SUSAN HENSHAW JONES - National Building Museumnationalbuildingmuseum.net/pdf/Future_Of_Skyscraper... · 2011-10-07 · SUSAN HENSHAW JONES: Good evening ladies and gentlemen. My name

© National Building Museum

THE FUTURE OF SKYSCRAPERSNational Building Museum

November 9, 2001

SUSAN HENSHAW JONES: Good evening ladies and gentlemen. My name is SusanHenshaw Jones and I am the President of the National Building Museum. And it's mygreat pleasure to welcome you all here tonight.

For those of you who are here for the first time, I would like to tell you a little bitabout who we are and what we do. We were created by an act of Congress in 1980 andwe opened our doors to the public in 1985.

Our exhibitions and public programs examine the American built world andilluminate the broader cultural meanings of buildings.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon put our mission intoinstant focus. For these attacks demonstrate how buildings and public places ultimatereflect our vision, our values and our strength as a people and a nation.

The terrorists knew this and now Americans know it as well. To our minds, theseevents make the mission of the National Building Museum all the more relevant and all themore powerful.

Tonight's programs, combined with the exhibition opening of Twin TowersRemembered, is the first in our series of exhibitions and public programs collectively titledBuilding in the Aftermath.

In the coming months, this series will consider the impact of September 11th onarchitecture, engineering and urbanism. We hope that the series can contribute to thehealing process and to a greater understanding of our choices as we move to rebuild anddesign our cities in the future.

Upcoming public programs in this series include the symposium, Freedom WithoutFortresses, which will take place on November 27th. A postcard about this is on yourseats. It will feature former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who is a staunch advocateof design that reflects the values of an open society.

Then for January 28th, we have organized another symposium, From Ground Zero,which will present the engineers and contractors who have been working to clear theWorld Trade Center site and stabilize the slurry wall beneath it that holds back the HudsonRiver.

Our first exhibition is Twin Towers Remembered. It's composed of Camilo Jos‚Vergara's images of the World Trade Center that were taken over the past 30 years. Theexhibition will be opened after tonight's panel has concluded its remarks.

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And when you view the 60 photographs, you will realize how much the TwinTowers contributed to a neighborhood, to a city and to the nation.

I thank Camilo Vergara for working with us to put the exhibition at break-neckspeed, as well as Guest Curator Tom Mellins and Chief Curator Howard Decker and theentire exhibition department.

A catalog, also called "Twin Towers Remembered", accompanies this exhibitionand 12 thousand copies are right this minute on the way from Hong Kong to the UnitedStates. Delivery is next Wednesday. Order forms are available in the shop and at themembership table.

Like every other non-profit that is not directly connected to the September 11thtragedies, the museum is facing a drop-off in the level of contributions that it generallyreceives.

Thus, tonight, we are offering an enticement. We are making "Twin TowersRemembered" available for free to all those who sign up for membership tonight. Asample copy is sitting on the membership table. It's a $19.95 value. And I have to tell youwith the discount in the shop and for our public programs that membership in the museumgives it is an excellent value.

To consider issues about the future of the skyscraper, we have gathered some ofthe leading experts on the design of this quintessential American building type.

I will introduce them in the order that they will speak. Our moderator for the eveningis Robert Campbell, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for the Boston Globe. Anauthor of many books and a frequent contributor to Architectural Record, Mr. Campbellwrites beautifully about architecture. He is also a practicing architect.

Leslie Robertson is one of the world's leading structural engineers. And two yearsago Engineering News Record named him one of its 125 top people of the past 125 years.

He served as the structural engineer for many tall buildings around the world,including the Bank of China in Hong Kong and the World Trade Center. When he spoke atthe National Building Museum just about a year ago, he said that the Twin Towers wereengineered to withstand the blow of a 747 (editor's note: see Robertson comments oncorrection), but not the 767s that hit them on September 11th.

Witold Rybczynski is an author and professor of architecture and urbanism at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. His interests are broad and his books range from thebiography of Frederick Law Olmsted to ruminations on urban life. I particular recommend,"The Look of Architecture", his latest. It is a slim volume on architectural style that'savailable in the Museum Shop.


Bruce Fowle, a founder and principal in charge of design at Fox and FowleArchitects in New York, is a designer of tall buildings, including the Conde Nast Tower at 4Times Square and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China in Shanghai. He is one ofAmerica's leading advocates and practitioners of sustainable architecture.

Architect Paul Katz a principal and senior designer in the New York-based firm,Kohn Pedersen Fox, specializes as well in the design of tall buildings. His structures gracethe skyline of Hong Kong, Tokyo and Manila. He has also played a key role in the designof the Shanghai World Financial Center, which, when it's completed, will be the tallestbuilding in the world.

After their presentations, all of our speakers will join a round table discussion thatwill be moderated by Robert Campbell. And, now, it is my pleasure to introduce RobertCampbell.

REMARKS BY ROBERT CAMPBELL

ROBERT CAMPBELL: It's wonderful to see so many people here in spite of the sadevent that is drawing us here. I'm just going to make a few introductory remarks and throwout a few questions about skyscrapers and then we'll hear from the much moresophisticated people that are on the panel.

But it's a topic that I think we've all been thinking about a lot and, in fact, the exhibiton the Twin Towers, which I just saw on my way over to speak, by Camilo Vergara whoI've admired for a long time in other contexts, is very much worth seeing.

But our topic is the future of the skyscraper and I would like to throw out a numberof questions. The first and most obvious is: "Was the skyscraper a good idea?" Is it still agood idea? Christopher Alexander, the Berkeley savant of architecture who wrote "APattern Language" says in that book there is abundant evidence that tall buildings makepeople crazy.

Leon Krier, the somewhat retro British architect � or largely British � "tall buildingsare vicious and immoral." So, there are people who have never been entirely comfortablewith tall buildings.

And James Kunstler - I just took this off the web a few days ago: "The End of TallBuildings: We are convinced that the age of skyscrapers is at an end." This sent me alittle frantic about the language here.

"It must now be considered an experimental building typology that has failed." It isnot a typology, it's a type. "We predict that no new mega-towers will be built and existingare destined to be dismantled." He, of course, is an influential and popular author.


Those, I think, are questions worth asking. Was the skyscraper an ego trip? Are theskyscrapers of New York just a recapitulation of the towers of the medieval village of SanGimignano, in Italy, when way back in roughly 1350 all the powerful families in town builttowers. I think about 50 of them.

I think the highest one was about 170 feet, which is taller than Niagara Falls, andprobably for the technology of the time, just about as difficult to build as the World TradeCenter.

