| are the two towers soaring up from the midst of the World Trade Center
complex (seven buildings in all, one of which is a hotel and one
is across Vesey street) (map)
in Downtown Manhattan. Owned by the New York and New Jersey Port
Authorities, the WTC was planned to attract international firms to
Downtown Manhattan.
Originally planned on the Downtown East River waterfront, this
trading and business center was to also incorporate the New York Stock
Exchange, but when the project was relocated, under the auspices of the
Port Authority, to the Hudson River shore in 1962, also the NYSE
connection was dropped.
The site chosen was originally owned by the Hudson & Manhattan
Railroad and occupied, along with other low-rises, by the rail terminal
and the adjoining twin office skyscrapers (image)
at 30 and 50 Church Street, dating from 1908. At the time of their
completion, these were the largest office buildings in the world. The
buildings had, in fact, undergone a major, multi-million renovation just
before they were bought and demolished.
During the pre-planning stage, over 100 schemes were studied,
including a plan for a single 150-storey tower which was discarded due
to an excessive scale and replaced by a design with twin towers. The
completed WTC plan was introduced in 1964 and after slight alterations,
like the abandonment of a plan enclosing the plaza with a low-height
building "wall" or change of cladding material from stainless
steel to an aluminium-alloy, the construction was started.
The towers required 23 m deep foundations, and the dug-out earth was
used as a land-fill for the nearby Battery
Park City. The prefabricated steel elements made in the mid-west and
on the west coast were shipped to New York and eight cranes built in
Australia were used to hoist the elements into place. In all, 181,400
metric tons of structural steel was used in the towers.
The towers started to rise off the ground in March 1969 and were
dedicated on April 4th 1973. They were at 415.5 m (WTC 2) and 417 m (WTC
1: 521 m with the TV mast) the tallest buildings in the world until the
completion of the Sears Tower in Chicago in 1974.
As part of its modern office building status, the center was to have
a complete, integrated telecommunications network system, much like
those built into the modern office buildings. From the offered proposals,
the ITT package was chosen, but years of mainly legislative delays led
to stripping down of the delivered system as well as a change of the
provider. The system nevertheless broke new ground with, for example,
the first business-use data and video fiber optic and cable network in
the USA, electronic international mail and business directory services
and the first commercial building electronic central telephone switch.
In the beginning, because of the difficulties in finding tenants, the
State of New York had to rent out most of the buildings to avoid a total
financial disaster. Moreover, the price had soared in the course of the
construction from the originally estimated $350 million to the presented
$800 million -- which was widely considered to be $300 million short of
the true cost. Even it didn't include the annual payment of $25 million
to the construction locals during the years of delayed construction --
years which were beset further by inflation and unstable interest rates.
Nowadays, there are about 500 international companies in the Center,
providing work for 50,000 people. The Center has subway stations of its
own (both for six subway lines of the NYC subway service and for the
cross-Hudson PATH line -- acting as a terminus for New Jersey commuters),
as well as an underground shopping center of 60 shops, the largest in
the city.
The towers house 418,600 m² of office space, which at 75% of the
total floor area is considerably more than was usual in high-rises. The
upper floor office area is up to 3,700 m² due to the open area afforded
by the structural
system. The employment of a load-bearing outer wall was also a
factor that saved one of the towers in the 1993 WTC parking garage
bombing.
The entrance lobbies are all in all seven storeys high, the third
floor being on the upper plaza level as a mezzanine floor (image)
along the outer walls, leaving the central part open. From the all-glass
walls (intermittently interrupted by supporting columns, though) of the
mezzanine, a view opens to the 21,500 m² Austin J. Tobin Plaza (image),
the largest public plaza in NYC, occupying the space between the
buildings of the Center. A $12 million rework on the plaza in 1999
replaced the white Italian marble cladding with 40,000 blocks of brown
and red granite. Also spiralling benches for the "radial"
plaza were installed and the mid-plaza sculpture Globe by Fritz
Koenig restored to rotate again. There is also the sculpture Ideogram
by Rosati on the plaza (image).
The elevator
complement consists of 23 express elevators and 72 local elevators
in each zone. There are 43,600 windows in the towers; glass, however,
comprises only 30% of the towers' facade area, the rest being taken up
by the aluminium-clad columns that leave between only narrow, slot-like
windows. In order to allow the top floor observation facilities better
views, the top floor windows had to be widened by one-third. In each
tower, a specially-designed window washing machine travels up and down
the facades and takes half an hour to wash one vertical stripe of
windows.
Despite the strict security checks, the observation decks (opened
1975) of WTC 2 at 107th and 110th floors are visited daily by 80,000
people. The WTC 1 has a group of restaurants and bars at the 107th floor
level, crowned by the Windows on the World restaurant (1976) with
appropriately sky-high prices and reservation requirements. When the
weather permits, both offer breathtaking views, though.
The other, low-rise office buildings were completed between 1972 and
1977. In 1981 the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill-designed Vista
International Hotel (the 3 WTC, 820 rooms, since 1998 a Marriott hotel)
was completed as the last addition to the main compound (image).
The buildings in the World Trade Center (excluding the 7
World Trade Center) house a total of 930,000 m² of office space,
seven times the that of the Empire
State Building.
On August 7th 1974 the French tightrope performer Philippe Petit
performed a 45-minute walk between the towers' tops, a distance of 40
meters.
|
