2 WTC was designed by Bjarke Ingels Group and already has a tentative lease agreement with Rupert Murdoch’s media companies, 21st Century Fox and News Corp.
Wired, and an article by Andrew Rice, wins the bonanza as the media outlet to break the big reveal of the final tower designed for the World Trade Center site in New York City.
According to Rice, the design concept is the result of a super-secret design process known as Project Gotham, led by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. Once complete the project will become the headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s media companies, 21st Century Fox and News Corp.
Bjarke Ingels describes his design concept in a video included with the article, saying that the project, when viewed from Tribeca, will be "like a vertical village of singular buildings, each tailored to their individual activities, stacked on top of each other, forming parks and plazas in the sky." Viewed from the World Trade Center, explains Ingels, "the individual blocks unite, completing the spiral of towers framing the memorial." Then the video follows with the soaring three dimensional renderings and animated interior shots of the proposed design.
Rice also makes the point that the long process of redeveloping the World Trade Center, once beset by political infighting, has given way in its final chapters to the realities of the real estate market in Manhattan. "The once-dowdy area known as the Financial District has been transformed by an influx of companies from the advertising, design, and tech industries," writes Rice.
The article includes a lot more detail about the design of the building, including similarities between how the buildings will work for Murdoch's companies and designs by Ingels for Google on the other side of the country.
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