Looks like Childs won the architecture battle over Liebeskind. To be truthful after I watched a PBS program that featured Liebeskind explaining his design I liked his much better.

Daniel Liebeskind was trying to mimic the Statue of Liberty with his Freedom Tower. It's not bad. And I'm NOT a fan of Liebeskind's other work. It mostly just looks like rubbish.

The "redesign" looks like Child's design with a spire placed atop it. For anyone who hasn't followed this, and I haven't as closely as I would have liked, Liebeskind is the Architect awarded the design by the state. David Childs is the Architect of Larry Silverstien, the land's leaseholder. The two Architects have been battling for the past few years about the design, and I think Liebeskind has gotten the short end of the stick the entire time. Child's is the better Architect in terms of constructability and safety, but his design lacks passion. Liebeskind has passion, but lacks realism. Together they could either do very well together, or very poorly. I think were still getting the poor result.

<img src="http://www.gothamist.com/images/2003_12_torquedtower-thumb.jpg";
To the left is Liebeskind's Design and to the right Child's. To be fair Child's isn't give fair treatment in the pic, since it needs to be seen in 3d to be better appreciated. I just can't seem to find a decent picture though. Perhaps that's telling in itself.

When the dust settles we have a mishmash of the 2. I don't hate it, but it isn't all that inspiring to me. Like Tom pointed out, its certainly better than some of the other choices.

By the way, I practice a whole different type of Architecture than either Child's or Liebeskind. Mine is the down to earth real Architecture you see when you go buy groceries at the store or pull through the drive-in at the fast food palce. When I have gotten my picture in the paper (twice so far) for my architecture, its a grainy picture in the local business journal, not the Wall street journal. Their type of Architectural fascinates me and at the same time disgusts me. While I enjoy and dream about their sort of buildings, I'm disgusted at the egos and arrogance that goes with them. There really are two different Architectural worlds, however the larger than life egos that you see in Child's and Liebeskind can be found in both worlds however.

Anyway just a bit of musing.

-Steve G.