New York – Several blocks south of the site where the World Trade Center once stood, a new exhibit gives visitors a brief impression of what it was like to stand close to the fluted walls of the twin towers and gaze upward.
Carol Willis, director of The Skyscraper Museum, says she used to do that.
“Whenever I looked at the twin towers, sometimes they’d be lost in the clouds, and I could feel their tremendous power,” says Willis, an architectural historian. “The architectural thrill, to me, was to stand at the base and look straight up those pinstripe columns, a quarter of a mile in the sky.” That sense of grandeur, she said, is part of what the exhibit “Giants” seeks to convey. It opens Wednesday at the museum in lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City.
Using a combination of video and audio presentations, original architectural and engineering models and other visual displays, the exhibit traces the history of the World Trade Center from its inception in the 1960s to its years as New York City’s dominant landmark, visible from three states.
One section is a wall simulating the towers’ 22-inch-wide steel columns, which were separated by 17-inch windows. Reflected in the room’s stainless steel ceiling, the lighted columns seem to rise endlessly upward.
Blowups of photos and newspapers retell the trade center story in starkly graphic ways.
One wall-size aerial photo shows the twin towers as they neared completion in the early 1970s, already dwarfing the rest of the Wall Street financial center’s tallest skyscrapers and closely packed buildings that dated from the early 20th century.
The exhibit, to run through February, also includes several scale models of the World Trade Center, including the original one created by architect Minoru Yamaski and a wind-tunnel test version used by chief architectural engineer Leslie Robertson.
There are no photos or other displays dealing with the towers’ destruction by two terrorist-hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001.
“We felt that that event was being properly commemorated at ground zero,” Willis said.
Willis, who teaches architectural courses at Columbia University and founded the Skyscraper Museum several years ago, recalled watching the collapse of the towers from her apartment balcony in midtown Manhattan.
The 110-story twin towers stood more than 1,350 feet tall, the world’s tallest when they were built. They were later topped by Chicago’s Sears Tower, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Taipei 101 in Taiwan, but none of them matches the 4.7 million square feet of each WTC tower.
A key message of the exhibit, Willis said, is that the towers were of their own time – products of economic and social forces that prevailed then – but would not be built today, when the trend is toward buildings on a more “human scale” that seek to incorporate street commerce and activity.
The Freedom Tower, the planned central skyscraper of the rebuilt trade center site, will be 1,368 feet – the same as the trade center’s north tower – although with its spire, the skyscraper will be 1,776 feet tall.
Willis considers the redesigned Freedom Tower “a handsome building that will work well with New York’s skyline,” and said the idea espoused by some to rebuild the twin towers as a symbol of defiance was wishful thinking.
“I think it’s impossible that we’d ever build on the scale of the twin towers again, because they were so damn big. It was the culmination of a moment in the 20th century, in the 1970s, and it doesn’t keep getting larger and larger. We found the maximum, and it was this generation of supertalls,” she said.
Willis found the towers impressive but not particularly likable: “My favorite skyscraper has always been the Empire State Building. That is the iconic building of New York City.” — On the Net: Museum:
