“He has developed a curiously unsettled style,” wrote New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable, “which involves decorative traceries of exotic extraction applied over structure or worked into it. The architectural community had hesitations about Yamasaki, too, many seeing his soft-edged modernism as too mannered and prissy. Photograph: Joseph Sohm/Visions of America/Corbis The downtown Manhattan skyline, shown here from Liberty State Park in 1998, was utterly dominated by the twin towers. Broadcasters raised concerns that the towers would interfere with television reception, while the bird lobby even protested that the buildings posed a grave hazard to migrating fowl. Lewis Mumford compared the towers to a gigantic pair of filing cabinets, while others said they looked like the boxes that the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building came in. Nor was the project received with much warmth by contemporary critics. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey – which developed the buildings at the behest of Chase Manhattan Bank’s chairman David Rockefeller – filled much of the north tower with its own offices, while the State of New York ended up occupying 50 floors of the south tower to stop the embarrassment of it standing empty. None of these innovations, however, turned out to be of much use when the buildings first opened – given that, at the time, there was precious little demand for such office space in Lower Manhattan at all. The system saved 70% of the space that would have been used in a traditional lift shaft. So the engineers devised a plan to divide each building into thirds, with elevator “sky lobbies” where people would transfer to local lifts to reach their required floors. Buildings so tall didn’t usually make much economic sense, given the amount of space that had to be given over to lift shafts at the lower floors, the taller you went. ![]() The elevator system was revolutionary, too. They employed a radical framed tube structure to carry the load in their facades – thereby doing away with the need for columns inside, freeing up the interior for more office space (and requiring as little as half the material needed for conventional steel-framed construction). ![]() Where the ungainly obelisk of SOM’s One World Trade Center now stands, surrounded by a motley collection of stubby slabs, once rose the two sleekest symbols of America’s unbridled capitalist ambition and technical prowess the identical twin kings of global finance, dressed in matching silver pinstripe suits.ĭesigned by Japanese-American architect Minoru Yamasaki, they were the tallest towers in the world when they were completed in 1974, standing as glistening beacons of structural innovation. The towers’ windows were so narrow partly because Minoru Yamasaki was afraid of heights.
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