The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

ABOVE: Three photographs of the World Trade Center taken by Sonja Bullaty & Angelo Lomeo for Horizon Magazine’s Autumn 1976 issue. Please excuse the crease down the middle.

Recently my wife acquired a bunch of volumes of Horizon magazine, a now-out-of-print American periodical about the arts (including architecture), at a library book sale.

Thumbing through one of them just this past week I stumbled upon the three images you see above (click on any one of them to increase their size).

They’re quite moving, aren’t they?

The way pic 1 could almost be a Coke or McDonald’s commercial.

The way the seagull - yes, that’s a seagull - in pic 2 (left-hand side) makes us think of something altogether different - & less innocent - than a seagull.

The indisputable power of the landscape in pic 3.

These pictures accompanied an article by Thomas Meehan which I will post in full after the jump, called “The World Trade Center: Does Mega-Architecture Work?” Meehan took a stand against what the WTC represented - in fact at the bottom of the article the tagline reads “The WTC gets on Thomas Meehan’s nerves at home, thirty miles north of Manhattan. It hampers TV reception.”

The article offers a window into a simpler time. I hope you read it. Many thanks to “Jim,” of Ottowa Canada, who transcribed this article & posted it online on August 5th, 2007.

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER: DOES MEGA-ARCHITECTURE WORK?

An inquiry into whether a building of 110 stories is fit for human habitation

In the distance, when viewed from the Staten Island ferry or the piers of Hoboken, the 1,300-foot-high towers of New York’s World Trade Center remind me uneasily of a double image of the mysterious, tombstone-like monolith that is discovered on the moon by space explorers in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I’m put off by the place when I’m in it, too. There is something decidedly spooky about the fact that the towers are identical twins, clones of one another. I leave the lobby of one building, stroll for a couple of hundred feet along an enclosed concourse, and then enter what appears in every way to be the building I just left. Weird. Twilight Zone-y. All in all, the World Trade Center is not entirely of this planet or time continuum.

The World Trade Center, or WTC, is actually a complex of five buildings that stand on a sixteen-acre site in the southwest corner of Manhattan. Along with the 110-story towers, which are imaginatively known as the South Tower and the North Tower, there is also the 8-story United States Customhouse and a pair of 9-story office buildings that have been dubbed, in the same spirit, the Southeast Plaza Building and the Northeast Plaza Building. All of them are connected by a vast, shoplined pedestrian concourse that has all the warmth of a suburban shopping mall. Someday, to complete the WTC, a 20-story, 850-room hotel will be built on the western edge of the place, that is, if a hotelier can be found to put up the money. Like all gargantuan constructions, from aircraft carriers to the Superdome, the WTC is a statistic lover’s delight. WTC publicists tell you it has 600,000 square feet of glass in 43,600 windows, 40,000 doorknobs, more than 200 elevators, parking space on three of its six underground levels for 2,000 cars, 30,000 workers, 20,000 daily visitors, and a Zip Code for each of the towers. The point of the publicists’ spiel is to establish that the WTC is a hell of a big place, a claim that no one I know of has seriously questioned. What is in question is whether or not, as one of its severer critics has suggested, it is “the world’s tallest fiasco”, that is, whether it is a success as a work of architecture, as a moneymaker, and simply, if most importantly as a place for people to work for forty hours a week. Let me now, one at a time, look into those questions.

Construction of the towers, which began on September 1, 1966, took nearly seven years. They were briefly the tallest buildings in the world, until June, 1973, when, to the profound unhappiness of everyone at the WTC, the Sears Tower in Chicago was topped off at 1,450 feet, or a hundred feet higher than the WTC towers. Still the WTC contains 9,000,000 square feet of rentable office space, many times that of the Sears Tower and even more than all eighteen buildings in Rockefeller Center. But, of course, at a cost of approximately $800 million, the WTC was a good deal more expensive to build than the Sears Tower, which came in at only $150 million.