Is that what it's all been about? I think it's question worth asking. I don't know theanswer.

The other question is "Have we in the United States already moved to the sidelinesin the competition for skyscrapers?" Nobody in America talks any more about building theworld's tallest building, except maybe Donald Trump, and nobody listens to him.

The race for the tallest is somewhere else. Of the 20 tallest buildings in the worldtoday, none were built in the United States after 1974 � the Sears Tower � not one of thetop 20 buildings in the world. They are all in East Asia or the Middle East.

And that raises the other question, why are they building tall towers? Are they goingglove to glove with America, to show they can build taller buildings � the way Chicagoonce went glove to glove with New York? I don't know.

Or is the skyscraper, as Louis Sullivan said � the great Chicago architect whodesigned the first successful � aesthetically successful ones � "a proud and soaringthing, rising in sheer exultation," in his characteristically erectile language. Is that what itis? Is that something that we should feel proud of for those reasons?

And another question, what are the practical advantages of skyscrapers? Theobvious one is density. You can get a lot of people in a small place, interact, withinwalkable distance of each other, with propinquity to one another, and that leads to creativeexchange of ideas. That's what cities have always been about.

Can that kind of density, if it's good, and I think it is, be achieved by other means?There are no high-rise buildings in Washington. Do you feel deprived of creative exchangeas a result?

The most densely built city in the Western world by far is Paris. It has four and ahalf times as many people as Boston in the same area. And, yet, it has almost no high-risebuildings.

It's simply built rather solidly to eight, ten, twelve, fourteen stories, whatever. That'sa possible model I think. High density, mixed-use mid-rise makes for a very active streetlife in a city like Paris.


Another advantage is the kind of signature power of skyscrapers. People havealways built tall buildings whether they were steeples or bell towers or the domes ofcathedrals.

Whoever has the power in a culture tends to build the tallest buildings and it's thecorporations in our culture.

I was in Amsterdam on September 11th and a friend of mine, a European friend ofmine said to me the next day, New York will never look the same. And I was shocked bythat, because I never think of the skyline when I think of New York.

I think of the wonderful busy streets of SOHO or Chelsea or the tree-linedtownhouse streets of Brooklyn or the Meadows of Central Park or whatever. Skylinesreally are for postcards. Skylines are for tourists. Skylines maybe don't matter. But maybethey do. But certainly it was part of the image of New York as seen from afar.

The other question I have is the economic value of skyscrapers. The World TradeCenter, in its early years � one of the Towers was entirely filled up by state office workerssent there by Nelson Rockefeller to subsidize the buildings.

Whether these are an efficient means of housing office workers I think is worthasking. There were 104 elevators in each of the World Trade Center towers, took up agreat deal of space. Once you get above a certain height � and maybe Les Robertson willtalk about this � the wind load becomes more of a factor than the gravity load andbuildings then have to become especially strong as they become especially tall.

These are all potential inefficiencies I think that may or may not be significant. Whatshould a skyscraper say? That I think is fascinating. The old skyscrapers in New York allwear party hats. They're all on their way to a bash of some kind and they've all put onsome kind of fancy topper. And it's a kind of playful attitude about this city.

The post-World War II skyscrapers all have buzz cuts. They're all square tops andthey're saying we're just boxes of leasable space and we're macho guys with buzz cutsand we're just all about work and making money and competition.

Buildings always broadcast messages and attitudes about life. And so I ask thatquestion what should the message � what should a building say?

Robert Venturi is now proposing, the Philadelphia architect, that all buildings shouldnot � there should be no architecture in new buildings. The buildings should simply beelectronic screens, electronic billboards that are constantly in motion, broadcastingdifferent messages. And we've seen now a couple of buildings in the Times Square areawhere that's actually happened.

Where is the skyscraper going, if we go on building them? Are there new methodsof construction that deal with security that will be more efficient, that will deal with the


health of the planet? The issues of ecology, the so-called green architecture. An improvedwork place?

I never was on one of the work floors of the World Trade Center, but they were anacre in extent and they were ringed by a kind of fence of steel columns that made you, Iwould assume from photographs, feel rather caged in. Is that an ideal workplace? Is theworkplace going to evolve in some way?

And finally we may want to talk about not skyscrapers in general, but the WorldTrade Center, specifically and maybe we won't. But I'm astonished by some of theproposals that have been made and I'll name only two of them.

Roger Ebert, everybody's favorite film critic in Chicago, has proposed that the entire14-acre site be taken up by a cornfield as a memento, I guess, to the midwest in America.

And the office Minoru Yamasaki, who is now deceased, but his office still exists,they were the architects, of course, proposed to build the Twin Towers back exactly asthey were. Two ideas that I find equally offensive, but maybe not everybody does.

We have a great panel to talk about these subjects. You've heard their names andheard them introduced and we'll now hear first from a man I've heard about all my life andmet only tonight, the eminent structural engineer, Les Robertson.

REMARKS BY LESLIE ROBERTSON

LESLIE ROBERTSON: Well, introductions are always interesting. I should say thatSusan mentioned that we had designed the World Trade Center for the impact of a 747.And Boeing has more sevens in their airplanes than you can imagine. They even have atriple seven.

In fact, we had designed it for the smallest of the Boeing jet aircraft, which was the707. And I may look crazy, my family assures me I am, but we live and work in high-risebuildings.

Tonight I'm supposed to show you something about the World Trade Center, whereit came from and what happened to it, as a kind of stepping stone to where we're goingthis evening.

Everyone sees the World Trade Center in a different way and this is a photographtaken from New Jersey. And you see it as a kind of solid object and most views of theWorld Trade Center are like that.


So, a whole lot of really innovative things were done at the World Trade Center.One is wind engineering. We did a whole lot of model studies, work that had never beendone before in building construction.

We built motion simulators to sort out how people would react to the motion of a tallbuilding. Something that had never been in the minds of engineers or architects before.

And we used prefabrication in an extent that perhaps had never been used beforein structural steel. This is a man and this is a single piece.

The whole outside of the building was made in factory-produced elements, threecolumns wide, three stories high. And the floor was constructed with large panels, 60 feetby 20 feet for the most part, so that when you were all through, we had construction,which was incredibly safe.

These floors came complete with electrical distribution cells, the metal deck and soforth. The net result was, as pointed out earlier, a kind of jail like look about it.

That is construction workers here were basically � impossible almost for them tofall out of the building. We had come with up with a kind of new partition system calledshaft wall, which allowed for protection of the shafts around elevators, and so forth, duringconstruction. And as a result, the project was built without a single ironworker losing hislife.

