Siverstein Unveils Plans for New 7 WTC

A rendering of the new 7 World Trade Center. (Photo courtesy of Tishman Construction Corp.)

Larry Silverstein, chairman of Silverstein Properties Inc., was joined by New York Governor George Pataki and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as he unveiled plans for a new 7 World Trade Center.

Tishman Construction Corp. will serve as general contractor on the first new construction project on the World Trade Center site. The new 7 World Trade Center will be taller than its predecessor, which collapsed after being struck by falling debris from the 110-story Twin Towers.

The $700 million, 52-story, 1.6 million-sq.-ft., 750-ft. tall building will be built on a 58,400-sq.-ft. site bounded by Vesey, Barclay, Washington streets and West Broadway.

Rising from the site will be a parallelogram-shaped building which will be wrapped by a glass façade that will contain 42 tenant floors, with floorplates averaging 39,750 sq. ft.

The tower will sit atop a 10-story base that will house a new Consolidated Edison substation and the mechanical systems for the building.

Tenants and visitors will enter through a 45-ft.-high stone and glass entry lobby on the east side of the building. The new lobby will face a 15,000-sq.-ft. triangular-shaped, tree-lined park and pedestrian plaza.

While Silverstein reserved the right to build the same size building, Silverstein decided to shave 400,000 sq. ft. from the new tower so the architect, David Childs of Skidmore Owing & Merrill, could eliminate an elevator bank, and in its place, create a straight shaft tower at street level that opens up on Greenwich Street, allowing for pedestrian and vehicular access.

According to Silverstein, the new tower will "introduce a host of life-safety and environmental features never before incorporated into a commercial skyscraper."

Those enhancements include reinforced concrete walls that protect the building core for the full height of the building, twice the amount of fireproofing than is required by the current building codes, staircases that are 20 percent wider to facilitate egress from the building and the stairs will be pressurized to resist the intrusion of smoke.

In addition, the egress system is designed with redundancies to facilitate evacuation. The two stairs from the tower are joined by a connecting fire-rated corridor at a lower floor leading to four fire stairs down to grade.

Also an internal antenna system will be installed to improve communication between emergency workers. Other safety enhancements include multiple levels of high-performance filters to reduce the possibility of contaminates from entering occupied areas from the exterior, emergency generators are located at the top of the building to maximize distance from possible threats and fuel tanks will be buried underground outside of the building's footprint.