The WTC was designed by Minoru Yamasaki of Birmingham, Michigan, a sixty-three-year-old Seattle-born Japanese-American who is widely recognized as one of this country’s most distinguished architects. Although not by everyone. Wolf Von Eckardt, for example, referred to Yamasaki a while ago in Harper’s as a “popular architectural kitsch-monger.” Yamasaki, who worked in association with the New York architectural firm of Emery Roth and Sons, defends the design of the WTC by pointing out that he had to fit 230 acres of floor space into a 16-acre site and still leave room outdoors for a bench or two. In consequence, says Yamasaki, there was nowhere to go but up. Twice. Once he’d settled on a matching set of 110-story buildings, Yamasaki was confronted with the problem of making them stand up to the winds that batter buildings of great height. His solution was to turn to what is known as “bearing-wall construction.” Almost all previous skyscrapers had had so-called cage construction, in which a steel framework of interior columns bears all the vertical weight, and the exterior walls serve mainly as curtains to keep out the cold, the rain, and the pigeons. And to keep stenographers and their bosses from falling out of the place. But with bearing-wall construction the exterior walls carry most of the vertical weight. Thus the exterior walls of the WTC towers had to be extraordinarily strong; they are made of reinforced steel. The towers are indeed astonishingly wind resistant. They sway only eleven inches even in hurricane force winds, an amount that is supposed to be imperceptible to anyone working in the towers.

With bearing-wall construction, however, you pay an aesthetic price: each floor must be exactly the same size as the floor beneath it. The inevitable result is a box, in the case of the WTC towers, a pair of giant cigarette cartons. With bearing-wall construction, there can be none of the graceful setbacks and spires that distinguish such old-time New York skyscrapers as the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building.

Bearing-wall construction has other disadvantages, too. Because exterior walls can contain only a small amount of glass, the floor-to-ceiling windows in the WTC towers had to be exceedingly narrow, they are only twenty-two inches wide and are spaced roughly two feet apart. In consequence, there is no place within the towers where you can get spectacular, panoramic views. And since the outer walls can vary only slightly in design from the ground floor to the top, they are a standing monument to architectural boredom. Moreover, to make matters worse, Yamasaki chose to add to the strength of the outer walls by sheathing them in aluminum. It was, as Glenn Collins noted in the New York Times, “the largest aluminum siding job in the history of the world.”

In further defense of his design, Yamasaki points with enormous pride to the plaza, where there are a few scraggly trees, some benches, a fountain, and several hideous pieces of outsized abstract sculpture. The plaza, says Yamasaki, who professes to care deeply about such matters, lends a human scale to the WTC. But standing in the center of it, in the shadow of the soaring towers, I found myself feeling somehow less than human, dwarfed and diminished, insectlike. And elsewhere in the WTC I came upon little that struck me as being on a human scale. The high-ceilinged, fifty-five-passenger elevators are a good deal larger than a couple of New York apartments I’ve lived in. And the purple-carpeted and chandelier-hung lobbies are no less than seven stories high. They are a combination of purple-veined Italian marble, stainless steel, and seventy-three-foot Gothic columns that curve up to pointed arches at the top. No wonder Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic of the New York Times, called the lobbies “pure schmaltz” or that Newsweek’s Douglas Davis labeled them “sheer bombast.”

For the most part, the critical reviews of the WTC have been unfavorable. “These are big buildings but. . . not great architecture,” wrote Huxtable, adding that the WTC as a whole is “the ultimate Disneyland. . . blockbuster. . . General Motors Gothic.” And, in Newsweek, Davis flatly declared that the towers were ugly, “an esthetic failure, a classic attempt to compromise too many motives and ideologies at once, soured further by a dose of hubris.” America’s pre-eminent architecture critic, Lewis Mumford, wrote:
Elevators, load-bearing walls, these things are absolutely inconsequential. There’s nothing revolutionary about the World Trade Center. Tall buildings are outmoded concepts, this is Victorian thinking. Skyscrapers have always been put up for reasons of advertising and publicity. They are not economically sound or efficient, in fact, they are ridiculously unprofitable, and the World Trade Center’s fate is to be ripped down as nonsensical.

As someone who has lately spent a good deal of time looking at the WTC from every possible exterior and interior angle, I’d like to add my voice to those of its harsher critics. I’d say the WTC is an aluminum-sided disaster.

