Word: toweritis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ages, when every castle was a castle keep--both a courtly residence and a defensible perimeter. Maybe no one has been worried about security issues with more intensity than David Childs of the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architect chiefly responsible for the final design of the new Freedom Tower. (That was supposed to be Daniel Libeskind, but that's another story.) "Like jazz, the skyscraper is a true American invention," says Childs. "Yet America is no longer a leader in the technology of high-rise buildings." He wants the building not only to symbolize rebirth at the Trade Center...
...tallest anything, anywhere, anymore. At a time when Dick Cheney was still being shuttled around to undisclosed locations, skyscrapers suddenly seemed like the most disclosed locations of all--bull's-eyes with nice lobbies attached. Within weeks of 9/11, Donald Trump canceled plans to make his new apartment-office tower in Chicago the tallest in the world. It didn't help that the U.S. economy was turning south at the same time, leaving empty space in office towers everywhere. For a while, it looked as though the tall building, at least in the U.S., might be one more casualty...
Three years later, big is beautiful again. On July 4, New York Governor George Pataki and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg presided at the groundbreaking for the Freedom Tower, the office building that will rise at the World Trade Center site. New skyscraper projects are under way once more elsewhere in the city and around the country. Meanwhile, outside the U.S., where the taste for tall buildings never really abated, the skyscraper has also been poking its head up in very different ways, and not just for reasons having to do with security. Since the early '90s, tall buildings...
Probably the most ingenious thing about the Freedom Tower is how it manages to lay claim to being the tallest structure in the world without actually obliging anyone to work at its highest altitudes. Its offices stop at the 70th floor. Those are then topped by a tall "wind farm"--an unpeopled latticework of windmills that can provide as much as 20% of the building's electrical power. If the building is constructed as envisioned, rising from that will be a spire that reaches the record height...
...main structural support, the Freedom Tower will also employ an increasingly popular triangular-grid trusswork. From a defensive standpoint, structural strength, even more so than fire safety, is the most important consideration for tall buildings. "A square is not a geometrically stable shape," says Childs. "A triangle is stable because it has a diagonal." The Trade Center towers fell because intense fires eventually melted their interior steel. But their structural systems permitted both towers to remain standing after the initial impact of massive jetliners. So for the new 52-story headquarters of the New York Times, the construction of which...