Art: Onward & Upward

After playing home town to a long and ever ascending line of “tallest buildings in the world,” Manhattan learned this week that there are not one but two still taller structures in its future. Soon to rise is a twin-towered World Trade Center, each pinnacle 110 stories high, that will make the city’s familiar pointy downtown skyline look like a toy village.

Architect of the $350 million center is diminutive Minoru Yamasaki (TIME cover, Jan. 18, 1963), whose concrete Yama-Gothic traceries adorned the U.S. Science Pavilion at the Seattle World’s Fair. Chosen by the sponsoring Port of New York Authority over a dozen of the nation’s leading architects, Yama said: “The commission represented a once-in-a-lifetime, no, a once-in-two-lifetimes situation. To me the basic problem beyond solving the functional relationships of space is to find a beautiful solution of form and silhouette which fits well into lower Manhattan.”

Banks, Base. The World Trade Center will scrape the sky 1,3531 ft. above an area where nearly every other building is topped with turret, lantern and steeple. The question is not whether it should be modern (it has to be) but whether it is the kind of modern that lives with its surroundings. Yamasaki has avoided the acres-of-glass look, has instead invested the two towers with traceries of stainless steel arches in his familiar style, around the base and again just below the gently beveled roof line. Some people may yet feel that it is too stark, and far too big.

To make nearly 75% of the floor space available for occupancy (in most tower buildings 52% is considered standard), he has divided the towers into three zones, separated at the 41st and 74th floors by “sky lobbies.” A visitor who wants, for example, to go to the 90th floor takes an express elevator at a speed of more than 1,700 ft. per minute to the 74th floor sky lobby and transfers to a local that originates there. Each zone has banks of local elevators terminating at different levels; in this way the floor space directly above the truncated shafts in each zone is usable.

The Trade Center will have a gross floor area nearly triple that of the Pentagon; the five-storied base for the towers and a roomy plaza cover a 16-acre site that will require the abandonment of several existing streets. Yamasaki has switched from concrete, his favorite medium, to steel because of the sheer height of the towers, and instead of having the weight of the structure carried by the frame and the elevator core, the great steel columns of the exterior walls will support it. The stainless-steel outer ribs are only 22 inches apart, with glass between, giving the effect of a glistening steel skin unbroken by horizontal window lines; from within, the tenants will look down on the rest of town through glazed bowman’s slots.

Babylon, Beaux-Arts. Yamasaki will be faced with a problem that many notable architects come up against nowadays: working “in association with” another firm of building planners on the job. As in the case of the Gropius-Belluschi Pan Am Building in Manhattan, the “associates” will be the firm of Emery Roth & Sons, whose glassy budget ziggurats have transformed much of the city into a white-collar Babylon. Whether Yama can maintain his usual no-detail-is-too-small control over the project’s construction is a question that bothers many of his fellow architects. Says one: “I don’t think he can. It’s a tragic mistake.”

Even if Yama triumphs, there are other sure losers in the picture. The 33-year-old Empire State Building will no longer be able to call itself (with 102 floors, 1,248 ft.) the tallest building in the world,* will join such other has-beens as the Singer, the Woolworth and the Chrysler buildings. And one of Manhattan’s beaux-arts monuments, the splendid old U.S. Customs House, designed in 1901 by Cass Gilbert, will lose its identity—and possibly its existence—as all customs operations are shifted to the World Trade Center. Progress in New York moves onward and 1,3531 ft. upward.

* Though its TV mast will still top the Trade Center by 116J/2 ft.