The World Trade Center is the creation of, and is owned and run by, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a self-supporting, quasi-governmental agency that was set up in 1921 to deal with the planning, construction, and operation of all “transportation and terminal facilities and other facilities of commerce” that New Yorkers and their wary friends across the Hudson might have a common interest in. Since 1921 the Port Authority has spent $3 billion on “twenty-six land, sea, and air terminal and transportation facilities,” including the George Washington Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, Newark Airport, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The WTC was its first entry into the office-building business, a venture that it justified by its mandate to provide “facilities of commerce”; supposedly all WTC tenants would be involved in international commerce. But the critics of the Port Authority, who are probably numerous enough to fill Yankee Stadium, angrily claim that the agency had absolutely no right to build the WTC. “Basically,” says Theodore Kheel, a prominent New York labor lawyer, “the Port Authority should be involved only in areas where the private sector needs help. Instead, it invades the office-building business, which is an area profitable beyond the need of any governmental assistance.” Moreover, says Kheel and others, the Port Authority should have been concentrating its efforts during the past fifteen years on constructing mass transportation facilities. For reasons best known only to itself, the agency has always heavily favored the private automobile over mass transportation. And now, when it might instead have been constructing an interstate system of high-speed monorails, the Port Authority has focused almost all of its attention on building the WTC, where, by the way, the agency itself now grandly occupies twenty of the upper floors in the North Tower. Apparently, as far as Port Authority executives are concerned, “living well is the best revenge” against Theodore Kheel and his ilk. We have no money with which to build monorails or anything else, replies the Port Authority petulantly to its critics, but that is mainly because it has nearly a billion dollars tied up in the WTC.

The construction of the WTC, Port Authority critics bitterly go on to say, was a boondoggle that put a lot of money into the pockets of a lot of friends of the Port Authority. And, they add, it was also an ego trip for the Port Authority’s twelve commissioners, who envisioned themselves presiding over what they’d anticipated to be the world’s tallest buildings. The driving force behind getting the New York and New Jersey legislatures to approve the construction of the WTC wasn’t, however, the Port Authority at all but the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association, a powerful cabal of financiers led by David Rockefeller, whose brother Nelson happened to be the governor of New York. (Some critics still call the towers David and Nelson.) Today the tenant that occupies the most space in the WTC-fifty floors in the South Tower, is none other than the state of New York, even though it has little to do with international commerce.

Before the WTC opened, its critics darkly predicted that because of the excess office space available in Manhattan, a result of the construction boom of the 1960’s, the agency would be hard put to find tenants for the place. But the critics failed to reckon with the fact that the Port Authority is tax-exempt and that by underwriting the project with tax-exempt bonds it would pay about 5 per cent less in mortgage interest than a private builder. Thus the Port Authority was able to charge less rent. At the moment, it reports that the WTC is 82 per cent rented and is narrowly in the black. Still, of the 9,000,000 square feet of rentable space in the two towers some 1,200,000 remain vacant and another 2,800,000 are occupied by the state of New York and the Port Authority. If, therefore, space weren’t filled by the same people who built the place, the towers would be nearly half empty and the Port Authority would be in financial hot water. Nonetheless the WTC can be termed something of a financial success.

In its press releases the Port Authority frequently refers to the WTC as “a city within a city,” though if you count the 30,000 people who work there as the population, it’s no bigger than Rahway, New Jersey, or Prairie Village, Kansas. But it uses as much electricity and generates as much raw sewage each day as a city the size of Albany, which has a population of nearly 120,000. Of course, most small cities don’t have thousands of business people and tourists visiting them each day, most of whom probably use the bathroom facilities at least once while they are there.

That raw sewage, by the way, is emptied directly into the Hudson River, and will be until the city completes a pumping station in a year or so to pipe the stuff to a treatment plant in Brooklyn. Not surprisingly, ecologists and environmentalists have been up in arms for years about the WTC’s sewage disposal, and so have the New Jersey swimmers who were once able to use beaches in the Sandy Hook area but now find them foully polluted. But their complaints to the Port Authority and threats of lawsuits have been to no avail. From the time the WTC was planned, in fact, the Port Authority has shown little interest in the environmental effects of its project. In the first place, to make way for the WTC, the Port Authority saw to it that several historical blocks of old New York houses were condemned and torn down. And the agency was also behind the destruction of a neighborhood that had been the thriving center of New York’s radio-and-electronics equipment retail trade. Now, in place of a lively and bustling business section of low-lying buildings, the area is dominated by the WTC towers, which not only cast giant shadows on the surrounding neighborhood but also block the view of the Hudson River. The WTC, in short, is wildly out of proportion to its neighborhood and has in effect destroyed it. According to a spokesman for New York’s Environmental Protection Administration (an agency that didn’t exist when the WTC was being planned), the WTC is “a monument to the old way of planning, a symbol of the process of bigness in disregard of its impact on the environment.”

