The Twin Towers’ innovative design, which placed structural load on the outside columns rather than inside pillars, facilitated the owners’ desire for a maximum amount of rentable space. Rentable floor space: about one acre per floor Number of architectural design drafts: 105 The ambitious project overcame community opposition, design and construction setbacks, attempted sabotage by New York real estate rivals and major engineering challenges to open its doors in April 1973 while still under construction. The towers used 200,000 tons of steel and, according to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, enough concrete to run a sidewalk between New York City and Washington, D.C. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey presented a formal proposal to the two states’ governors in 1961, then hired an architect and cleared 14 blocks of the city’s historic grid. By 1960, city, state and business leaders came on board. World Trade Center Time to build: 14 years (from formal proposal to finish)ĭavid Rockefeller, grandson of the first billionaire in the U.S., had the idea to build a World Trade Center in the port district in Lower Manhattan in the 1950s. ![]() These facts and figures offer some perspective on the engineering and architectural feats that made the Twin Towers possible. Calling the project “the architecture of power,” Ada Louise Huxtable, an architecture critic for The New York Times offered a prescient warning when the towers were going up in 1966: “The trade-center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world,” she wrote. The Trade Center complex was so big, it had its own zip code.īut some of the same impressive architectural elements may have also helped worsen the tragedy on the fateful morning of September 11, 2001. From the South Tower observation deck on a clear day, visitors could see 45 miles. ![]() They contained 15 miles of elevator shafts and nearly 44,000 windows-which took 20 days to wash. The towers' eye-popping statistics amply illustrate that ambition: They rose a quarter-mile in the sky. Even before they became iconic features of the New York City skyline, they reflected America’s soaring ambition, innovation and technological prowess. When the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers opened to the public in 1973, they were the tallest buildings in the world.
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