Kostabi World Trade Center : Amazing Structures

The Kostabi World Trade Center is an envisioned building in New York City, United States. If built, it will have 160 floors and will be 2,000 feet (609 m) high. It was one of the many ideas that was presented for the World Trade Center site after the 9/11 terrorist attacks destroyed the original World Trade Center Twin Towers.

Mark Kostabi has proposed a monumental building devoted entirely to art, a mixed-use structure comprising art studios, galleries, museums, apartments, printing workshops, sculpture foundries, schools, offices for creative firms, hotels, libraries, bookstores, theaters, and restaurants: a self-sufficient vertical art city.

The structure has been designed by world-renowned architect Eli Attia and will emerge from a park designed by San Diego-based environmental artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison.

Eli Attia(of Eli Attia Architects), who had successful involvement in the construction of the Millenium Hilton Hotel (1992) and the 101 Park Avenue (1982), both in New York, has developed plans for a majestic spire tapering from a 4.64 acre footprint and rising towards an unprecedented 2,000 foot height. The building will be a highly versatile structural cage equivalent to 160 stories. The tower will taper upward from the ground at an accelerating rate providing a wide range of floor sizes: from 202,000 square feet at the base to 10,000 square feet at the top. The total floor area will be over two million square feet.

Current plans call for the building to rise from a 30 acre site in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Mindful of the ecological significance of constructing the world's tallest building, artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison were hired to create the park from which the skyscraper will rise. The Harrisons, known internationally for environmental reconstruction, have a particular interest in the relationship of the site to the East River. On it they intend to establish an ecosystem, "part wetland and brook, part forest and meadow that reflects the ecosystem once present and the probable ecosystem that will emerge as global warming takes place".

This building will be finished in the Twentieth Century and will reassert the glory of its predecessors - but it will open and lead into the Twenty-First Century with its inspiring design and state-of-the-art structural engineering. Thus it will reflect something of both centuries for a single purpose - the support and recognition of art as a significant part of our human existence.

After the Freedom Tower project was chosen to replace the WTC Twin Towers, the plans for the Kostabi WTC were dropped. However, there still remains the possibility that the Kostabi WTC might be built in another location in the future.

(Information comes courtesy of the Wikipedia amongst other sources.)