Freedom sings

Behold, the new One World Trade Center — the unfinished, imperfect end-product of maybe the most anguished public soap opera ever to bring forth a single building.

Still in a raw state, it’s already cause to celebrate. The nearly $4 billion, largest, most fought-over piece of the puzzle in downtown’s epic skyline restoration turns out to be a gentle giant, graceful and humane as the Twin Towers were not.

Architectural eggheads will sneer at it, but the masses will just as surely love it.

Include me in the common rabble.

What scant pleasure the old towers afforded lay in their tacky duplication. The thumbs-up tuning fork lent their banal bulk a semblance of wit; imagine how utterly awful one of them would have looked without the other.

The new One World Trade Center requires no identical sibling to draw stares or smiles. Although we won’t see it whole for another year, my heart lifts from every vantage point — from narrow Fulton Street, where it thunders skyward beyond the shabby old storefronts; from the Brooklyn Heights Esplanade, revealing its prideful place in the lower Manhattan panorama; and from beneath the Manhattan Bridge in Dumbo, a perspective that invites the Frank Gehry-designed 8 Spruce St. into a surprise pas de deux.

One World Trade Center’s prominence in the downtown pantheon is more plainly perceived from the New Jersey shore. Stand on the Exchange Place pier and see how comfortably it fits amidst stubbier neighbors. The sight also teases and delights riders on the No. 7 and F trains, motorists on the Long Island and Brooklyn-Queens expressways and the New Jersey Turnpike, party animals on Williamsburg’s Wythe Hotel terrace, and air travelers over Newark and the Verrazano Bridge.

We all had to come to terms with the hole in the skyline left by the 9/11 terrorist attack — even Tony Soprano emerging from the Lincoln Tunnel missed the twins. But during nearly 10 years when little above-ground progress was visible, we almost got used to it. Millions of New Yorkers disliked the boxy monoliths arrogantly imposed on the once eloquent lower Manhattan skyline. We yearned to replace them with something better, but until the day came, life would go on just fine without their oppressive mass and parallel shadows which on winter days seemed to stretch to Coney Island.

After years of false starts, the day has come. One World Trade Center’s steel topped off months ago at its full 1,368 feet. (Its vaunted 1,776-foot height includes the yet to be completed spire). The tower is pretty but not prissy; much loftier than the structures around it but respectful of them; and different enough to stand out in the crowd that is the lower Manhattan mash-up of old and new.

Downtown has regenerated impressively since 9/11. There are the massive Four World Trade Center nearing completion; the new 7 World Trade Center; the Goldman Sachs headquarters; and 8 Spruce St. a few blocks east. Welcome as they are, the skyline ached for the exclamation point of an “iconic” tower taller than the rest.

Right now, judging One World Trade Center’s long-term skyline stature requires some imagination. Although anchor tenant Conde Nast will have the keys a mere year from now (but not move in until 2015), curtain wall glass remains at least 10 floors shy of the tower’s 100 stories. The edifice as of yet has neither top nor bottom. Installation of the beacon-topped, colorfully lit spire has barely begun. There’s little hint of how the fortified square base, 185 feet on each side, will look once it’s wrapped in vertical spire has barely begun. There’s little hint of how the fortified square base, 185 feet on each side, will look once it’s wrapped in vertical glass fins,stainless-steel slates and illuminated aluminum screens.

Until it’s all done, the tower’s form and texture are not fully legible even at close range. The Durst people say it will be “finished on the skyline” by year’s end.

Even then, evaluation may be premature. Two more huge towers along Church Street will eventually fill in the yawning gulf between One and Four World Trade Center. The Richard Rogers-designed 3 World Trade Center, is on hold at the “podium” stage — a shopping-mall base — but developer Larry Silverstein is in talks with several possible tenants. If a deal is struck, as Mayor Bloomberg said might be close, the 80-story, 1,155-foot-tall stunner will rise sooner rather than later. The question then will no longer be how One World Trade Center looks, but how towers One and Three look together — a very different thing.

Tower Two, designed by Foster + Partners, whenever it’s built, will change impressions even more profoundly. From a distance, the cloudbusting quartet will read as a skyscraper village aligned in height order ascending to One World Trade’s crown. From some points, the interstices between them will seem to disappear. Will we see a medley of masterpieces in distinct shapes and styles — or a monumental wall?