In any event, it was finished and it has a huge tower on top for TV broadcasting andprobably those of you know about, all the TV stations now are scrambling for antennaspace.

And then in 1993 a bomb went off, just to the South of the North tower. It was abouttwo and a half tons of explosives in a van. It was exploded at the B2 Level. About thesame size bomb, maybe a little larger, than the bomb that went off in Oklahoma City.

But this bomb did essentially no damage to the towers of the World Trade Center,essentially nothing. Indeed, there was recording equipment in the building that records themotion of the building in the case of windstorms.

And the equipment didn't even record the presence of the bomb. It was that smallan object in the life of a major building.

But outside of the towers in the low-rise areas, a huge hole was created by thebomb and destroyed a large � about 400 feet from the tower down this way � destroyedconcrete structure.

The damage was extraordinary. This was a car. I took lots of pictures of cars. I'minterested in cars. And also I took photographs of cars with license plates, particularly,


and sent them to the owners who really enjoyed photographs of what was left of theirvehicles.

But you see this used to be a flat concrete floor that was supported up here. It wasa very dangerous place. Concrete everywhere, dangling, very tough place to work.

In any event, we fixed it. It was expensive and after it was all through a memorialwas constructed. I never liked the memorial, but one was built. And then we had back tonormal, this wonderful spire of the church.

And then you've all seen photographs like this. And I show it to you only to remindyou that this was a very significant event that took place in the World Trade Center.

On the North Tower alone, two-thirds of the columns on this face of the buildingwere removed by the passage of the aircraft through it. In addition to that, a petrochemicalfire for which the project was never designed took place inside.

This gives you � maybe a close up view. We've scanned this picture very carefully,thinking this is a man. And maybe it is or maybe it isn't. Photographs are very deceiving.

But it was a terrible event. But the towers stood up and now trying to put in scale foryou the event that transpired.

We designed for a Boeing 707 flying slowly, looking for a landing place. What hit itwas a 767, a little heavier, but flying a whole lot faster. And, so, the energy the buildinghad to absorb to the same scale, this changed. So, the buildings took a hit, which was awhole lot more than that for which they were designed.

Now, the buildings were not designed of the fuel load of the 707. Why? We werenot responsible for the fire engineering, but the principal reason is it wasn't possible to doit.

But in any event, comparing the 707 with the 767, this is the amount of fuel in the767 and the 707. And we designed it for nothing.

But that's the good news. Here's the bad news, this is the 707, this is the energy ina 707. This was in the 767. Now, let's talk about a 747 or we talk about the yet to be putinto production Airbus 380.

And you see that the event that took place in the World Trade Center is a tinyfraction of that which is possible in this world around us.

And let's not forget that most of the buildings that are hit by airplanes are not tallbuildings, they're low buildings. I'm not talking about Pentagons. I'm talking about housesand small buildings in small cities.


And then if we look at the potential fuel load, this is what a 707 can carry, 767, 747and then the Airbus. So, you saw that ball of fire from the 767 and just imagine it thismuch bigger.

And you begin to realize, I think, that architects and engineers are not going todesign buildings, be they high-rise buildings or low-rise buildings, for the impact fromthese airplanes.

It's not a practical thing to do. We have to learn to keep airplanes away frombuildings, not learn to keep buildings from being struck down by airplanes.

I just want to show you a little bit of what took place afterwards, but in order to doso, I have to give you a little introduction of the project. This is Tower 1, the North Tower;Tower 2, Building 3, which was the Vista Hotel. This was designed by other engineers, notby us. Building 4,5,6 and off up here is Building 7, again designed by other engineers, notby us.

If you approach the project from the southeast as you are walking from our officestowards the project, this is what you saw. This is Building 4. Because a whole bunch ofstructural steel came down from the towers and just completely demolished this end of thebuilding.

This is Building 5. You can see portions of the tower hanging off of the top of thebuilding and you see these pipe columns which were the structural support for the outsidewall that all bent and twisted. These buildings, 4, 5 and 6, burned all day and all night.

Then if you turned and looked into the plaza, this is a sculptural piece that was inthe plaza. It was never something to my liking, but I sort of grew accustomed to it. Andthen when I saw it here, I was amazed that that sculptural piece with flimsy metal wouldlast.

This is the east wall of the North Tower. This is what's left of the service car of theNorth Tower. And if we look at Building 5, we can see that it took a huge amount of impacton the roof level, buckled all these columns which were further damaged by the fire inside.But the building stood up pretty well.

This is Building 7. It's a transfer beam of Building 7. Building 7 burned all day andthen collapsed in the early evening. Again this is a part of Building 7, this is a telephonecompany building immediately next door.

This is Building 5, Building 6. Building 7 is on your left in here. In this building nowthere's a big atrium. It's there today, created by the falling debris.

So, you have to take your hat off to the people who worked here. You may thinkthis all looks very stable, but let me tell you, that if a small steel beam rolls on to your leg,you have a broken leg. It's a terrible place to work � very, very dangerous.


Across the street to the west was Battery Park City and this is a piece of the NorthTower which struck in this area. It's a column section from the outside wall.

Interestingly enough, all of the fire-proofing on the structural steel in this whole areawas removed not by fire, but was removed just because the building was hit by this pieceof structural steel.

And many people have said, well, why didn't the Trade Center have better fire-proofing systems?

With the kind of fire that was there, there was no fire-proofing system at that timeand to the best of my knowledge and there's no fire-proofing system today that will resistthat kind of a fire.

Some of the steel that was taken out of the tower had reached a temperature of2000 degrees, which meant that basically it melted.

The Winter Garden of Battery Park City on this side looks a terrible mess. But if yousee it from the other side, it looks brand new, it looks really great, as it did originally.

The fire in the World Trade Center is burning today. They still have three fire crewsout there pouring water into the site. Temperatures are so hot that in areas, again, thesteel has literally melted from the heat of the fire in the buried portions of the work.

People say, well, this looks like a big sand pile, a bunch of dirt there. And if youthink about what concrete is made out of, sand and gravel and a little bit of cement, andwhen you pound it all up you get sand and that's what's here, a great huge sand pile.

This is Building 6. It's in a terrible state. It's holding up what was the north wall ofthe North Tower, keeping it from collapsing. So, even demolishing this is really tough,because you can't really get cranes out here, because the structure underneath is badlydemolished.

And you can't take down this building for fear that this will fall over. So, it's beenvery slow going.

