Designtel - World Trade Centre, Minoru Yamasaki and Emery Roth & Sons

World Trade Centre [1973]

Minoru Yamasaki and Emery Roth & Sons

One of the most controversial developments of its time, the World Trade Centre to New York’s financial district delivered over a million square metres of office space and stood as the world’s tallest structures at the time of their completion. Minoru Yamasaki with a team inclusive of Emery Roth & Sons devised a scheme that incorporated twin towers with ‘sky lobbies’ to intermediate floors, a tube-frame structural system and narrow gothic modernist elements to the facade. Initially criticised for their reduced, monolithic form (famously denounced by a Times columnist as ‘little better than the box the Empire State Building came in’) the World Trade Centre nonetheless became a stoic emblem of freedom and progress. Destroyed September 11, 2001.

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