QuickTime News: Foster & Partner's Rebuilding of the World Trade Center Site

Fellow architects have notified us of Foster & Partner's new website entitled: The Rebuilding of the World Trade Center Site. The site features a detailed proposal for the architectural and urban rebirth of this landmark site in New York City, featuring numerous drawings, computerized rendering and QuickTime video and animation. Foster & Partners is one of the premier architectural firms practicing worldwide. Based in London the firm is led by the celebrated English architect Lord Foster of Thames Bank.

Norman Foster was granted knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours of 1990, won the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 1994, received the 1999 Pritzker Architectural Prize Laureate (the architecture profession's equivalent to the Nobel Prize), and also in 1999 was honoured with a life peerage, taking the title of Lord Foster of Thames Bank.

The firm's work has been widely published and exhibited.

World Trade Center Design Site

Foster & Partner's new website, devoted to the World Trade Center project, details the firm's three-part proposal. The firm was selected late 2002, along with six other teams, to develop a comprehensive master plan for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. (More information about the selection and schemes can be found here.)

Their new site devoted to their scheme is succinctly presented with a number of superb QuickTime movies with combined video and sophisticated animations. In fact, these QuickTime movies are an excellent example of how to use QuickTime technology in architectural practice. The QuickTime movies are well executed, include elegant voice-over narration, and utilize complex CAD, 3D and 2D animations.

The Design

The firm's design proposal is very strong, featuring a new connected twin tower design that would be the strongest, safest, and greenness tall building in the world. Perhaps the nicest part of the proposal is the spartan elegance of the memorial sites, which include two walled voids where the destroyed towers once stood. Nothing exist in the voids but air and you cannot see into them from the park that surrounds them. Beneath their periphery runs underground sacred spaces for visitors and families. From within these dark spaces -- which run around each void -- one can look into and up in the void, only seeing air and the sky above. The treatment of these spaces is elegant in its simplicity, as is the architectural programming to separate the voids into a public void and a private void just for the families of victims.

To experience this excellent architectural proposal visit the site now. http://www.fosterworldtradecenter.com/