Latest news with #DavidChilds
New York Times
2 days ago
- General
- New York Times
My Friends Are Immortal to Me
The deaths of three friends in the past seven months has me thinking about immortality — not Plato's view of the immortal soul, or the Bible's, but simply what lasts of our lives after we go. The lives of my friends were prominent, so one might think that their works would long outlast them. Lance Morrow, the essayist; Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist and writer; and David Childs, the architect who built One World Trade Center (also known as the Freedom Tower), oversaw the Moynihan Train Hall extension of Penn Station in New York, 7 World Trade Center and much more. If anyone could achieve immortality on earth, these three should qualify. Yet history teaches otherwise. David Childs's masterworks could crumble to dust. The words of Jules and Lance could be forgotten in a trice. Practically no one would have heard of John Donne today had T.S. Eliot not resurrected his name. We want valued things to last, but so often they don't. The lives of my three friends, though, are vivid in my mind. I easily and gladly resurrect our conversations, the artistic and political opinions we shared, our special terms of reference, our shorthand private language. These are my souvenirs. David and I met when our families lived near each other in Washington, in the '70s. Our wives and children were friends and remain so, though distances intervened. David was especially good with our children. He taught our eldest, Carl, a trick with algebra, which Carl, now 59, remembers to this day. A major international figure in architecture, David remained quiet and modest throughout his life. Amused if annoyed by the prevailing assumption that the tallest building was the best, he spoke of installing a device in his home with a button he could push to raise the needle of Freedom Tower a few feet whenever a taller building went up, so that his would always be in first place. David died with an especially pernicious form of dementia. He could not recall building anything in his life, the cruelest way a thing can crumble. Would you like to submit a Letter to the Editor? Use the form below to share your thoughts on this or any other piece published in The New York Times in the past seven days. For your letter to be considered for publication, it should be 150 to 300 words and include your first and last names. If it is selected, an editor will contact you to review any necessary edits. Your submission must be exclusive to The New York Times. We do not publish open letters or third-party letters. Click here for more information about the selection process. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Times
20-05-2025
- Business
- Times
David Childs obituary: designer of One World Trade Center
After the twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed in a terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, there was widespread clamour for a so-called starchitect to design a building that would soar in its wake and represent hope and renewal in New York City. Daniel Libeskind was a popular choice when he won a design competition staged by the city's authorities to plan the rebuilding of the 16-acre site in Lower Manhattan. The Polish-American architect had recently designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin — a much-acclaimed paean to memory and humanity. The centrepiece of his work was expected to be a tower that would utilise Libeskind's deconstructivist aesthetic of fragmentation to become a metaphor of healing, albeit in an edgy, asymmetrical and avant-garde building. There was one problem. The person paying for the reconstruction was Larry Silverstein, a tough-as-teak Brooklyn-born billionaire property developer who had signed a 99-year lease with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on the World Trade Center complex of buildings only two months before 9/11. Given Silverstein held the strings of a purse that included a $3.5 billion insurance payout, no architect, however starry, could credibly get to work at their drawing board without the developer's say-so. On the day after the attacks, Silverstein rang an architect called David Childs, of whom few people had heard. His first words were: 'Now I want you to rebuild these towers.' In Silverstein's mind, whatever replaced the twin towers had to exploit the commercial value to the maximum and there was no better exponent of that than Childs, a veteran designer of tall buildings in New York at the corporate practice Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), whose oeuvre was more inspired by the boxy, pared-back modernism of the German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Libeskind pressed on, exhibiting his masterplan for the site, which he called 'Memory Foundations', in 2003. In it he envisioned a large memorial in the footprint of one of the towers to honour the 2,977 people who died in the attacks. At the centre of a spiral of tall buildings at the site would be One World Trade Center: an asymmetrical skyscraper designed by Libeskind himself and topped with a spire that would be a nod to the Statue of Liberty nearby. In an office not far away, Childs was overseeing the design of a rival and very different tower, a monolithic and symmetrical structure that would maximise floor space. Mammon won, but in Childs Silverstein had no better emissary to mollify Libeskind and the New York authorities who had hired him. Described by Chris Fogarty in Building Design magazine as 'tall and bespectacled, affable, urbane, and the Ivy League embodiment of a virtuoso architect', Childs navigated a difficult path. Silverstein insisted that Childs's design would 'reflect the spirit of Dan's plan'. Libeskind was described as a 'full member of the project team'. By the end of 2003 an impasse had been reached and both chose their words carefully. 