Charlie how was it that you were going to think about what was going to be there . Bjarke what is interesting about the tower and its location is that i live on franklin street and church. If i walk towards the World Trade Center from church, i would be walking in the streets of tribeca with the sort of city scale neighborhood until i reach the side of tower two, so basically on one side, it is facing the lively side of tribeca, and on the other side, it is the final tower that will come in eight the towers, framing it. So we need to be equally at home among the side scrapers as among among the skyscrapers as among the city blocks of tribeca. Also, it will be the home, what we said 15 years ago. It was the financial district. After 9 11, and it accelerated after the sort of financial collapse at the end of 2008, and a lot of the Financial Institutions have moved to midtown, so now you have kind of an influx of more creative companies, and we moved our office to the intersection of wall street and broadway. I love this idea that it is the street of commerce and creativity, where they intersect, so it is very new. It is a lot of different buildings within the buildings, so we got this idea to conceive of the tower as seven different buildings, each tailored to different functions. The new studios in the lower floors, and then maybe more classic towers, and that basically means that we stack me seven different boxes on top of each other so they actually create giant terraces, where even if you are living or working on the 50th floor, you can extend your day out into huge hanging gardens, so it is going to be a completely different way of inhabiting it. It is quite funny, because when you put a project like this forward, like, of course, we have thought all kinds of things about the project, and then once you put it out there, it becomes part of the city, and it open for peoples interpretations. Like one of my best friends, her little son, he instantly saw it as the stairway to heaven. Charlie wow. I can imagine. Bjarke i got an email from someone whose brother was one of the First Responders who gave his life, and sort of evoking the stair climb that the firefighters took up through the towers. Charlie did all of that inform your thinking when you designed this or Something Else . Bjarke we were focusing on the idea that the 9 11 memorial is like eight acres of sanctuary in the densest parts of the city. This is where we remember the people who died in 9 11. The towers are basically for the city today, so they frame the memorial. They create a graceful backdrop for the memorial, but we really designed the tower as much as possible to create the most lively and active city around the memorial. So it is really all must like the inside out. Charlie created for a new community. Bjarke exactly. And with this tower, i have a sense there is a chance for a renaissance for downtown to become a lively neighborhood again, because it has had a slow decade and a half. Charlie and the neighborhood needs more than office towers. Bjarke and maybe office and work was very formulaic, maybe 20 years ago, but i think today, you see so many different kinds of work environments that the mold that created the skyscrapers, primarily for finance, now will not fit the bill anymore, and we need many different kinds of spaces, both inside and outside the building for a Creative Work environment. Charlie you replaced or succeeded sir Norman Foster. What happened . Bjarke you can say that sir Norman Foster designed his tower a decade ago, back when the thinking was still Financial Institutions, so in a way, it is tailored to be a financial headquarters, and since over the last decade, the character of the neighborhood has really changed, and the kind of tenants who are looking to go there, they have radically different needs, so did not fit that kind of tenant, and it is also a side of the changing character of downtown manhattan. Charlie Rupert Murdoch and fox are principal tenants, and what will be on the top floor . Bjarke basically, news corp and fox occupy the bottom. In the top will be leased, and we still have hopes that on the very top floor, there can be a screening room, so you can imagine that once you have seen the premiere of the film where the screen lit up, you will have maybe even an even more epic view of the city you are in. Charlie how many restaurants . Bjarke i think all of this will be sort of detailed further, but we will place the amenities so that they are always adjacent to the terraces. Also, we are working on the terraces so they dipped down or lift up so that multiple floors have direct access to these hanging gardens. Charlie you once said this was like playing twister with a 1300 foot high rise. Bjarke it is true, because like one of the complexities of working on this site, it is not just the heritage of the site and the significance of the site. It is also that it is sitting on top of 11 Public Transportation lines, a service road, a power station that serves the whole neighborhood, so the footprint and columns have already been placed, so trying to guess where they would go, but now that we know what the building above is looking like, of course, from the second floor and all of the way to the top, we have placed the columns so they fit with the plan, and then basically the lobby, we have to sort of connect the dots, because what falls down might not actually land in the same place, so you get columns in all kinds of angles. You see it changing shape as it comes down, so when you come in, it looks like an expressive architectural sculpture in the lobby, but, in fact, it is almost like bringing the forces from where they arrive from the top to where they may need to go on the bottom. Charlie the second slide, the view of the terraces, and number three, we just talked about. Number four is the fox news studio. Bjarke there are huge, open workplaces, where everyone can see each other. And around. Charlie and it is a symbol of almost all new office but, where they see more open than close. Bjarke and inspired by our offices at the time. We occupied a former warehouse, so we had a huge open floor place, where everyone was within visual or even shouting distance, and i think the more you