David M. Childs, Architect of 1 World Trade Center, Dies at 83

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.

“At SOM, you don’t know what my next building will look like,” Mr. Childs told Julie Iovine of The New York Times in 2003. “You know what a Richard Meier building will look like; there’s a style. I’m more like Eero Saarinen, whom I revere. His buildings all look different.”

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.”