Speaking of high-rise, this is the Woolworth Tower, done by Cass Gilbert, awonderful skyscraper in its time.

This is inside Building 6, if you had been working inside Building 6 when itcollapsed, this would have come down on top of you. Those buildings, however, were allevacuated.

We designed the Vista Hotel up to this level and other engineers did the rest of it. Itstood up pretty well.


To give you the kind of damage, this is a four-inch thick piece of steel and thecorner was literally ripped right off of it � because it fell, not because an airplane ran intoit.

This is a typical wall panel. They use these big tree assemblies. In fact, that is oneprefabricated element from there to there. Now without support underneath it.

This is across the street to the south, you see the building lost a whole columnhere. There were many reports that the building was going to fall down, which it never did,obviously.

This is Building 6 from the other side. This is a wonderful building, again done byCass Gilbert. I used to have an office there many years ago. It has a terra cotta facade.I'm sure the developers will do everything possible to tear it down. It's a landmark buildingand it's going to be interesting to see how that holds up.

To get around the basement now you go by boat. There's about seven feet of waterin it. It's just sort of gruesome beauty.

This is a photograph of the World Trade Center from New Jersey in the earlymorning. When the building was finished, more or less like the wonderful photographs thatyou see in the exhibit � but here you can see right down the corridors of the elevator shaftand you start realizing how light and airy these high-rise buildings really are.

I mean, they look very stalwart, and they are very stalwart, but they're there tohouse people, they're not there to occupy cubage. So, the buildings are very light, veryairy and very strong. Thank you.

REMARKS BY WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI

WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI: I've been asked to talk about the skyscrapers in the city. Askyscraper, of course, is our unique contribution to architecture. But I think what makesthem so American is really their character.

They're, of course, novel, and this is a country of newness, of trying new things.They're about technology and America has always been about technical innovation.

They're also, after all, commercial and not only is New York a commercial city, asall our cities, but there's something about our culture: we're a culture that makes things,we're a culture that honors business above all.

And the skyscraper as Bob said is in many cases a commercial symbol. They're bigand it's a truism to say that we're a big country � that they suit us. We like them because


they're big. We like big things and skyscrapers are among the largest man made objects Iguess until we start building super tankers.

They're boastful. We're not a shy people. And skyscrapers declare that and theydeclare it so that you can see it from far, far away. And they very self-confident, which isperhaps the most terrible thing about September 11th. Our self-confidence has beenrocked.

The skyscrapers that define the skyline of cities � and I agree with Bob that wedon't look at the skyline � but when I think of New York, I think of walking down a man-made canyon. And that's very much � for most of the 20th-century cities were like that.

And, so, the skyscraper was not only something that we invented, but it wassomething quite unique to American cities. That's, of course, no longer true. There areskyscrapers in Berlin and Paris, on the outskirts of London, in the center.

But there's still I think the notion of a city that's vertical is an American idea and it'llbe a long time I think before we start thinking of skyscraper cities as something notAmerican.

Richard Morris Hunt built, arguably, the first skyscraper in New York, it was onlynine stories tall. But it was the first real application of Otis' idea of moving people up anddown in these little cars.

How is it a skyscraper? Well nine stories was very tall and it's not quite as tall asTrinity Church, but soon we were building taller buildings in New York than Trinity Church.And that's a question that I'll leave to other speakers who know a lot more about the actualarchitecture of tall buildings.

Tall buildings have a huge effect on the American city and they created anotheruniquely American part of the city, the downtown. Because this huge concentration, whichstatistically you can even out Paris and New York. But when you build buildings that tall,enough of them, you get huge concentrations of people in that particular spot in thedowntown.

And, so, the skyscrapers created this unique American notion of the downtown asvery, very intensely concentrated initially places of work, but also places where peoplelived, these great concentrations of people.

American cities don't have plazas and they don't have boulevards and greatpalaces, but what we have is skyscrapers and it's very much the character of our city.

So, when people say we should stop building them we need to think very hardabout that, because it means we stop building the cities the way we've been building formore than 100 years.


And we should be cautious I think of listening to people who take advantage of thisawful event to promote their agenda of trying to build European cities in North America.

Many Americans have tried to do that for a long long time. And except for this city,they never succeeded. And, of course, that's why this city, in many ways, is not anAmerican city. It's for many reasons a curious city. But urbanistically it's something else.And we've never repeated it anywhere else.

I think the challenge of thinking about skyscrapers is not height. I think the tallestbuilding in the world is a completely obsolete idea, which is why obscure cities in Asia arebuilding them. It doesn't mean anything any more. I would argue that it probably didn'tmean anything even in the 1970s.

I think it meant something when the Empire State Building was built, the biggestbuilding in the biggest city by this rich economy. It really meant something. I just don'tthink it means anything any more.

It's not the sort of record that � not all records have meanings forever. Certainrecords mean something at a certain moment when you can hire great Americanarchitects and engineers and get the tallest building in the world that record doesn't reallymean anything any more. And I would argue that it doesn't.

I think the challenge for skyscrapers is how to integrate skyscrapers into cities.Skyscrapers are buildings, they have a street address. But, of course, they're huge andthere's a point I think reached long ago where the skyscraper is not simply a largerbuilding like all the others, but just bigger.

And to learn about that, we can go back, not to the skyscrapers of the 60s, which Ithink were pretty horrible, with their plazas and their beautiful, but empty lobbies. But tothe skyscrapers of the 30s, which have stores on the ground floor, which came down tothe sidewalk, which didn't create plazas, and which were much more integrated into thecity than the modern skyscraper.

The skyscraper, of course, is not a modernist building. It's a pre-modern buildingand a lot of those early skyscrapers of the 20s where I think more on the right track.

We can also created beautiful spaces as Rockefeller Center does, built in the 30s.And we can learn from that as well.

I think there are two trends that could be � that are starting to happen that I thinkpoint at least two ways in which skyscrapers can become not taller, but better.

One is to bring the city up into the skyscraper. If we treat the skyscraper like a fourstory building, except it's 40 or 80 stories, and we simply see it as a problem of gettingpeople up and down, I think that we miss an important point which was understood bymany of the visionary city planners of the early 20th-century, who made these fantastic


Buck Rogers drawings of vertical cities, of bridges up in the air and things we neveractually managed to build.

But they had the right idea. They realized that if you're going to go up, you shouldalso go across. That it's a new kind of city.

