World Trade Centered

The revelation of the new new Two World Trade Center, a stack of seven boxes that rise one thousand three hundred and forty feet into the sky, designed by the rather busy architect Bjarke Ingels, demands a fair amount of processing: It is replacing one of the better designs of the World Trade Center master plan, by Norman Foster, a tight bundle of four angular towers; in a shift of the New York media industry’s “center of gravity” to downtown, it will house the headquarters of both News Corp. and 21st Century Fox, whose Fox News will be broadcasting from the World Trade Center, its headlines streaking above the heads of passersby; and when (if) Two World Trade Center is completed by its target date of 2020, the re-constituted World Trade Center will be complete nearly twenty years after 9/11.

Though apparently designed at least in part to satisfy the whims of the Murdoch clan, whose money is required to complete the tower, resulting in a silhouette that is clumsy from some angles, Two World Trade Center is not entirely without charm or ingenuity — each box will have a garden which will “evoke varying climates, from tropical to arctic,” according to Wired — or recent precedent — stacks of boxes are real cool right now — even if Ingels’ rhetoric of reuniting the “streetscapes of Tribeca” with the “towers Downtown,” and of “horizontal meets vertical, diversity becomes unity” achieves the distinction of being among the more inane proclamations about yet another building with the unfortunate circumstance of being constructed in what has become New York City’s deepest, blackest hole of disingenuousness.