David M. Childs, an architect who crowned the New York City skyline with the tallest building in the Americas — a shimmering new 1 World Trade Center in place of the twin towers destroyed on 9/11 — died on Wednesday in Pelham, N.Y. He was 83.
The cause was Lewy body dementia, his wife, Annie, said. Mr. Childs had homes in Manhattan and Keene, N.Y. The couple were staying in Pelham to be near two of their children.
One World Trade Center (also called Freedom Tower) is a tapering, eight-faceted exclamation point abutting the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan. Known to millions of visitors, it is just one of a dozen transformative buildings in Manhattan that Mr. Childs and his colleagues at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed from the 1980s to the 2010s. Some are crisp evocations of midcentury modernism; others conjure the more decorative towers of the Jazz Age.
Paul Goldberger, a former architecture critic at The Times and The New Yorker and the author of “Up From Zero: Politics, Architecture and the Rebuilding of New York” (2004), assessed Mr. Childs’s career in a recent email: “There was always an earnestness to his architecture, a seriousness of intention and a deep belief in urbanistic values. He was concerned about the larger civic good, and he worked hard to convince developers to take this into account. This was his legacy as much as pure design.”
Because Mr. Childs often tackled projects with contentious histories and competing constituencies, his work could be pushed and pulled in many directions, as it was at 1 World Trade Center. That design went through at least five iterations during the protracted rebuilding of ground zero, where the original twin towers stood until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
To admirers, the final version of 1 World Trade Center, completed in 2014, repaired an awful hole in the skyline and symbolized civic resilience. To detractors, it demonstrated how politics, commerce and fear had strangled imagination in the redevelopment of ground zero. To visitors, it was synonymous with New York itself, judging by the tchotchke market it spawned.
To Mr. Childs, 1 World Trade Center also served as something else: a pylon to mark the abutting memorial. “It subtly recalls, in the sky, the tragedy that has happened here,” he said in 2005.
Tall and bespectacled, affable and urbane, Mr. Childs was the Ivy League embodiment of a virtuoso architect. He joined SOM, a storied architecture and engineering firm, in 1971; served as its chairman from 1991 to 1993 and again from 1998 to 2000, the only partner ever hold that title twice; and was a consulting partner until his retirement in 2022.
Mr. Childs was the antithesis of a “starchitect,” whose celebrity derives from unmistakable flourishes. And he candidly acknowledged his place in the architectural pantheon.
“I know a lot of what I’ve designed is not ‘A’ work,” he said to Nicolai Ouroussoff, then The Times’s architecture critic, in 2005. “But my role was different. I wanted to raise the level of everyday development as much as I could.”
David Magie Childs was born on April 1, 1941, in Princeton, N.J. He grew up in Mount Kisco, N.Y., with his mother, Mary (Cole) Childs, who was the executive director of the Children’s Book Council. His father, Alton Quentin Childs, taught classics at Princeton University. His parents divorced when David was a child.
After attending Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, he went on to Yale University, where a mesmerizing lecture by the architectural historian Vincent Scully persuaded him to forgo studies in zoology and pursue architecture instead. Around that time he met Anne Woolman Reeve, known as Annie, who was attending Sarah Lawrence College. They wed in 1963.
His wife survives him, as do their children, Joshua, Nicholas and Jocelyn Childs; six grandchildren; and a sister, Ellyn Allison. (When Mr. Childs was terribly sick with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in 2016, Joshua helped save his father’s life by donating much of his own liver for a transplant.)
Mr. Childs earned a master’s degree in architecture at Yale in 1967, then joined a presidential commission in Washington that sought to transform a dilapidated Pennsylvania Avenue into a ceremonial boulevard. There, he met Nathaniel A. Owings, a founding partner of SOM, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a future senator from New York. Both became his mentors.
Mr. Owings hired Mr. Childs in 1971 to open a Washington office for SOM. During that time, he worked on Constitution Gardens, an oasis of tranquillity along the National Mall.
