Once upon a time, One World Trade was a trumpeted as the future greenest skyscraper in the world. It turned out to be anything but, and today, Mother Jones has obtained documents explaining what the hell happened. The short answer is money, bureaucracy, bad design. Oh, and Hurricane Sandy.
People have been passing around this video for the past few days because it captures an astonishing phenomenon. The newly-built Freedom Tower emits a long, flute-like moaning sound. It's eerie and it's real. But no, it's not the ghosts of 9/11.
It's a hotly contested issue amongst architects and designers. Does a building's height stop at the highest usable floor, or should the spire above it count, too? What's the difference between a spire and an antenna? Does it really matter? Well, it does to the developer of the 1,776-foot-tall Freedom Tower.
When James Kastner took off from Newark International Airport he had no idea he'd soon be taking such an incredible photo of One World Trade Center.
The "Occupy Movement" might be nebulous, but it's at least a stirring cross-section of ideas. One of them, as followed by Motherboard's latest doc, "Free the Network," was the idea to create an internet owned by the people. It kinda worked.
On September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center transformed from a pair of gleaming towers into a carcinogenic pile of smoldering rubble that's still killing people. Currently rising out of that rubble, though, is a skyscraper with the most environmentally advanced technologies ever attempted at the scale.
