WORLD TRADE CENTER A Built Narrative of Structure, Program, Interactions and Connections
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1609 Mannahatta Island A contrast between the metropolis of today and the natural landscape of the 17th century. Most of the World Trade Center site is founded on man-made grounds, an artificial Manhattan.
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1660 The Dutch Broadway Within half of a century, the Dutch colonize and fortify lower Manhattan.
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1728 Euro-Urbanism European Urbanism evident in the way the blocks begin to evolve into
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1827 The Commissioner’s Grid
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1907 From Urban to Architectural Since then, the Commissioner’s Grid has dominated the Manhattan landscape.
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1908 Meanwhile on the street, an architectural identity has developed.
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1909 1909 Theorem: Real Estate Issue The production of an unlimited number of sites on a single metropolitan location.
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1922 Hugh Ferriss, Drawings of Skyscrapers with 1916 Zoning Law: Form Issue New zoning laws create a new paradigm through which buildings begin to take their forms.
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1927 Downtown Athletic Club: Social Programming Issue The mixing of disparate program within one entity encouraging the exploration of new possibilities.
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1966 Downtown Manhattan Before the World Trade Center
The culmination of these factors leads to the Manhattan skyline of 1966.
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1964 Yamasaki Designs The World Trade Center Minoru Yamasaki’s commission to design the World Trade Center with the New York firm of Emery Roth and Sons...house(s) anyone and anything connected world trade. The program presented to Yamasaki, who was selected over a dozen other American architects, was quite explicit: twelve million 14
square feet of floor area on a sixteen acre site, which also had to accommodate new facilities for the Hudson tubes and subway connections—all with a budget of under $500 million
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“The World Trade Center is a living symbol of man’s dedication to world peace, a representation of man’s belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men, and, through cooperation, his ability to find greatness.” -Minoru Yamasaki
Design Specifics 110 stories in each tower 1368 feet high, the North Tower 1362 feet high, the South Tower 10,000,000 square feet of rentable space. 1 acre of rentable space on each floor. 239 elevators in the WTC complex 71 escalators in the WTC complex
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A Reasonable Scale “From the outset, Yamasaki believed that there should be an open plaza from which one could appreciate the scale of the towers upon approach. There is little or no sense of scale, for instance, standing at the base of the Empire State Building. Yamasaki’s plaza is sheltered from the river winds and contained by five-story buildings which house shops, exhibition pavilions and a 250-room hotel.” 17
“The structural system is impressively simple.� -Paul Heyer, Architects on Architecture
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Simple Structure “The structural system, deriving from the I.B.M. Building in Seattle, is impressively simple. The 208-foot wide facade is, in effect, a prefabricated steel lattice, with columns on 39-inch centers acting as wind bracing to resist all overturning forces; the central core takes only the gravity loads of the building. A very light, economical structure results by keeping the wind bracing in the most efficient place, the outside surface of the building, thus not transferring the forces through the
floor membrane to the core, as in most curtain-wall structures. Office spaces will have no interior columns. In the upper floors there is as much as 40,000 square feet of office space per floor. The floor construction is of prefabricated trussed steel, only 33 inches in depth, that spans the full 60 feet to the core, and also acts as a diaphragm to stiffen the outside wall against lateral buckling forces from wind-load pressures.� 19
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Site excavation began in 1966 in the Lower West Side of Manhattan where Radio Row once was. The site of the World Trade Center was located on landfill with the bedrock located 65 feet (20 m) below. To construct the World Trade Center, it was necessary to build a “bathtub” with a slurry wall around the West Street side of the site, to keep water from the Hudson River out. The slurry method selected by Port Authority’s chief engineer, John M. Kyle, Jr., involved digging a trench, and as excavation proceeded, filling the space with a “slurry” mixture composed of bentonite and water, which plugged holes and kept groundwater out. When the trench was dug out, a steel cage was inserted and concrete was poured in, forcing the “slurry” out. It took fourteen months for the slurry wall to be completed; it was necessary before excavation of material from the interior of the site could begin. Plans for the use of eminent domain to remove the shops in the area bounded by Vesey, Church, Liberty, and Fulton streets began in 1961 when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was deciding between the east side of Lower Manhattan and the west side near the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad terminals.
1966
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1971 Construction and Controversy Plans to build the World Trade Center were controversial. The site for the World Trade Center was the location of Radio Row, home to hundreds of commercial and industrial tenants, property owners, small businesses, and approximately 100 residents, many of whom fiercely resisted forced relocation. A 22
group of small businesses affected filed an injunction challenging the Port Authority’s power of eminent domain.[56] The case made its way through the court system to the United States Supreme Court; the Court refused to accept the case.
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Typical Floor Section
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Typical Floor
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On this stage of concrete, steel and glass, cut out between two oceans by a frigid body of water, the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production. - Michel De Certeau 26
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1973 Opening Ceremonies
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Windows of the World Restaurant
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