World Trade Center

Abstract

The original World Trade Center was commissioned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 1962. The Port Authority envisioned the Trade Center as a new architectural symbol for New York. After soliciting ideas from many of the leading American architects of the time, the Port Authority selected Minoru Yamasaki and Associates over such notable architects as Philip Johnson, Walter Gropius and TAC, and Welton Becket and Associates. Yamasaki’s proposal included a “framed tube” construction technique that used closely spaced exterior vertical supports to carry the buildings’ loads; the system was first utilized by engineers Worthington, Skilling, Helle & Jackson (later Skilling, Helle, Christiansen & Robertson) in Yamasaki’s IBM Building in Seattle—designed just months before the World Trade Center. When the Port Authority asked Yamasaki to design the world’s tallest building, he responded with a proposal for two 110-story towers looming 1,350 feet over a five-acre public plaza ringed by secondary structures, with an underground city of shops, restaurants, and train tracks beneath. The architect unveiled the first model in January 1964 to favorable reviews; however, after a slightly modified version was presented to the public in 1966, the critical attitude toward the project switched from positive to negative, as some prominent former admirers of the initial scheme like Ada Louise Huxtable and Wolf Von Eckardt now became vehemently opposed. By the time construction was completed and the buildings occupied in the early 1970s, a few publications celebrated the World Trade Center’s technical achievements, but it mostly disappeared from the architectural literature. Aside from an ill-fated 1993 bombing attempt, the Twin Towers drew little attention from the architectural or popular press until their tragic destruction by terrorists on 11 September 2001. The subsequent rebuilding campaign, fraught with political and economic conflicts, became one of the most celebrated architectural projects of the early twenty-first century. (Note: This annotated bibliography concerns the architecture of the World Trade Center and its replacement, One World Trade Center, and will not include material about the 9/11 attack, the Twin Towers’ collapse, emergency responders and the site cleanup, or the design and construction of the 9/11 memorial.)