And I think buildings like Norman Foster's Commerce Bank in Frankfurt, whichcreates these gardens up on the sky � so that when you're up there on the 30th of 40thfloor, you don't come down to go outside, you just go down two or three levels and you'rein some sort of atrium or landscaped area. And there's a sense that this building needs tobe organized differently.

And there's KPF's building being planned in London, which is very similar, whichrecognizes that working high up in the air isn't the same as working two or three levels offthe ground.

Another thing, which we're seeing in many skyscrapers, slightly less in this country,but I think it's a very good idea, is to mix the uses in the skyscraper.

To recognize if you're creating a vertical city, a city is not just one use. And thewonder of a city like New York is the mosaic of uses that occurs at ground level.

And when you put in a one-acre box, 100 stories high, you destroy that mosaic,because it's just this one huge lump. And one way of getting across that is to create amixture of uses in that very tall building.

And to put � have people living at one level � the sort of things that the JohnHancock building, I think very successfully, in Chicago, where they have apartments at thetop, offices and then stores at ground level.

And there are buildings being built now, which put hotels at the top, where you canreally capitalize on those views. And it solves a little bit some of those elevator problemsthat Bob alluded to, because you don't need as many elevators to service an apartmentbuilding as you do in an office building.

So, I think that the � obviously, I feel that the skyscraper does have a future. I don'tthink that this event, horrible as it is, is going to dissuade us. I think that we need to bemuch more skillful in the way we design tall buildings.

I think we've heard from Leslie Robertson that making these buildings somehow100 percent proof against all attack is not going to be possible. We can probably do somethings to improve them.

I don't think we should be going up 100 stories. I don't think it makes economicsense, but I'll leave that question to the next speaker.


REMARKS BY BRUCE FOWLE

BRUCE FOWLE: It occurred to me that we can't talk about the future of the skyscraperwithout looking at the past and history of the skyscraper. So, I hope to be able to producein ten minutes a history of the skyscraper, particularly as it pertains to New York and ...[END SIDE A/TAPE 1]

[BEGIN TAPE 1/SIDE 2] FOWLE (Continues - picks up mid-sentence) ... seen it in theshow and I've seen it in Les' presentation, so I realize it's not very unique. This is St.Paul's Chapel in New York, which is incredible in that it juxtapositions the � probably thefirst tallest building in New York or at one point the tallest building, influenced by SirChristopher Wren � and, of course, the World Trade Center in the background which was,at one point, the tallest in modern history.

As technology improved in the use of the elevator, Mr. Otis invented the elevator,the structural steel frame came into � became a feasible way of constructing, instead ofload bearing construction. Buildings started going up. And there was � really the sky wasthe limit. It was just a technological limitation at that point.

And this is Daniel Burnham's Flatiron Building in New York, which was at one pointthe tallest building. And you see that buildings at that time were generally � had corniceson the top, they had a base shaft top in the articulation of the facade. And this wasprobably the zenith of that period.

Again, going back to Cass Gilbert's 90 West Street, as these buildings got morerefined, you can see, as Vitruvius would say was the firmness at the base, commodity atthe center and in the shaft and then the light at the top.

And you begin to see how the cornice was gone and there was a mansard roof andthere were new things beginning to happen.

The problem with this type of design was that the � particularly, once you got out ofthe Wall Street area and up into this grid of New York City where the blocks wereirregular, 200 foot by 400 to 800 feet � and owners would only have pieces of theseblocks.

But the buildings didn't really make much sense in their high-rise form and they hadwhat we call scar tissues, where sides of buildings were just blank, because it wasanticipated that another building would be built next to that. The same thing on the otherside.

And you begin to see that the closing in of light and air to the point where you getstreets like this, which is Wall Street, with Trinity Church in the background.


This is what really began the changing of the zoning laws in New York, which didnot occur until 1916, I believe, was the initial change, where they limited the height ofstreet walls and began to force the towers to set back.

And we had what was called the 25 percent rule where the tower beyond a certainstreet wall height could only cover 25 percent of the site, which is what drove them up verytall.

This was kind of a mixed bag, this is McKim, Mead and White's Municipal Buildingin New York. You can see it still has the cornice, but they're starting to break through witha spire, the campanile-type configuration on the top.

The Con-Edison Building was taking it a little bit further. The MetLife Building inUnion Square was really the ultimate in the campanile style where there was still a veryeclectic approach to the high-rise building.

There was almost a timidity in the sense that they were not � they didn't want to doanything that was too drastic. They had to have some sort of historic recall. It wasbeginning, touching on arrogance, but within some constraints.

And then, of course, Cass Gilbert's Woolworth Tower, which reached out to theGothic style, which became � vertical Gothic, which, of course, became very predominantin high-rise design and you can see this is the 25 percent tower that's beginning to pokethrough.

One of the major innovations was the use of high rise construction for residents. Upuntil the teens and early 20's, it was the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers and theCarnegies. They all wanted to be in their own mansions in the urban settings.

And then finally it became acceptable to live in an apartment building and it beganto change New York in dramatic ways and really probably is what makes New York sounique is that there is high rise residential � old wonderful stock of beautiful high riseresidential buildings.

Then, of course, as Robert was saying, this is the party hat stage. The SherryNetherlands Hotel, very eclectic, 25 percent tower. The only way you could get thatsquare footage was to go up. You couldn't make the tower any wider than it was in anymore area, which is extremely inefficient.

In the development of the art deco period it was the first time that American high-rise architects had found their own style. They were creating a whole new "ism" ofarchitectural design, which applied to most of their buildings during the 20s and the early30s.

And, of course, the zenith was the Chrysler Building which was the first real,unabashed, corporate symbol, even to the point where there were hood ornaments that


were used to form the gargoyles, which, of course, did not act as gargoyles. But it was -�it was a very bold statement of corporate identity.

The Empire State Building, which was the zenith of the height wars before the war� what's unique about the Empire State Building is that when you're down on the street,you hardly know it's there, something we got away from and we'd like to come back to asWitold was mentioning earlier.

Rockefeller Center is in my opinion the greatest urban space in the world. And it's� notice I said space, not tall building, because this is the first time that buildings wereactually created to form space. And even though this is a 60-story wonderful building it'sthe space that we really remember about Rockefeller Center.

After the war, LeCorbusier finally had his opportunity to produce the glass box inthe park, the tower in the park, which really began to change the way we all looked atarchitecture and urban life and development.

This is the Seagram Building, which was the next level of refinement where Miesvan der Rohe just took the simple glass box and took the basic components of whatmakes buildings hold up, what makes windows and texture and refined it to the pointwhere it's still one of the most beautiful buildings in the world.

