David M. Childs, an architect who topped the New York Metropolis skyline with the tallest constructing within the Americas — a shimmering new 1 World Commerce Heart rather than the dual towers destroyed on 9/11 — died on Wednesday in Pelham, N.Y. He was 83.
The trigger was Lewy physique dementia, his spouse, Annie, mentioned. Mr. Childs had properties in Manhattan and Keene, N.Y. The couple have been staying in Pelham to be close to two of their youngsters.
One World Commerce Heart (additionally referred to as Freedom Tower) is a tapering, eight-faceted exclamation level abutting the Nationwide September 11 Memorial in Decrease Manhattan. Recognized to hundreds of thousands of tourists, it is only one of a dozen transformative buildings in Manhattan that Mr. Childs and his colleagues at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed from the Nineteen Eighties to the 2010s. Some are crisp evocations of midcentury modernism; others conjure the extra ornamental towers of the Jazz Age.
Paul Goldberger, a former structure critic at The Occasions and The New Yorker and the writer of “Up From Zero: Politics, Structure and the Rebuilding of New York” (2004), assessed Mr. Childs’s profession in a latest e-mail: “There was all the time an earnestness to his structure, a seriousness of intention and a deep perception in urbanistic values. He was involved in regards to the bigger civic good, and he labored exhausting to persuade builders to take this under consideration. This was his legacy as a lot as pure design.”
