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World Trade Center, complex of seven commercial buildings in New York City, demolished by a terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. The best-known buildings of the World Trade Center were twin skyscrapers designed by American architect Minoru Yamasaki with the firm Emery Roth and Sons. These 110-story towers were built in lower Manhattan from 1966 to 1973 and quickly became a distinctive feature of the New York City skyline and a symbol of the city’s financial power. Tower One, the north tower, stood 417 m (1,368 ft) tall; Tower Two, the south tower, 415 m (1,362 ft). The towers briefly ranked as the world’s tallest buildings, but they were surpassed in 1974 by the Sears Tower in Chicago, Illinois, which has a height of 442 m (1,450 ft).
The World Trade Center occupied a 6.5-hectare (16-acre) site and contained about 836,000 sq m (9 million sq ft) of office space in the twin towers. Four smaller buildings and a 47-story high-rise occupied a plaza surrounding the towers and housed shops, exhibition pavilions, and additional offices. The complex numbered more than 430 businesses and government agencies among its tenants, including the investment firm Morgan Stanley, the Bank of America, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that owned and operated the World Trade Center. About 50,000 people worked in the complex, and another 80,000 visited it daily. Subways transported people to and from a station underneath the complex. A concourse of shops was also located underground. The modern steel-and-glass towers that Yamasaki created for the World Trade Center had a light and airy feeling. Columns of thin steel tubing sheathed the exterior and provided substantial support for the weight of the towers. The tubes were placed 56 cm (22 in) apart, and narrow windows filled the space in between. The close spacing of the tubes made the building appear from a distance to have a solid exterior of gleaming metal. At plaza level the exterior tubing formed graceful arches that reminded many critics of Gothic architecture. The decorative arches and exterior tubing drew criticism for their departure from the austere aesthetic of modernism. The fact that the walls were load-bearing also struck critics as a retreat from the nonload-bearing “curtain wall” construction typical of most modern skyscrapers. The towers had square floor plans; no internal supports broke up the interior space between the outer walls and the central core, which housed elevators, stairwells, and other facilities. This plan provided the towers with an enormous amount of rentable floor space, about an acre per floor. Each tower had 104 elevators. From an observation deck on the 107th floor of Tower Two, visitors could see for 72 km (45 mi) in four directions. A restaurant, Windows on the World, topped Tower One.
On the morning of September 11 two hijacked Boeing 767 commercial jetliners flew into the towers. The airplanes were almost fully fueled, and the intense heat generated by the burning fuel melted the buildings’ steel supporting beams. The south tower stood for about 1 hour after the crash; the north tower for approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes. They then collapsed, floor upon floor, the added weight of each concrete floor causing floors beneath to collapse. Tenants and visitors left the buildings by stairways, but not everyone was able to escape. Nearly 2,800 people died as a result of the terrorist attack, including hundreds of firefighters and police who had arrived to help. The buildings had been designed to withstand a collision from a jet plane, and they had survived a terrorist bomb attack in 1993. But they could not withstand the heat of the burning fuel. All seven buildings in the complex collapsed during the disaster. See also September 11 Attacks.
In the summer of 2002 the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), created to supervise the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, released designs for the site. Negative public reaction to the designs, which were thought too timid and unambitious, led the LMDC to announce a design competition open to all architects. Each design was to include office and commercial space, facilities for cultural events, public areas, and a memorial to the victims of the September 11 attacks. The winning design for the site, chosen in 2003, came from Polish-born American architect Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind’s plan left visible the bedrock beneath the site, exposed after the rubble from the attack had been cleared away. It also included a tower—soon referred to as Freedom Tower—with a symbolic height of 1,776 ft (541 m), reflecting the date of American Independence. Rising from the tower was a spire that resembled the arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty. A garden planned for the top of the tower was intended to suggest the triumph of life. Security concerns led to a redesign of Freedom Tower in 2005 and delayed the start of construction until 2006. The shape of the building’s base changed in the redesign, from a parallelogram to a square, and the tower was moved farther from the street. Completion of Freedom Tower is scheduled for 2010. The LMDC also launched a design competition in 2003 for a memorial to those who lost their lives in the September 11 attacks. The winning design, Reflecting Absence, was submitted by architects Michael Arad and Peter Walker. It consists of an open space with pools, trees, and walkways. The pools and ramps surrounding them encompass the footprints of the missing towers. Designs were unveiled in 2006 for three more skyscrapers to be built on the World Trade Center site. The three proposed glass towers descend in height from Freedom Tower and, together with Freedom Tower, encircle the planned memorial. British architects Norman Foster and Richard Rogers and Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki each designed one of the skyscrapers.
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