And part of this was the idea of open space, which you can see here. The buildingis on the right. And it was so well received, even though it defied all of the zoning laws.

It defied, the building was actually smaller than it could legally have been, but it wasto be a corporate symbol and it was the combination of space and refined architecture thatmade it happen.

The unfortunate thing was that the geniuses in the New York City planningcommission thought that they could recreate this everywhere throughout the city, so theychanged the laws to encourage this type of plaza.

But without the refinement, without the same forces that created this, it didn't work.Thus we have something like the General Motors Building, which Edward Stone designed.This used to have a beautiful hotel on the site and formed Grand Army Plaza, which wasone of the great spaces in New York, if not in the world.

This building was set back. There was a plaza put in front of it and it basicallydestroyed that space. And they're still having trouble making that plaza work. They've justredesigned it for about the fourth time.

And, of course, the World Trade Center, which when architects at this point wereworking with the box and how do they make the box something that's more interesting.


And part of the concept where was if you � if one doesn't work, you make two. Oneis an object, two is sculpture. And even though it's very alien and it defies all of the urbandesign principles that we've learned to guide in modern city design, urban design, it wasremarkable, I think the greatest thing about it was the fact that it has no scale.

It's almost like � it's like a tuning fork with these two elements you can almost feelthe resonance, the tension between these two forms. And the fact that they � that thefacade, which probably evolved more out of Les' structure than of the architect ,is soalmost like a singular surface, a plain surface, so that it really does not compete onceyou're , when you look at it with the rest of the buildings in the area, it's just like a foreignobject that is almost from another place.

Then trying to redesign the box, trying to find ways out of the box, we got intoGordon Bunshaft's curved base, trying to relate his tower to the street. We got into HughStubbins clipped-off top. A very fine flush facade.

And then, well, how do you make it meet the street? In this case, the idea was, lift itup and let the public go under it and provide some internal retail space, and so forth.

Or we'll try to work with it like a piece of clay, we'll make sculpture out of it, whichwas Roche-Dinkeloo's UN Plaza Building. Or we'll carve it out like Der Scutt's TrumpTower on 5th Avenue.

Or we'll just kind of make sculpture out of the facade elements which is PaulRudolph's building in Hong Kong � there's two like this actually.

And then I must offer the opinion that one of the most regressive periods in high-rise design was the so-called post-modern period, where we started bringing Gothicarchitecture � this is Philip Johnson's Pittsburgh Plate Glass Building in Pittsburgh � backin the mix.

And then we tried a little Chip and Dale with the AT&T building that Johnsondesigned on Madison Avenue in New York. And then Cesar Pelli tried kind of breakingdown the masses, this is actually a very big building. I'm not sure how many stories thisparticular one of the World Financial Center is.

But the idea was to break it down in a number of ways. One was the texture of thefacade. You can see it's more dense at the base and actually has more human scale,relates to the punch windows � relate more to the scale. And then it breaks away,changes facade, sets back, and so forth and becomes a much more human experience.

And then we realize that we weren't really doing much for the man on the street.So, the introduction of the Winter Garden, which as Les pointed out, has been greatlydestroyed, and creating interior spaces where human beings could somehow relate tothese massive over-scaled buildings. This was becoming extremely successful in the lastfive years or so.


Then we have kind of a structural expressionist experience period that began inHong Kong with Norman Foster's Hong Kong Bank, which is both a combination ofstructure and utilitarian elements being expressed on the exterior.

And there was also the beginning of the kind of inverted building where we'rebeginning to say cities really aren't all that beautiful, so maybe we should create awonderful atrium space inside that everybody can relate to and feel that they belong.

And then I.M. Pei's Bank of China building which was beginning to make sculptureout of structure, and this Les Robertson also designed and is a very beautiful, statuesquebuilding that is in its very simplest form. There is no embellishment other than itsfunctionality.

Then the idea of actually shaping the floor plates and getting into curvilinear formsbegan to be acceptable. Before that the development community and most of thebrokerage community would absolutely frown on that, because it did not make natural,efficient interior layouts.

But people began to get bored with those efficient interior layouts and broke intothis more curvilinear type of form.

And then Richard Rogers and his Lloyds of London building actually took the coreelements and put them outside. In the middle of this is a very simple rectangle, but thestairways, the mechanical services, even the toilets, are expressed in these stainless steelvolumes on the outside. This is actually being rehabbed at this point. It is not the naturalfacade.

This was a building that we did in China, in the Pudong section of China. When wedesigned there was nothing else here. It was a new economic development zone. Wehad a height limit that we were restricted to.

So, we began to play with the masses and create vertical slabs, vertical volumesthat sort of responded off of each other and started to deconstruct the volume and go �what we call dematerialization of the facade � layering of facade and so forth to createinterest.

And then the Conde Nast Building in Times Square was a very different approach,where we had a very strong context, Times Square on the one hand and midtown on theother. And this is the building where we actually began to overlay massing and materialsto create a composition.

This building is actually about twice the size that normal New York City zoning lawswould allow on that site. But for a number of reasons the air rights were transferred there.So, it was an attempt to try to fit it into the urban context.


Even to the point where, as you go around the corner, you get into the razzle-dazzle, unrestrained commercialism of Times Square, but we kept the kind of dignifiedcorporate entry as far east as possible. But you can see it's engaging the street. And theretail begins to take over here and it becomes very much a part of the city. And looking atthis side, you can see it's very much an integral part of the elements of the city.

And from Times Square itself you almost don't even know it's there. This is thebeginning of the building here, but the context is in the signage, all down at the scale ofthe rest of Times Square.

And even as you go into the sky, it's something that almost evolves out of thisurban context in a very natural, almost organic way.

Just taking a little look around the world. This is the sort of thing that's happening.This is in Shanghai. This was China's attempt to make the tallest building in Asia, which isactually a television communications tower that was completed in about 1995.

Since then this has been filled up with high rise buildings, but it is still a very strongsymbol. And this was simply to show their strength in the world economy.

This is a model of the Norman Foster building in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which waspure nationalistic symbolism. This was the King that wanted to have a building thatmarked this. This is in the middle of the desert.

Then the ego-trip with the Donald Trumps of the world. This is an apartmentbuilding in New York. It's now been completed. There's no rationale to it. It actually almostforced the changing the zoning laws in New York to make sure that this doesn't happen.

The Hudson River is right here, looking across the from the World Trade Center,this is Jersey City. This is what is beginning to happen where Manhattan is so compact,that we're now having to form new centers outside of Manhattan because of the density.

