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At the time of their completion, the Twin Towers—the original 1 World Trade Center (the North Tower) at 1,368 feet (417 m), and 2 World Trade Center (the South Tower) at 1,362 feet (415.1 m)—were the tallest buildings in the world.
- 1 and 2 WTC: 110 floors, 3 WTC: 22 floors, 4 and 5 WTC: 9 floors, 6 WTC: 8 floors, 7 WTC: 47 floors
- Willis Tower
Apr 18, 2024 · Each of the twin towers had 97 passenger elevators, 21,800 windows, and roughly an acre (0.4 hectare) of rentable space per floor. An observation deck was situated on the 107th floor of the south tower (Two World Trade Center), and a television-broadcasting mast 360 feet (110 metres) high was attached to the north tower (One World Trade Center).
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Its transmission tower with broadcast antennas added about 360 feet more. The South Tower stood over a quarter-mile tall at 1,362 feet. Each of the Twin Towers had 110 floors. Each tower’s footprint and floors were approximately an acre in size. On windy days, each tower could sway up to almost 12 inches side to side.
- Time to Build: 14 Years
- Number of Architectural Design Drafts: 105
- Cost to Build: More Than $1 Billion
- Rentable Floor Space: About One Acre Per Floor
- Depth of The Twin Towers’ Foundation: 70 Feet
- Extra Land Created by Building The WTC: 23 Acres
- Twin Towers' Elevator Speed: 1,600 Feet Per Minute
- Windspeed The Towers Could Sustain: 80 M.P.H.
- Number of Sprinklers in The Towers: 3,700
- Height of The Tightrope Walk Between The Towers: 1,350 Feet
David Rockefeller, grandson of the first billionairein the U.S., had the idea to build a World Trade Center in the port district in Lower Manhattan in the 1950s. By 1960, city, state and business leaders came on board. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey presented a formal proposal to the two states’ governors in 1961, then hired an archi...
After creating more than 100 design ideas with various combinations of buildings, architect Minoru Yamasaki’s team settled on a seven-building complex with a centerpiece of two identical 110-story towers. The towers' design featured a distinctive steel-cage exterior consisting of 59 precise, narrowly spaced slender steel columns per side.
According to The New York Times, the cost of building the towers ballooned to more than $1 billion, far beyond its original budget of $280 million. Project managers faced cost overruns as safety, wind and fire tests were conducted. And engineers embraced or created innovative construction techniques and new technologies to make the towers lighter a...
The Twin Towers’ innovative design, which placed structural load on the outside columns rather than inside pillars, facilitated the owners’ desire for a maximum amount of rentable space. With 10 million square feet of office space—more than Houston, Detroit or downtown Los Angeles had at the time, according to The New York Times—the World Trade Cen...
To build such tall towers on landfill that had piled up onto Lower Manhattan for centuries, the towers needed exceedingly strong foundations. So engineers dug a huge rectangular hole seven stories down into the soft soil to reach bedrock. Using a technique developed by Italian builders in the 1940s, the towers’ builders used slurry, a mud-type mate...
The 1.2 million cubic yards of soil dug up to build the “bathtub” were used to add 23 acres to Lower Manhattan—about a quarter of the area of a planned community of parks, apartment buildings, stores and restaurants nearby called Battery Park City that lines the Hudson River.
The Twin Towers had 198 elevators operating inside 15 miles of elevator shafts, and when they were installed, their motors were the largest in the world. The towers’ innovative elevator design mimicked the New York City subway, with express and local conveyances. That innovation lessened the amount of space the elevators took, leaving more rentable...
Engineers concluded in wind tunnel tests in 1964 that the towers could sustain a thrashing of 80-m.p.h. winds, the equivalent of a category 1-force hurricane. With this study, one of the first of its kind for a skyscraper, engineers tested how the towers’ innovative tubular structural design, lighter than the traditional masonry construction, would...
Two months after the release of the blockbuster movie The Towering Inferno, a three-alarm blaze in the North Tower in 1975 raised concerns that the Twin Towers had no sprinklers. That was common for skyscrapers at the time, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the buildings, was exempt from the city’s fire safety codes. Bu...
On the morning of August 7, 1974, French acrobat Philippe Petit walked the more than 130 feet between the Twin Towers on a high wire approximately one-quarter mile up in the air. Thousands of commuters stared up, gasping in amazement. Exuding confidence in his 45-minute show, the tightrope artist laid down on the wire, knelt down on one knee, talke...
- Iván Román
- 2 min
At the time of their completion, the Twin Towers—the original 1 World Trade Center at 1,368 feet (417 m), and 2 World Trade Center at 1,362 feet (415.1 m)—were the tallest buildings in the world. Other buildings in the complex included the Marriott World Trade Center, 4 WTC, 5 WTC, 6 WTC, and 7 WTC.
1368 feet high—the North Tower. 1362 feet high—the South Tower. 10,000,000 square feet of rentable space in the Twin Towers. 1 acre of rentable space on each floor of the Twin Towers. 50,000 people worked in the Twin Towers. 150,000 people used the World Trade Center subway stations daily.
The original World Trade Center included the Twin Towers, which opened in 1973 and were the tallest buildings in the world at the time of their completion. They were destroyed on the morning of September 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda -affiliated hijackers flew two Boeing 767 jets into the complex in a coordinated act of terrorism .
