4 WTC: Curbed's Building of the Year

So this year, the honor goes to Silverstein Properties' 4 World Trade Center. The first of the World Trade Center sites to be complete, it opened in November to much acclaim from a chorus of archicritics. "A deft, thoughtful and well-made piece of architecture, so quiet that it almost seems to recede from view," according to the Los Angeles Times. Per the Chicago Tribune: "[T]he subtle, self-effacing high-rise compels with its combination of sharply-honed, light-reflecting minimalist geometry and sensitive, city-embracing urbanism." One of Design Boom's top 10 towers of 2013, the Times' David Dunlap raved, too.

But beyond purely superficial attributes-"abstract," "ephemeral," "quiet," "dignified," full of"quiet splendor"-it even serves a higher purpose, observes New York magazine archicritic Justin Davidson:

Maybe it's that the building performs the same consoling magic on the site's violent history as hospital corners and gleaming uniforms do: It neutralizes gruesome memory, substituting violence with order.

Masterminded by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, he said upon its opening that the goal was "a 'minimalist' tower that achieves an appropriate presence, quiet but with dignity, and a 'podium' that becomes a catalyst for activating the surrounding urban streetscape." TheArchitectural Record joins the chorus of praise: "From outside, you're looking at reflections, and from inside, you're still looking at reflections. It's hard to think of another building that so fully erases itself-an admirable act of restraint by Maki, a Pritzker Prize-winner." Congratulations are in order, then, for it seems she has succeeded. Onwards to the new buildings of 2014.