Architecture of the Twin Tower

The idea of the Twin Towers came about in the early 1960s by the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Development Association. By 1962, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey began plans to build the two towers. Minoru Yamasaki was chosen out of a dozen other architects. His plan included twelve million square feet of floor area, which also had to accommodate new facilities for the Hudson tubes and subway connections.

“After studying more than one hundred schemes in model form, Yamasaki decided on a two-tower development to contain the nine million square feet of office space. One tower became unreasonable in size and unwieldy structurally, yet several towers became too approximate for their size and 'looked too much like a housing project'; whereas two towers gave a reasonable office area on each floor, took advantage of the magnificent views, and allowed a manageable structural system.”ą

Critics claimed that the towers would “Rob New York of character, ruin the skyline, disrupt television reception, and strain city services.”˛ They started construction in 1966.

The World Trade Center consists of sixteen acres of land. In building of the Twin Towers, five streets

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”ł The perimeter walls are vertical steel columns and horizontal spandrel plates. There were 59 perimeter columns on each side of the towers, and one column on each corner.

The loss of strength and stiffness of the materials resulting from the fire, combined with the initial impact damage, would have caused a failure of the truss system supporting a floor, or the remaining perimeter columns, or even the internal core, or some combination. There were estimated to be between 16,000 to 19,000 people in the World Trade Center Complex.

The designs for the towers were inventive in several ways which include its elevator system and its structural system. The floors were only supported by trusses. A regular elevator known as the conventional elevator would have taken up half of the room on the lower floors. A total of 10,000 people were involved with the building of the Twin Towers. There were a total of 240 perimeter columns in each tower. Seven floors were involved in this fire.

After the 1993 parking garage bombing, safety became a factor again and they installed battery-operated light fixtures in the stairwells, the application of bright glow-in-the-dark paint to the handrails and a centerline down the stairs, and the installation of a public address system. were closed off and 164 buildings were destroyed.

In 2006, they plan on starting to rebuild the World Trade Center.

Approximate Word count = 788
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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