'We both have strong opinions about design,'' said Libeskind at the time. 'Nothing worthwhile was ever created without some conflict, and what emerges from a collaboration should be even greater than the sum of its parts.'' The design went through five iterations before Childs revealed the final plans in June 2005. The tower, which was completed in 2014, is the tallest building in the western hemisphere and the seventh tallest in the world. A muscular servant to capitalism, it may lack the full power of Libeskind's design philosophy and elegiac memorialising instinct, but there were clear signs of collaboration in the sculptural form of the glass skyscraper that effectively becomes octagonal at midpoint and tapers towards the top where a mast brings the height to 1,776ft, signifying the date of the US Declaration of Independence. Opinions remain divided in the architecture world, but Childs emerged from the process with his reputation enhanced. In explaining his approach, Childs, who cut a patrician figure and cared deeply about the urban context of his buildings, made a backhanded criticism of the type of branded buildings that 'starchitects' come up with. 'At SOM, you don't know what my next building will look like,' he told The New York Times in 2003. 'You know what a Richard Meier building will look like; there's a style. I'm more like Eero Saarinen, whom I revere. His buildings all look different.' David Magie Childs was born in 1941 in Princeton, New Jersey, to Alton Childs, a classics tutor at Princeton University, and Mary (née Cole), a director of the Children's Book Council. He was educated at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and went to Yale to study zoology. Attending a lecture by the architectural historian Vincent Scully changed his life. He switched to architecture and qualified in 1967. His first job as a shape and place maker was as a junior member of a presidential commission to transform the run-down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. Nathaniel Owings, a partner in the already well-established SOM in Washington, was impressed with the cerebral and scholarly looking young man. In 1971 Childs joined the practice and became schooled in its collegiate approach to corporate architecture. He worked on Washington projects including the headquarters for National Geographic. The practice had boomed after the Second World War, picking up lucrative commissions during a wave of commercial construction inspired by the Miesian glass curtain-walled skyscrapers that became the house style of postwar capitalism. When that was replaced with the playful historicism and pastiche of postmodernism in the late Seventies, Childs performed the architect's version of the reverse ferret. He moved to the New York office in 1984 and helped to add a postmodernist twist to the skyline himself in 1989 with 1 Worldwide Plaza, a 47-storey office tower west of Times Square. A company man, he twice served as chairman of SOM from 1991 to 1993 and from 1998 to 2000. He is survived by his wife, Anne Woolman Reeve, whom he married in 1963, and by their children Joshua, Nicholas and Jocelyn. Childs declined Silverstein's offer to design all the buildings at the World Trade Center site because he believed that diversity was vital for creating a rich urban grain that would attract tourists wandering through while laptops and machines whirred in the towers above. Other architects brought in included Fumihiko Maki, Jean Nouvel and Britain's Lord (Norman) Foster, who is designing the 400m Two World Trade Center — yet to start construction. Childs did consent to design 7 World Trade Center, a parallelogram shape, which was completed in 2006. His collegiate designs for tall commercial buildings continued to add to the Manhattan skyline in later years. He retired in 2022. Childs liked to say that experience teaches you to discern which clients to turn down, a skill at least as important as nurturing new relationships. When once told that Donald Trump was on the line to discuss a potential project, he chose not to take the call. David Childs, architect, was born on April 1, 1941. He died of Lewy body dementia on March 26, 2025, aged 83
Times
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
BBC NOW/MacMillan review — this bubbly new concerto flows like a river
James MacMillan was in a mellow mood when he wrote his new concerto for euphonium and strings, titled Where the Lugar meets the Glaisnock, after the two rivers that meet in his Ayrshire home town of Cumnock. And the music flowed like a great river in one continuous sweep of 25 minutes, travelling with a natural ease and unhurried certainty that suggests there's truth to the composer's claim this piece has been percolating in his mind for a long time. In fact, it was about 25 years ago that the player David Childs — who gave this premiere at BBC Hoddinott Hall in Cardiff, in a concert conducted by the composer — first wrote to MacMillan requesting a piece. The pair have remained in
