British architect Lord Norman Foster has been chosen to build an office tower at the World Trade Center site, rebuilding officials announced Thursday.
Foster, whose projects include the new Hearst tower in Manhattan, the Beijing airport and the Swiss Re headquarters in London, will build the second of developer Larry Silverstein's five planned office towers at ground zero.
Foster joins a half-dozen architects, including Frank Gehry and Santiago Calatrava, hired since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to design different projects at the 16-acre (6.4-hectare) trade center site. A transit hub designed by Calatrava is under construction now.
Construction is scheduled to begin this spring on architect David Childs' Freedom Tower &to=http://english.pravda.ru/accidents/2002/04/19/27790.html' target=_blank>skyscraper. Groundbreaking is also scheduled in spring for a trade center memorial, and Gehry has submitted designs for a performing arts center.
Silverstein hired Foster to build a 2.4-million square-foot (220,000-square-meter) tower with ground-level retail space and an underground concourse connecting workers to the new transit hub. The design for the building will be unveiled in the summer, and construction on the 65-story structure is scheduled to begin in 2007. It is scheduled to open in 2011, two years after the Freedom Tower.
Silverstein has already rebuilt a 52-story tower overlooking ground zero to replace Seven &to=http://english.pravda.ru/usa/2001/11/23/21827.html' target=_blank>World Trade Center, a third building that had collapsed on Sept. 11. Until Thursday, he had no signed tenants for either Seven or for the Freedom Tower. But the New York Academy of Science signed a 15-year lease to rent the 40th floor of Seven World Trade, Silverstein said, reports AP.
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