Height- 1,368 and 1,362
Owners- Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
Architect- Minoru Yamasaki, Emery Roth and sons consulting
Engineer- John Skilling and Leslie Robertson of Worthington, Skilling, Helle, and Jackson
Ground Breaking- August 5, 1966
Opened- 1970-73; April 4, 1973 ribbon cutting
Destroyed- September 11, 2001
Faced with difficulties of building to unthinkable heights, Yamasaki and engineers innovated a unique design: a rigid "hollow tube" of closely spaced steel columns with floor trusses extending across to a central core. "The columns, finished with a silver-colored aluminum alloy, were 18 3/4" wide and set only 22" apart, making the towers appear from afar to have no windows at all."(http://www.skyscraper.org/) Another unique aspect about the design of the buildings was that they were the first buildings of this size built without any masonry. Engineers used a drywall system fixed to the reinforced steel core. "The floor construction is of prefabricated trussed steel, only 33 inches in depth, that spans the full 60 feet to the core, and also acts as a diaphragm to stiffen the outside wall against lateral buckling forces from wind-load pressures."(http://www.greatbuildings.com/)
I liked the quick interesting facts in the beginning of the blog.
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