World Trade Center

The WorldTradeCenter was a complex of seven commercial buildings in New York City, demolished by a terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. The best-known buildings of the World Trade Center were twin skyscrapers designed by American architect Minoru Yamasaki with the firm Emery Roth and Sons. These 110-story towers were built in lower Manhattan from 1966 to 1973 and quickly became a distinctive feature of the New York City skyline and a symbol of the city's financial power. Tower One, the north tower, stood 417 m (1,368 ft) tall; Tower Two, the south tower, 415 m (1,362 ft). The towers briefly ranked as the world's tallest buildings, but they were surpassed in 1974 by the Sears Tower in Chicago, Illinois, which has a height of 442 m (1,450 ft).

The WorldTradeCenter occupied a 6.5-hectare (16-acre) site and contained about 836,000 sq m (9 million sq ft) of office space in the twin towers. Four smaller buildings and a 47-story high-rise occupied a plaza surrounding the towers and housed shops, exhibition pavilions, and additional offices. The complex numbered more than 430 businesses and government agencies among its tenants, including the investment firm Morgan Stanley, the Bank of America, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that owned and operated the World Trade Center. About 50,000 people worked in the complex, and another 80,000 visited it daily. Subways transported people to and from a station underneath the complex. A concourse of shops was also located underground.

The modern steel-and-glass towers that Yamasaki created for the WorldTradeCenter had a light and airy feeling. Columns of thin steel tubing sheathed the exterior and provided substantial support for the weight of the towers. The tubes were placed 56 cm (22 in) apart, and narrow windows filled the space in between. The close spacing of the tubes made the building appear from a distance to have a solid exterior of gleaming metal. At plaza level the exterior tubing formed graceful arches that reminded many critics of Gothic architecture. The decorative arches and exterior tubing drew criticism for their departure from the austere aesthetic of modernism. The fact that the walls were load-bearing also struck critics as a retreat from the nonload-bearing "curtain wall" construction typical of most modern skyscrapers.

The towers had square floor plans; no internal supports broke up the interior space between the outer walls and the central core, which housed elevators, stairwells, and other facilities. This plan provided the towers with an enormous amount of rentable floor space, about an acre per floor. Each tower had 104 elevators. From an observation deck on the 107th floor of Tower Two, visitors could see for 72 km (45 mi) in four directions. A restaurant, Windows on the World, topped Tower One.

On the morning of September 11 two hijacked Boeing 767 commercial jetliners flew into the towers. The airplanes were almost fully fueled, and the intense heat generated by the burning fuel melted the buildings' steel supporting beams. The south tower stood for about 1 hour after the crash; the north tower for approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes. They then collapsed, floor upon floor, the added weight of each concrete floor causing floors beneath to collapse. Tenants and visitors left the buildings by stairways, but not everyone was able to escape. Nearly 3,000 people died or were presumed dead as a result of the terrorist attack, including hundreds of firefighters and police who had arrived to help. The buildings had been designed to withstand a collision from a jet plane, and they had survived a terrorist bomb attack in 1993. But they could not withstand the heat of the burning fuel. All seven buildings in the complex collapsed during the disaster.

In the summer of 2002 the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, created to supervise the rebuilding of the WorldTradeCenter, released designs for the site. Negative public reaction to the designs, which were thought too timid and unambitious, led the corporation to announce a design competition open to all architects. Each design was to include office and commercial space, facilities for cultural events, public areas, and a memorial to the victims of the September 11 attacks. The winning design for the site, chosen in 2003, came from Polish-born American architect Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind's plan leaves visible the bedrock beneath the site, exposed after the rubble from the attack had been cleared away. It also includes a tower that rises a symbolic 1,776 ft (541 m), reflecting the date of the Declaration of Independence. A garden planned for the top of the tower suggests the triumph of life.


Source: Encarta Online 2003∞
See also: World Trade Center∞

CategoryHistory - CategoryArchitecture