For now, we can appreciate One World Trade in its own right. Its remarkably tranquil, almost soothing, profile belies its bitter gestation. Conceived by former Gov. George Pataki and his hand-picked master planner Daniel Libeskind as an “iconic” 1,776-foot-tall steeple of resilience, the traumatically evolving project was a hot potato tossed from owner to owner — Larry Silverstein, who hated the prospect of building it; the Port Authority, which had little more enthusiasm; and today the PA and the Durst Organization, the partnership which finally embraced it but changed it yet again.

It’s been designed and redesigned to the point of farce. Libeskind first envisioned a jagged, knife-edged structure gesturing to the Statue of Liberty. He lost his lead role to David Childs, who nonetheless was forced to incorporate elements of Libeskind and adhere to guidelines from Pataki. The forced marriage drew up a twisting, windmills-topped tower so problematic that its own structural engineer later claimed it could not have been built.

That didn’t stop the pols and bureaucrats from staging a phony “cornerstone laying” on July 4, 2004 (office buildings don’t have cornerstones). Less than a year later, the NYPD ordered the tower moved slightly east and insisted on yet another redesign to protect it from a bomb attack.

Childs spent a year more working on it. The new design’s proportions and basic form are those now under construction — but so tweaked by the PA and Durst at top and bottom and in facade details that Childs remains bitter over it.

Not even the original name survived. Aware that “Freedom Tower” might scare off tenants — Donald Trump called the project “Terror target No. 1 with a bull’s-eye around its neck” — the PA interred the moniker for One World Trade Center. Real estate moguls condemned it by any name as a white elephant that would sink the office market.

To certain New York Times columnists, it still is, despite that more than half of its 3 million square feet are spoken for two years before it opens and will provide a home for one of the nation’s great media companies.

Gov. Cuomo is no fan, either: He deplores the Port Authority investment in and public subsidies it took to get it built.

That a tower so comfortable in its skin, yet commercially viable, emerged from the maelstrom is a thing of wonder. If One World Trade Center conveys a mood, it’s tranquility. Despite its much greater height, it overwhelms nothing around it — not the memorial at its feet, nor the 1980s-vintage World Financial Center towers to the west, nor 1930s Art Deco spires to the south.

It belongs. But it isn’t a matter of merely fitting in like “contextual” projects: One World Trade Center doesn’t mimic its neighbors at all.

Rising from the cubic base, the facade’s eight slender, vertical triangular planes — pointed alternately toward street and sky — taper inward, generating progressively smaller floor plates as they rise toward a square roof turned 45 degrees from the tower base.

The shifting orientation from bottom to top imparts a stronger sense of rotation than in structures truly round, such as Norman Foster’s “Gherkin” in London and Jean Nouvel’s Torre Agbar in Barcelona.

Triangular forms can yield eyesores like San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid. But One World Trade’s softer geometry achieves a more benign effect.

The curtain wall of 12,000 transparent glass panels is unthreatening even at close range.

That it works so well is all to the credit of Childs, but the tower at last coming into focus isn’t entirely his. He grappled with the developers over elements he deemed crucial. He got Silverstein to agree on stainless steel, rather than cheaper aluminum, for the nearly 1,000 foot-long, sun-reflecting strips between the triangles. But among other alterations, the Port Authority and Durst axed the clear prismatic glass he wanted around the base, and replaced a fiberglass-sheathed mast he wanted at the top with a simpler, unenclosed spire.

Those changes bode ill for the project’s critical reception. The Architecture-With-A-Capital-A crowd has never loved Childs’ work, despite grudging admiration for 7 World Trade Center; the edits to One World Trade can only encourage a judgement of mediocrity compounded.

Soon enough — perhaps by year’s end, when it’s fully enclosed in glass — we’ll surely read that One World Trade is pedestrian, a “lost opportunity,” the sorry detritus of a noble vision cheapened for political and commercial ends.

But most who gaze up at it from near or far will just as surely view it differently. And if the spire is lit with anything like the flair of the candy canes atop Durst’s One Bryant Park and Four Times Square uptown — I strongly suspect it will be — it will solidify the tower’s stature as an icon worthy of the site’s tragic and heroic history.

The public struggle that brought forth such a civilized piece of work was as dysfunctional, chaotic, politically tainted and esthetically compromised as detractors claim.

The wonder is that One World Trade Center came through the chaos at all — and much, much better than once seemed likely or logical.

Sometimes the impossible dream that is New York City comes with a happy ending we don’t quite deserve.

scuozzo@nypost.com