Tower Two, 2.0

As the outrage mushrooms over the internet, let me share my initial thoughts on Bjark Ingels' design for the new Two World Trade Center.

I, too, was looking forward to Norman Foster's quadri-diamonded crystal of a tower as the most anticipated building after Santiago Calatrava's transportation hub that is easily my favorite bit of architecture going up on the site.

Foster was not scrapped for artistic reasons, but for the practical. Tower Two will host television production studios and their offices and the Dow Jones. The layout of Foster's tower did not efficiently maximize the space towards those ends. Ingels' does.

But Ingels' does more. It pushes the envelope.

We are a predictable lot when it comes to our art. I'm as guilty as the next. We hate the newest thing until it is old and shoved by proxy into the warmer parts of our heart by the next newly vilified adventure.

This design is worth our praise.

It is not so much unlike anything we've ever seen (the new cantilevered apartment building One Madison Square springs to mind) as it is unlike anything we ever expected of an office tower. It has a precariousness to it that flies in the face of corporate power and the corporate towers that precede it. In fact, it is in many ways, the reverse of a NYC skyscraper. Or, better put, the inverse.

Look at its silhouette and notice the World Financial Center at its feet. NYC is known for its setbacks, a design element that was mandated after the nearby Equitable Building cut off the sun as early as 1915, one hundred years ago.

Tower Two does the opposite, on two of its sides, filling in that negative space in the skyline, in our minds, but granting sun past its other edges simultaneously.

Some architecture is driven by narcissism. "I am here. Are you?" But this building is having a conversation with its neighboring buildings, responding to them, sharing the sky.

I love that it is unexpected, I love that it surprises with its overhangs, I love that it plays nicely with its neighbors, but mostly, I love that it dares us to catch up with it.