And a couple of these building exists. This is the new Goldman Sachs building byCesar Pelli. This is a statement, hey, we're over here, look across the river, we'reGoldman Sachs. And this is a building that we're doing for Merrill Lynch, which is basicallythe same sort of thing.

And what's interesting is that the centers are now being so well conceived and welldeveloped that they are becoming places in themselves and we're trying � this is a largeatrium that relates this building to the street � provides for retail activity, for leisure time.They have a light rail connection through here. They're doing all of the right urbanisticthings to connect this area to the world and it is booming.

So, if we don't build high-rise buildings, as I heard somebody suggest, this is whatyou're going to get. This is Los Angeles, this is the ultimate in sprawl. It would probablytake you three hours to drive from there to there. And you can see that's the high-rise


section of Los Angeles. And when you go a little bit outside of Los Angeles, this is whatyou see. You can almost feel this crawling across the country. If we allow this kind of low-density random development to continue, there won't be any country.

This is better. Thank you.

REMARKS BY PAUL KATZ

PAUL KATZ: I think there's a common thread evolving in some of the concerns andoptimism and thoughts are being shared between the various participants in this panel.

I'm going to present the work that our firm is doing around the world and try andgive you an idea of what is happening in the rest of the world. Because I think the question� and I'll present our work not because I think it's necessarily the best work or the onlywork worth viewing, but it's the work I know best and I think can put the story together.

Maybe not as poetically as Witold did, but certainly I think the question not thefuture of the high-rise building, but the question we should be asking is what is the futureof our cities.

The slides I'm going to show you will take you around the world and try toemphasize what I think are the important points of why tall building are desirable in thecities.

You'll see that � actually, as has been pointed out before, the United States is not� no longer the dominant force in high rise buildings. The reasons for that is because wehave invested differently in our cities.

And other cities and other countries have been investing differently and thinkingdifferently about the cities. Part of this is because they have no choice.

A hundred years ago, the only country in the world that had a majority of itspopulation in cities was Britain. By the end of this decade, the majority of the world'spopulation will be urbanized. And maybe in this country it doesn't matter so much to us.

But in other countries they cannot adopt the model of urbanization that we havedone, especially in the case of limited resources, both in land and in energy.

The United States, after all, as you know, uses one quarter of the world's energyand certainly China urbanizes, we'd hate to think what the consequences of that willhappen.


A majority of the nation can be urbanized by the end of the decade. So the cities inAsia where most of the rapid urbanization is happening is where we've seen a lot of high-rise construction.

They depend primarily on public transportation to get into the city. And that hascreated � enabled them to have the density. If you think back to the 20s when the rapidurbanization and densification of American cities happened, that was the case.

So, they're actually building high-rise buildings very close to public transportation.And in fact in cases like Hong Kong and to some degree in London, paying for theimprovement of the infrastructure with high-rise construction.

Many of these buildings do take advantage of two of the things that Witold wastalking about in that bringing the city up to the sky � in fact, I would like to show you thebuilding in London which has the stacked atriums.

This building also conserves energy. It uses 40 percent less energy than similaroffice buildings by doing a number of sensible things.

The core is on the south face to shield the building from solar gain and it hascourtyards on the north face. This solar � this south wall of elevators then is covered withphotovoltaic cells, which capture energy and translate it into electricity. The atriums thenalso create these pockets or these urban squares that are raised up in the building.

In Holland we're building very tall, slender buildings, because in Holland they aredesperately short of space. And we use wind turbines to � as you know in Holland they'vebeen using wind energy for many years � and we're using that in the building to generatemuch of the energy. Les is working on that building as well.

In Tokyo, they have a different problem. There they face the 100 percent certaintythat there will be a major earthquake in our lifetime probably. And, so, over the past 10years, despite the terrible economic times they've had in Japan, they have been buildingmore and more tall buildings, because tall building will be more capable of resistingearthquakes than low buildings.

And that was certainly the case in Kobe, where most of the tall buildings survivedthe earthquake and the lower buildings were destroyed.

One of the things they did learn from Kobe was that despite the fact that relativelyfew people lost their lives, the tall buildings did not survive as viable structures for thecontinuation of business.

And, so, businesses in Japan are rapidly moving towards buildings that areearthquake proof, we will see, but one tends to believe they'll probably survive theearthquake better than the lower buildings.


And potentially the workers and the businesses will be able to operate the next day.And that's very important to the global economy that a city like Tokyo functions thefollowing day after that earth quake, which the Japanese are pretty certain will happen andthey need to prepare themselves.

So, preparing themselves for bad events is not necessarily a signal that there's nofuture for your cities. Certainly in England they've been living with the threat of terrorismfor many, many years.

And the British have transformed London to a capital of commerce, competing withNew York and they've done that through sensible planning and sensible codes.

If you go to Canary Wharf, there are many cameras that photograph people andthey don't disturb anybody's freedom and they record who comes and goes from thebuilding. In fact, the compact area of Canary Wharf is then well-defended.

The buildings in Canary Wharf were criticized for being boring and they areprobably not the most exciting buildings in London, but the urban life in between thebuildings of Canary Wharf, the street life and the public life � even the British are amazedhow much they enjoy it.

Small things can save lives in the design of buildings. For example, all the glass inCanary Wharf buildings is laminated glass, so that should there be a terrorist incident, thatglass won't shatter into the space. In addition, the businesses can function the next day.

Codes overseas are also a little bit more anticipatory of bad things than the UScodes. So, there are firemen's elevators in every high-rise code outside of the UnitedStates. My observation is that every other country in the world uses them and it might besomething that the US should consider using. They have smoke vestibules. They havemore stairs per floor, per net area.

So if we go to Hong Kong, which by the way is a city that is incredibly dense, in avery harsh climate, but uses the least amount of gasoline per capita in the world. That isan important factor when you think of the planning of future cities in Asia. And Hong Kongis a high-rise city.

We are designing a building in Hong Kong right above the train station to the airportand it will be part of the financing of the infrastructure system from the airport.

That's because it is about 100 stories. And it stands next to a 75-story building nowunder construction, which is a residential building.

These people in those cities do not have any resistance to living in height. In fact,they have possibly a different mode of existence. But that should not necessarily meanthat it's any worse or better than our way of life.


Their culture is transformed by the cities. The cities have shaped their life styles.And Hong Kong is a very vital city. It is quite an acceptable model to many people in Asiaon what the future cities of Asia should be like.