facilitate the meeting between people, the more exchange of ideas happens. Were also working on punching holes between the floors, so you have cascades that stretch. You actually have lines of sight. So you will be able to see colleagues that are maybe five floors above you or below you, so you will be able to get to them physically, and you will be able to see them visually again. Undo the vertical segregation that normally comes from working on multiple floors. Charlie take a look at this. This is what the terraces look like from above. Bjarke we are all must to extend the floor tiles from the inside though the theme of inside outside continuity is as seamless as possible. Charlie when you look at your buildings, would most people know they came from the same architect in the same way they would know that all buildings created by frank gehry have some defining similarity. Richard myers, some defining similarities, that it is not true with you, is it . Bjarke in a way, i see having a style is often like having certain things you have to do all of the time or certain things you would never allow yourself to do. In a way, a style is almost like the sum of all your inhibitions, and i think what we try to do is to design buildings that look different, particularly because they perform differently, and you can say in the beginning of each project, we try to educate ourselves and what are the key criteria here, what is the biggest problem we need to solve, or what is the greatest potential we can create, and then we try to seek expertise, find people that really know about these issues and interview them and learn about these issues and then try to turn those issues into the driving force of the design. You can almost call it like informationdriven design, like every design decision is not ruled by a style, but it is governed by it is informed by the information we have about the project and the problem. Charlie did you have to sell this . Bjarke we did. He found it disturbingly different. He needed some digestion time. And we got the idea that since all the other towers on the sites had been decide ofigned with a group architects. We decided, what if we sit down with the architect of one world trade. We go to our thinking and we hear what charlie i hear he was enthusiastic. We were on the top floor of seven world trade. He comes in. He is a very majestic gentleman. Six feet and some. I explained all the thinking. He gets up and looks at the tower. Makes a comment about all the hard work. Then he says, should i be completely honest . And mr. Silverstein says, yes, david, that is why you are here, and then all of a sudden, you can hear like a pin drop in the room, and he said, i love it. And then the conversation flowed from then. It was definitely a turning point in this process. Charlie when will this be finished . Bjarke it should be finished in 2020. Charlie and how much of this time occupy of yours . Or does your time end, and you turn it over to the builder . Bjarke i think the next two years, we will be incredibly busy doing this, and we will oversee the site, both where i work and where i live. We have a beautiful view of the site. We really have to get this one right. Charlie what influence . Bjarke when i started studying architecture in 1993, a book came out. And so anyway, i discovered him. My generation he is part of the canon of the discipline. Charlie you fell in love with his work. Bjarke each project, rather than being driven by style, like Richard Meyer likes white tile and certain shapes, with him, each project was injected into a specific situation in a society or in a country, so almost the way a journalist would approach a project by having a certain angle on a story. And rather than having it be independent of society, he was always intricately linked to the forces of the environment. I saw this idea that architecture was not something happening in the studio. It is really how a city comes to life, how a society wants to be shaped. Charlie some have suggested that the u. S. Is dead, and you were the first to come here to say, no, it is not. That is not true. Bjarke america had suffered. Everyone said you should be going to asia, because this is where the boom is happening, but i really wanted to live in new york, and i really think one of the things that the europeans can learn from america is that with the european union, europe has been incredibly good at breaking down trade barriers and opening up the borders and the Free Movement of workforces, where actually to my surprise, the 50 states of america are probably more sort of separated by legal issues than europe is. However, the culture of the american side, i had this strange episode. A month after moving to new york, i went to vancouver in canada on the west coast to give a talk at something called the urban land institute, which is a foundation both in the United States and in canada. I met a developer in vancouver. We had a great conversation, and i said finally we were opening our offices in new york, and he said, you are here, and i had just gotten off our flight from new york, in another country, three time zones away, but the idea was you are here in north america, we could do something together. It was pretty eyeopening. Charlie ok, lets look at couple of other buildings. This is west 57th street. Bjarke this is a court scraper. It is what happens when you marry the communal space with a courtyard in the middle with the density of a new york skyscraper, any sensually, what and essentially what youre seeing is from the westside waterfront from manhattan. The building like kneels down towards the water and opens up the courtyard so the sunlight and the views can enter deep into the courtyard itself. You have an abundance of daylight and sunshine and the court how. All the People Living there have views from their balconies and terraces. Charlie this is on 57th street, north of 11th . Charlie the next one is the dry line. Bjarke this is the high line. Former rail yards that have turn into the most popular prom and i. Were thinking, what if you do not have to wait until a piece of infrastructure gets decommissioned . What if you could design it in this case for the coastal resilience of manhattan, and essentially