Each working day at 7:00 A.M., bidden by computers, the fifty-five-passenger express elevators in the towers, moving into “morning up-peak position,” descend to the lobbies and stand silently waiting for the arriving hordes. On warm days, at 7:00 A.M., too, the WTC’s air-conditioning system, which is the largest of its kind in the world, is automatically switched on by 6,500 heat sensors located at points throughout the buildings, and a mammoth chilling plant, on the WTC’s sixth and lowest underground level, begins putting out enough cool air to serve a city the size of St. Joseph, Missouri. At shortly before 8:00 A.M., the first wave of workers begins to arrive, swarming up stairways and escalators into the concourse and making their way to one of the WTC’s five buildings-headed for work at the Australian Meat Board, the Competent Shipping Corporation, the Hsing Chow Trading Company, the Netherlands Flower-Bulb Institute, Thunderstorm Import-Export, Inc., or anyone of the WTC’s 500-odd tenants. Because office hours are staggered in order to spread the load on subways, buses, and commuter trains from New Jersey, a new wave of workers arrives at the WTC every fifteen minutes until 10:00 A.M. Even so, every mode of arriving transportation is invariably jam-packed each morning. “For an agency charged with the coordination of transportation,” Theodore Kheel notes bitterly, “the Port Authority will do more to uncoordinate transportation in downtown Manhattan than any other factor.” Many who work in the WTC are frightened by the crowding. “If you happened to slip and fall on the concourse during the morning rush,” says Karen Fisher, a New York State employee, “you could be literally trampled to death.”

At 11:30 A.M., the concourse begins to grow crowded with people who have been let out for an early lunch, and it stays fairly crowded until around 2:00 P.M., when the last of the lunchers has gone back upstairs to his office. Workers in the WTC can have lunch in one of the several restaurants and cafeterias within the buildings, but they are so mobbed at midday that many workers in the WTC choose to brown-bag it, eating either at their desks or, in good weather, outdoors in the plaza. There are so few benches there, however, that it’s almost as difficult to get a seat as it is on the subway at rush hour. Many people end up either standing or else sitting right on the stone plaza.

At 3:00 P.M., once again bidden by computers, the express elevators in the towers move toward the upper floors, into “afternoon down-peak position,” and stand waiting for the army of homeward-bound workers who will soon invade them. At 4:00 P.M. and in fifteen-minute intervals until 6:00 P.M., the 30,000 workers in the WTC crowd into the elevators, push their way once more through the jammed concourse, and disappear down the stairways and escalators into the subways and commuter trains. Shortly after 6:00, another day of international commerce has ended, and the buildings are left to a nighttime cleaning crew of 500.

For those whose offices are in the towers, especially on their upper floors, working in the WTC is radically different from working anywhere else. In the first place, many of them admit to being nagged by a constant fear of fire what the Port Authority casually refers to as “The Towering Inferno” syndrome. For the most part, the fear is irrational, for the WTC is constructed entirely of fireproof materials. On the other hand, the WTC has already had a major fire, on February 13, 1975, when a blaze set by a disgruntled cleaning person on the eleventh floor of the North Tower caused more than a million dollars’ worth of damage. What burned, however, wasn’t the building itself but drapes, carpets, and furnishings, although the heat of the fire did blowout windows and cause some minor structural damage. Luckily, no one was injured and the fire didn’t spread to any other floors, but it nonetheless proved that the towers were somewhat less fireproof than the Port Authority had been claiming. And it did little to ease the minds of those plagued by the fear of being trapped in a towering inferno.

Other inhabitants of the towers, sufferers from acrophobia, or fear of heights, are bothered constantly by the sensation of being a thousand or more feet above the ground and make it their jittery business to steer clear of the windows. For an acrophobiac in good form, the view from one of the WTC’s upper floors isn’t a pleasure but a nightmare. “But if you’re afraid of heights, why the devil do you work here?” I asked Joan Sanchez, an acrophobiac whose office is on the seventy-eighth floor of the South Tower. “Why do people who get transferred by their companies go to live in Pittsburgh or Tulsa?” she replied. “We work here because this is where our jobs are, and good jobs aren’t easy to find these days. But I certainly wish we were at least on a lower floor.”

