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BUILDING PLANS
by PAUL GOLDBERGER

2001-09-17

The urge to make buildings higher and higher has been fading for the last few years, for purely practical reasons. Constructing towers of a hundred stories or more isn’t much of a challenge technologically today, but it is not particularly economical, either. It never was. The space on the lower floors that is given up to make room for elevator shafts to the upper floors cuts into rentable space. The World Trade Center was a dinosaur in this sense, although the economics of the place got a lot better over time, and just two months ago the Port Authority concluded a deal to lease the towers for $3.2 billion to the developer Larry Silverstein, who then hired David Childs, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, to upgrade the complex. Childs has designed several new towers in New York, including the A.O.L. Time Warner Center that is going up at Columbus Circle. Silverstein hoped to fix up the Trade Center’s image and turn it into a kind of downtown Rockefeller Center.

The very tallest buildings have usually been put up by people more interested in attention-getting value than in immediate financial return. That was the motivation of Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the Port Authority in the nineteen-sixties, when the World Trade Center was conceived, and it is the motivation for the entrepreneurs who have built or plan to build tall buildings in cities like Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur, where the Petronas Towers, the tallest skyscrapers in the world at the moment, were built in 1998. The destruction of the World Trade Center may well put an end to this kind of thing. “I think many of our clients would not want to build such a visible symbol, that they will want to build not so iconic and not so tall, the way the wealthy in Mexico started driving around in Volkswagens instead of Jaguars,” David Childs said a few days ago.

The Trade Center was structurally innovative. Earlier skyscrapers were supported by complex frames of steel or concrete columns and beams. Their exteriors were a “curtain wall” of metal, glass, or masonry hung from the frame, and their interiors were broken up by the grid of columns and beams. The Trade Center was more like a vast tube. Its exterior walls were a kind of steel mesh that supported most of the building’s structural weight, freeing the interior floors from the usual maze of columns. The architects, Minoru Yamasaki and Emery Roth & Sons, and the engineer, Leslie Robertson, did not invent this tubular system. It was used earlier by Fazlur Khan and Myron Goldsmith, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, for an apartment house in Chicago finished in 1965. But the use of it at the Trade Center towers, which at the time of their construction were the tallest buildings in the world, represented an enormous advance. It was part of a tendency toward lightness in the design of almost everything—from cars and telephones to buildings.

The architect Cesar Pelli estimates that if the World Trade Center had been demolished conventionally it would have taken two years to dismantle. Pelli, designed the World Financial Center.

The New Yorker (archive)