David Childs, Architect of 1 World Trade Center and Deutsche Bank Center, Dies

David Childs, the architect behind 1 World Trade Center, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere that was built on the site of the former Twin Towers destroyed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, died Wednesday at 83.

The cause was Lewy body dementia, The New York Times reported. Childs died in Pelham, N.Y., where he was staying with his wife Annie to be near his children.

Aside from his work at 1 World Trade Center, the 104-story glass skyscraper erected by Silverstein Properties, Childs also designed Deutsche Bank Center at Columbus Circle (formerly known as the Time Warner Center), 1540 Broadway and 35 Hudson Yards. 

“David was the most humanist of architects,” said Kenneth Lewis, managing partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), where Childs served as chairman emeritus until he retired in 2022. “He cared about us, he cared about our city, and he always had time to bring that to the table as we were working.”

Childs was known for tackling projects with contentious histories, including that 1 World Trade Center as well as the Deutsche Bank Center. And, unlike other “starchitects,” whose work can easily be defined, Childs aimed not to have a specific, distinguishable style.

“I know a lot of what I’ve designed is not ‘A’ work,” he told the Times in 2005. “But my role was different. I wanted to raise the level of everyday development as much as I could.”

David Childs was born on April 1, 1941, in Princeton, N.J., and attended Yale University, where he found a zeal for architecture and switched his major from zoology, according to the Times. While at college he met his wife Annie — who attended Sarah Lawrence College — and they married in 1963.

He joined SOM in 1971 to open a Washington, D.C., office then moved to New York City in 1984, where his first project was 1 Worldwide Plaza, the Hell’s Kitchen office tower completed in 1989, according to the Times.

Later in his career, he was tasked with replacing the New York Coliseum, a maligned convention center built by Robert Moses in 1954 and labeled “a low point for New York’s public buildings” by the Times. It was shuttered in 1986.

“The Coliseum that was there was supposed to bring life to that corner, but it never came,” Childs told Commercial Observer in 2019. “People forget that coliseums were usually empty.”

After previous plans for the Coliseum’s replacement drew protests and lawsuits concerned over its size and potential of casting shadows over Central Park, Mortimer Zuckerman, co-founder of owner Boston Properties (now BXP), tapped Childs to come up with a better design to appease opponents, whose ranks included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

“It was massive because it piled all of its weight into the center,” Childs told CO of the original design. “I opened a hole in the center to let the sunlight through.”

Yet even those plans fell through, and Related Companies took up the project in 1996 with plans for two 750-foot towers with office space, a 251-room Mandarin Oriental Hotel, 198 condominiums and a 347,000-square-foot retail space. Once again, Related chose Childs to come up with the design.

 The $1.3 billion project finally opened in 2004 as Time Warner Center. It was officially renamed Deutsche Bank Center in 2021 after the German lender took more than 1 million square feet of office space there.

Lewis said that throughout that process, Childs never shied away from meeting with community members — no matter how against the project they were — and always calmly explained to them his rationale behind the choices he was making.

“They were upset about what, to them, was a huge building,” Lewis said. “David would take any question from them and, never in a patronizing way … just engage them in a very real way and show them that you can listen and disagree.”

But perhaps Childs’s biggest mark on the city is the 1,776-foot, 3.5 million-square-foot glass tower at 1 World Trade Center that Larry Silverstein built to replace much of the Twin Towers.

“I was hired by him just three weeks before [the terrorist attacks] to redo the lobbies and make those outdoor spaces around the Twin Towers more pleasant, and so forth,” Childs told CO in 2021. “And, I was just about to get started on it when 9/11 happened.”

Childs and the SOM team were all personally affected by 9/11 — their offices were downtown and they lost one of their colleagues during the attacks — but he kept the bigger picture for the city as a whole when getting to work on rebuilding the site.

“He started as the best people do, by putting your emotions aside, by putting quick ideas aside about what we should do,” Lewis said. “[Instead, Childs said,] ‘Let’s start with the city itself and how do we repair the city.'”

Lewis said that Silverstein asked Childs to design the entire World Trade Center campus after the attacks, but Childs declined because he felt it “would not be in the nature of the city” to have such a large area done solely by one architect.

“The rebuilding of the World Trade Center was a labor of love for thousands of people, and no single individual was more responsible for its success than David,” Silverstein said in a statement. “He pushed from the earliest days for the creation of a master plan and the participation of a wide range of architectural voices.

“He was a mentor, partner and a passionate advocate for design excellence, enlightened urban planning, public space art and sustainability,” Silverstein added.  “He will be greatly missed, but his legacy will live forever.”

After a long and winding development history — including protests by some who felt the tower shouldn’t be built and a lawsuit accusing Childs of copying the design — 1 World Trade Center opened its doors in 2014.

“A good architect listens,” Childs said about the design in 2011. “I knew everyone would have an opinion. Many said what I was doing was terrible, and I should leave the space empty. I didn’t agree. As time has evolved, these feelings have been recessed. Now, many feel this is a sign of resilience and honor to those who worked there.”

Aside from his wife, Childs is survived by his children Joshua, Nicholas and Jocelyn Childs; sister, Ellyn Allison; and six grandchildren.

Nicholas Rizzi can be reached at nrizzi@commercialobserver.com.