Although the Port Authority insists that it is impossible to feel the sway of the buildings, a number of those who work in the towers say otherwise. Tom DiNatale, an architect on the sixtieth floor of the South Tower, says, “When the wind is blowing I find myself feeling that I’m walking uphill. And when I sense that the building has stopped swaying, I actually find myself sliding backward on my heels.” (I myself never felt any sway in the towers, but then I never was there on a good windy day.) Other tower workers also spoke to me of having often felt the buildings swaying, and of a fear of being in an elevator when its cables snapped. Perhaps because they are beset by so many fears, an inordinate number of workers in the towers suffer from frequent headaches, nausea, and dizziness, to the point where the buildings have not so jokingly been dubbed “the towering infirmaries.”

Aside from nervous disorders, those who work in the towers have other bothersome problems. “Sometimes you’re literally in a cloud up here,” observes Peter Haight, a vice president of a banking firm that has offices on the ninety-fourth floor of the North Tower. “You have no idea of what the weather is like below. Before lunch, I’ll call a friend of mine in another firm downstairs to see if I need to bring a raincoat. It’s like working in an airplane. You see storms approaching from the west and lightning crackling beneath you.” Other upper-floor workers have reported sighting helicopters and airplanes flying frighteningly close to the towers. On dark, stormy days, even people on the middle floors speak of feeling as though they were working in a black tunnel.

“I suppose the worst thing about working in the World Trade Center is the sense that hits you here of having no personal identity,” says Miriam Lucas, a secretary for an import-export firm on the sixty-third floor of the North Tower. “In the morning and evening rushes, you’re one of a shoving, faceless mob jammed into subways and the concourse and the elevators. And then there’s the odd feeling you get when working in your office of knowing that just about every floor in the building is exactly the same. But you don’t know any of the people who are working on those floors. What I’m saying is that the World Trade Center, because of its size or whatever, is a curiously cold and impersonal place to work.”

To get to her office from the lobby, Miriam Lucas takes a nonstop express elevator that lifts her in twenty-two earpopping seconds to the forty-fourth floor. There she transfers to a local elevator that takes her to the sixty-third floor. In each of the towers, at the forty-fourth and seventy-eighth floors, there are what are futuristically known as skylobbies, transfer stations where there are also shops, banks, and restaurants. When she doesn’t have lunch at her desk, she goes down to the forty-fourth floor skylobby to a restaurant known as the Skydive, and while in the sky lobby she can also cash her paycheck in a branch of the Manufacturers Hanover Trust or have her hair done by the Harbor View Hair Stylists.

From talking with Lucas and scores of others who have jobs in the place, I’ve come to the conclusion that the World Trade Center is no place to have to work. But are outsized rectangular boxes the sort of places where we’re all ultimately going to end up in the twenty-first century or sooner? Or, on the other hand, are they a dying breed? Percival Goodman, a well-known New York architect, thinks the World Trade Center is the last of the dinosaurs. “I think, and I hope, it represents the end of the line for that kind of building, and I say that despite the John Hancock and Sears buildings in Chicago. After all, the dinosaurs didn’t die overnight.” But other architects disagree. They predict that skyscrapers of immense height will continue to be built but that they will no longer contain only office space. Instead, they say, a new breed of megastructures will contain not only offices but also apartments, theatres, restaurants, bars, swimming pools, and bowling alleys. In short, they’ll be self-contained working, living, and recreational units, skyscrapers that you could conceivably live and die in without ever leaving. The prospect is a trifle chilling.

Nonetheless, there is one prominent American architect who continues vigorously to champion buildings like the WTC towers, none other than Minoru Yamasaki himself. “In the next ten to fifteen years, I expect that a number of one-hundred-and-fifty-story office buildings will be put up in New York,” says Yamasaki, who has little but disdain for social planners, urban sentimentalists, and others who oppose the construction of tall buildings. And who is to say that Yamasaki will be proven wrong? Dammit.

What do you think? I’d love to hear what you have to say about either the photos, or the article. So please post a comment.

& also, most importantly: Remember.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.