News
UP IN 4 WTC
September 10, 2012
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| On Friday—up on the 60th floor of the 2.3M SF, 72-story 4 WTC, which will finish in fall 2013—we snapped Silverstein's Janno Lieber, president of the developer's subsidiary World Trade Center Properties. In ascending order of height, 4 WTC is 50% leased; 3 WTC is up to 11 stories and will deliver in 2016; 2 WTC, which along with 3 will include the site's amenity retail, will be built to street level and await signed leases for further construction; and 1 WTC is 50% leased. Janno tells us the unfinished buildings have tax abatements until complete, enabling the developer to pace construction and avoid flooding Downtown ahead of demand. |
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| Silverstein's Jeremy Moss leads office leasing at 2, 3, and 4 WTC and tells us interested tenants range from 5,000 SF-ers that had space in the original WTC to big boys looking for 500k SF (as many as 10 floors by 4 WTC's 44k SF floorplates). His pitch is new, column-free, flexible space for the same or less than 30-year-old office space in Midtown. He says the typical lease term here is 10 to 15 years (20 for the larger tenants). |
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| Osamu Sassa works for Tokyo's Maki and Associates, designer of 4 WTC. David Childs of the US-based SOM designed 1 WTC, the UK's Norman Foster handled 2, and the UK's Richard Rogers 3. All are Pritzker Architecture Prize winners. Janno says the variety was intentional to draw in different yet complementary designs. Osamu says tower 4 is lucky to have unobstructed views of the memorial park to the east and Zuccotti Park to the west, making it the gateway to Daniel Libeskind's master plan. To accentuate Daniel's plan for descending buildings meant to draw the eye in a spiral from 1 WTC down to the memorial, Osamu started with a parallelogram floor plate (dictated by Greenwich Street's diagonal slice through the street grid) and torqued it to a trapezoid on the 48th floor. |
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| Tishman-AECOM's Frank Hussey has been working at WTC since cleanup of the Twin Towers. He was working on the new 1 WTC until he moved to oversee construction at 4 WTC, and he'll continue on at 3 WTC when 4 finishes. He tells us he had a friendly bet with the superintendent over at 1 (no money, just bragging rights among the 500 workers at 4 WTC and the 1,500 at 1 WTC) about which building would top out first. Durst and Port Authority's 1 WTC was ahead of schedule, but after a tight race, Frank and tower 4 won, topping out in late June. |
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| Sometimes our camera does cool things without us knowing it. We snapped 1 WTC from our perch on the 60th floor of 4 WTC, capturing the reflection of the crane atop 4 WTC. If you look really closely, you can also see us waving back at you from the reflection. |
