs – retains many elements of Libeskind’s original plan but appears to smooth out its most angular elements.

“We owe it to the heroes who died on September 11 and we owe it as an expression of our confidence in the future to have this soaring tribute to the memory of the heroes we lost and to freedom,” Governor George Pataki said.

“This represents a melding of two very, very talented creative geniuses,” Pataki said.

The two architects reached a compromise design after months of feuding over the size and shape of the tower that will rise at the World Trade Centre site.

Negotiations between Libeskind and Childs were contentious, but the two met a deadline set by Pataki.

Childs said they had “a spectacular time working together”.

“Creative minds have different thoughts about how you do things,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to work with somebody who would just say yes.”

The plan follows the original, asymmetrical structure proposed by Libeskind, who was originally brought in as the architect to remake ground zero by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

But Childs, who was appointed by leaseholder Larry Silverstein, succeeded in including a lattice structure filled with energy-generating windmills at the top of the building.

Childs likened the suspension elements of the new design to the Brooklyn Bridge, with the bottom of the building “torqued or twisted”.

The tower is to include 70 storeys of office space and a 276-foot spire. The tapered building evokes the Statue of Liberty across the harbour, as Libeskind envisioned.