Mr. Childs moved to New York in 1984. His first big project was a 47-story office tower, 1 Worldwide Plaza, part of a full-block development in Hell’s Kitchen, west of Times Square. The building was completed in 1989 in the decorative postmodern style, with a brick facade and multiple setbacks.
His early designs for the Deutsche Bank Center on Columbus Circle (formerly the Time Warner Center) were also in the postmodern aesthetic. But after the long-delayed project was taken over by a new developer, Mr. Childs revised the design dramatically in 2000, with a plan for two 55-story parallelogram-shaped skyscrapers clad in glass. The center opened in 2003.
Mr. Childs’s most daring design involved the expansion of Pennsylvania Station into the James A. Farley Post Office, across Eighth Avenue, a project championed by Senator Moynihan. It called for the construction of a two-block-wide, 150-foot-high, concave glass canopy in the middle of the block, over the entrance to a new four-level passenger concourse where mail was once sorted.
Ultimately, a more modest version of the concourse opened in 2021, as the Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station. It was designed by SOM, but by then Mr. Childs was no longer associated with the project.
Fatefully, in July 2001, the developer Larry A. Silverstein signed a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center complex with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the builder and owner. He hired Mr. Childs to prepare renovation plans for the 30-year-old twin towers, designed by Minoru Yamasaki.
Two months later, the entire complex lay in ruin, including 7 World Trade Center, which Mr. Silverstein had developed and owned. In “Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan,” Lynne B. Sagalyn wrote that Mr. Silverstein called Mr. Childs the day after the attacks, saying: “Now I want you to rebuild these towers. You’re going to be my Minoru Yamasaki.”
Mr. Childs declined the commission to design all the new towers, saying architectural diversity was vital to the site. But he did set to work on the first assignment, to replace 7 World Trade Center. Finished in 2006, the new 7 World Trade Center is a crystalline parallelogram, meticulously detailed and situated to reopen views along Greenwich Street that had been obscured by the previous building. It is arguably Mr. Childs’s finest skyscraper.
The design of 1 World Trade Center was a public spectacle. Mr. Silverstein fought the Port Authority, which was battling New York City, all while Mr. Childs was skirmishing with the architect Daniel Libeskind, whom state officials had designated as master planner of the trade center site.
Mr. Libeskind envisioned a tower with the symbolic height of 1,776 feet. But Mr. Silverstein never intended to construct it. Instead, he had Mr. Childs devise alternatives, including a 2,000-foot tower. A clash was inevitable, resulting in an awkward mash-up of the architects’ competing visions in late 2003. This plan was derailed in April 2005 by security objections from the New York Police Department.
Adding to the complexity, the architect Thomas Shine sued Mr. Childs and SOM in 2004. He contended that the 1 World Trade Center design had been copied from his graduate work at Yale, work known to Mr. Childs as a jurist critiquing student projects. Mr. Childs and SOM denied the accusation. The suit was settled in 2006.
The final version of the tower was almost entirely the work of Mr. Childs. The building’s height, 1,368 feet, matches that of the original 1 World Trade Center. (The official height of 1,776 feet takes into account a 408-foot mast at the top of the building.) The tower’s slender triangles look diaphanous from a distance, but from the sidewalk the building resembles a fortress, with a 186-foot concrete-and-steel base safeguarding the 94 stories above from bombings.
Among Mr. Childs’s other projects in Manhattan were the 72-story 35 Hudson Yards, completed in 2019; the 47-story 383 Madison Avenue, near Grand Central Terminal, completed in 2001; and the 42-story 1540 Broadway, on Times Square, completed in 1990.
Outside New York, one of Mr. Childs’s passions was the American Academy in Rome, a center for independent study in the fine arts and humanities. He helped lead a renovation of its McKim, Mead & White building on the academy’s centenary, in 1994 and served as the academy’s chairman from 2006 to 2008.
Mr. Child’s second home was a family compound in the hamlet of Keene, in upstate New York, east of Lake Placid. Speaking with Lauren Elkies of The Real Deal in 2011, he said, “You go up there to the top of the mountain, and you see these 6 million acres in the Adirondack Park, and you suddenly realize that all these things we do every day are not really that important.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