all of what is necessary to resist the next sandy . What if you could design it like Rolling Hills charlie for that to happen, a lot of things have to be touring down, it do they not . Bjarke we were trying to weave it in between some of the existing buildings, and we tried to conceive of the dry line as a love child of robert moses and jane jacobs, and for those who do not know, robert moses was also known as the powerbroker, a Public Servant with almost totalitarian influence. He made a lot of the very necessary public works in new york, the highways, the waterfronts, the public housing. Charlie often bulldozing everything out of the way, removing people were they were. Bjarke at some point, he wanted to run a highway through greenwich village, and he encountered resistance from jane jacobs, and it was sort of a davidgoliath moment to defeat the plans and save the village, but we thought what if they had worked together, because to resist an incoming flood, you need to create 12 miles of contiguous waterfront with a very sort of holistic overview, but to make it successful for the community, it needs to happen in a closed conversation with the people who are going to inhabit it, so instead of making a wall that separates the city from the water around it, to make it into an inviting landscape of undulating hills, furniture, pagodas, which actually brings the life of the city together. Charlie there is also a new this is the mountain in copenhagen. Bjarke i think this mountain is an example of what we like to call architectural alchemy, by taking traditional ingredients, like this, a big parking structure for the neighborhood. It is like an illusion of a photographic image, and then on top, we have placed a layer of apartments, so instead of having just like a traditional stack of apartments one placed on top of each other, they are actually cascading, so on this side, they cover the parking, but on the sunnyside, it becomes a manmade mountain of houses with gardens, almost like having a suburban lifestyle, a house with a garden, with a view in the middle of the city. Charlie thank you for joining us. Akin a moment. Stay with us. Charlie the Whitney Museum of american art opened in 1931. Its mandate was to focus exclusively on the art and artists of this country. It moved to madison avenue in 1966. The new building designed by renzo piano will open a few blocks from its original location. It is called a depth series achievement, and the citys changing cultural landscape. Joining me now, renzo piano, and adam weinberg. This is a remarkable story. So it is complete. How do you characterize this moment . Adam the whitney have been trying to expand for 30 years. We try to expand next to our building for the records four directors ago. The collection when we first moved in with 2000 works. Today it is 22,000 works. The idea of being able to see not just what we have, but to offer possibilities and aspirational spaces for artists to do things like we have never been able to do before. Charlie and youre going back to your roots. Adam it feels very comfortable. The greatest complement we have received in the last weeks has been it feels like the whitney. Even though it is a different kind of space. Charlie hasnt there been effort to design a new Whitney Building for a while . Adam for decades. Michael graves many years ago made an attempt. Renzo himself did a plan for uptown. In the end we both agreed there wasnt the kind of space you need to for contemporary art. Charlie leonard is a great friend of mine. Im am sure a friend of yours. He calls you up and says what . Renzo i was on the side of the library that day. Charlie which you were designing. Renzo yes. I was inside, and he called me and said why dont you come for a coffee . He was lying. [laughter] of course i will come for a coffee. Charlie tell me the truth. Did you have any notion that what he really wanted to talk to you about was designing a new building . Renzo i didnt know it all. I didnt know. Im like children. I am totally absorbed by what i am doing. It is like playing in the sand in the beach. I have to play. So i went up. I came in the room. It was full of people. It was the design committee. And great people. Adam was there. Adam leonard. Bob hurst. Charlie you are sitting there with the board. It is not just leonard. Renzo the entire board. I started to think that wasnt a coffee. We started to talk. Thats all. Charlie thats not all. Adam there was a bit of behind the scenes. We were interviewing a number of architects. Leonard said we should ask one or two questions to every architect is a constant. We asked every architect what is your Favorite Museum building in the world . Every architect named one of renzos buildings. Everybody loves his buildings. Why are we talking to renzo . Charlie which do they love . Adam the byler museum, the manila museum. It was those that came up over and over again. Charlie you said im not just here, im not prepared to compete. I dont do that. If you want me to do it, offer me the job and i will do it. Renzo i hope you understand, at a certain age you dont want to fall in love with jobs like that. You dont want to fall in love and then it goes away with somebody else. Its too much. Charlie you dont want to fall in love with the idea of building this museum because you have to tell them what it is and have them say we will decide on someone else. Renzo its just that passion. You cannot do this profession without passion. You have to put yourself entirely fair. This was incredible. Im european, italian. I grew up with the idea that freedom comes from this country. You know. We grow with this great idea, great roots, great culture. At the same time you need. Freedom. America was and is about that attitude. Making a house for american art, an incredible challenge. Bringing together my sense of things, and this core freedom that is an absolute necessity. Charlie you hope to incorporate social life, or vanity, urbanity, invention, construction, technology, poetry, and light. That is hugely ambitious. [laughter] renzo this is true. Architecture is about those things coming together. Social life, urbanity, poetry, it is about fighting against gravity and try to create something that is playing wi