THE TWIN TOWERS
...he observation deck and the Windows on the World Restaurant were located, the hundred and seventh floor. Using some very successful comparisons and all the words related to size, Goldberger supports his main idea of the paragraph: “Height is our most potent architectural currency”. He states that “size was the point”, that the most notable feature of the Twin Towers was their size and that height was the main reason for the people to want to visit them and terrorists to want to destroy them and I do not quite agree with his point of view -- it’s not only the size that matters. Even though the World Trade Center was the highest building in the world, as shall be demonstrated, it was for the most functionality that it was built so high, not to attract peoples’ attention, as Goldberg states in his essay. And it is not the height that made it a target for the terrorists, it was again its functionality and situation in Manhattan. New York is quite a big city and it has it all: parks, buildings, apartments, cinemas, operas, theaters. In Manhattan though, the space is limited to only the area of the island, which is so crowded with buildings that there is hardly any space for new ones. This is one of the main reasons architects nowadays construct tall buildings such as skyscrapers, because of the limited ground space. If someone wants to build a spacious building that can house numerous offices and even have a space for restaurants, is to construct it high in the sky. And the Towers were not ordinary buildings –they were the World Trade Center and as the name suggests, the structure has to be very big in order to fit all the offices of the world’s biggest corporations. Each tower had 350,000 m˛ of office space available and to fit so much space in Manhattan, the architects of the WTC, Minoru Yamasaki and Antonio Brittiochi, had only one choice: to go up, high in the sky. The towers were initially designed to be tall, but only 80-90 stories. But with the need for more office space, they decided to construct the towers as the world's tallest buildings. The WTC was built the way it was built in order to maximize the available are, it had to be one of the biggest skyscrapers in New York. Here Goldberger would disagree. In his essay he says, “The very tallest buildings have usually been put up by people more interested in attention-getting value than in immediate financial return”, but I oppose his opinion. As I demonstrated The Twins Towers were not designed to attract attention, they were so tall only because of their functionality, to house as many offices and people as possible, to be the World Trade Center. On 11 September 2001, the Twin Towers were hit by terrorists. But what actually is terrorism? Terrorism is a violent or destructive act that aims to intimidate people or a government, in other words terrorism’s goal is to prevent normal people from doing their ev...