When we started working in Asia 10 to 15 years ago, people looked towards NewYork and Tokyo as the model of the cities of the future in Asia. But I would say today HongKong is probably the clearest image for the Chinese, which is the largest country in theworld and the most rapidly urbanizing and fastest growing economy in the world.

Hong Kong has now become the symbol and Hong Kong in some ways is closer tothose visionary diagrams that were generated in the 20s in New York of bridgesconnecting buildings, multi-level, multi-functional buildings and that is part of their cultureand I do not think they see high rise buildings as a negative in any way.

So, I think we can learn from � although we created the high-rise building and in away sent it overseas, it's now become transformed and changed. And I believe we canlearn from these cities.

I believe the quality of life in some of these cities is quite acceptable and actually insome way, in some areas, in my opinion, far more acceptable than the picture that we sawof Los Angeles creeping across the desert towards us.

The time really has come to think of how we utilize our limited resources. Our landis not as open and plentiful as it was at the turn of the century. Certainly, we'reencumbered by a shortage of energy. And if we don't start thinking about how to use thisenergy in our buildings, in our built environment, certainly, we'll be more vulnerable to thekinds of terrible events we're facing at the moment.

In all of this, I think we need to think that the high rise building is very important toour cities and important to sustaining our life. And it's not just about buildings and theirshape and their form, but really about our future.

So, I think one of the things we've learned and I'd like to convey to you fromworking overseas is that the building type of the 21st-century is the tall building. And weneed to understand that. It doesn't mean we don't love designing low buildings. Of coursewe love designing low buildings. We love designing buildings in Washington. We designedthe World Bank and many other buildings here. It's not a question of size, it's not aquestion of ego. It's really a question of what is the importance of the building and the cityin our futures. Thank you.

QUESTION & ANSWER PERIOD

ROBERT CAMPBELL: We've heard from Les Robertson a very moving summary ofthe World Trade Center, its building and its demise.


From Witold, who unfortunately had to leave, we heard a lovely talk about theskyscraper essentially American way of building cities.

From Bruce Fowle, the skyscraper history in New York and the argument thatchoice is between sprawl and skyscrapers. I'm not sure there's not a middle ground.

And from Paul Katz an argument that the skyscraper or the tall building, or densitycertainly, I think we can agree on that � is resource-efficient. And the need to conserveresources and energy is critical in the century that we're entering now.

Rather than throw questions at our panel, we have microphones in both the aislesand I think in the time remaining, we'd much rather hear from you.

Q: This comment is directed to Bruce Fowle. I want to take him to task on two thingshe said. I think the first one he might have misspoken. The second one concerns memuch more.

You said that Rockefeller Center was the first time buildings were used to formspace. We're not forgetting San Marco Square or St. Peter's in Rome. Did you mean high-rise buildings?

FOWLE: I meant high-rise buildings. Sorry.

Q: You showed the example of the Merrill Lynch building in New Jersey creating anatrium, as something that's urban-friendly. But my experience with atriums is what usuallyhappens is the businesses move off the sidewalk and into the atrium where they're onlyavailable during work hours.

So, it makes it hard for a night life to develop in an urban place, because thebusinesses have to choose. Are they inside for the lunchtime traffic or outside for earlymorning and late at night? I've seen that kill cities, what do you say about that?

FOWLE: Well, it's more interior urban street than it is atrium. It would be open at leastfor 12 to 14 hours a day. It would have retail inside, so it would be simply a way of havinga sheltered area that one could enjoy shops and have a cup of coffee, relax, listen tomusic, and so forth, in a way that enhances the street, because it's very visible from thestreet.

It's simply a matter of having a glass wall that in inclement weather would bewonderful place to be inside rather than outside.

Q: I have a question for Les Robertson about the excavation of the World TradeCenter. Is it six levels below grade, is that correct? When I saw the excavation pictures, itshows the PATH tunnels, the excavation went below PATH lines. Was the PATH linemoved down to the bottom of the excavation?


ROBERTSON: The original PATH line was put in many years ago and it wasexpanded because of the desire � PATH is the rapid transit system that goes under theHudson River from New Jersey to New York.

In any event, the desire was to use longer trains, so they could carry more peoplethrough the same tunnels. And, so, the tracks were rerouted, but not significantly inelevation.

Q: Having lived in Manhattan and enjoyed the incredible variety of the cityscape inthere. If tall buildings remain in the future, like the World Trade Center or smaller, how doyou keep the tall buildings from simply becoming the territory of the upper middle class,the elite, keep them from increasing the disparity in our society?

KATZ:Well, I think that's a social problem rather than an architectural problem. If you visitSingapore, for example, you'll see very nice middle-to-lower income housing in high-riseand dense environments, as you will in Hong Kong and Japan and Korea.

So, it's not a question of � it's a cultural and societal question not an architecturalquestion. Architects can't do everything, although they think they can.

Q: How much of a part is green architecture going to play in the next ten years in theUnited States and throughout the world? And how prepared are we for bio-terrorism?

FOWLE: When I first showed you the Conde Nast Building that was actually the firstgreen high-rise in the country and it may still be the largest in the world.

That was designed to use about 40 percent less energy. A fair amount of theenergy is actually produced on-site, so we're not depending on the power companies andall of the transmission losses.

It includes photovoltaic fuel cells. Interior air quality is something that's extremelyimportant.

There isn't anything that went into that building that is not just plain common sense.There's a payback of three to five years for most of the features that are in there and it'sjust a matter of education and I think that's going to be prevalent in all buildings. And thelaws will soon demand it because of the effect on the ecology.

ROBERTSON: First of all, bio-terrorism is extremely expensive and difficult a war towage. We are not prepared in the United States or anywhere in the world to resist thatkind of warfare.

We see it today. It's heavy in the news right now, but in terms of a real threat to theUnited States, it's not a significant one.


The nerve gas that was released in the Tokyo subway would have been veryserious, except the delivery systems failed and, so, only a small amount of the gas gotout. Even so, that was a much more serious event, probably in a larger sense the greaterthreat.

Everyone is talking about what to do with air intakes, and so forth, and trying todeal with that problem. So builders in the future will be on top of it.

Q: You think there are technical solutions?

ROBERTSON: There are no solutions, there are ameliorations.

FOWLE: A lot of it has to do with where the fresh air comes into the building. If itcomes in low where it's easily accessible from the terrorist on the street, that could easilyaffect the building.

Also, the amount of filtering that goes on in the air, Four Times Square, forexample, filters about 85 percent of the particulates out of the air as opposed to normally35 percent. So, the air itself is much cleaner.

Whether that would actually combat a biotech impact ...

ROBERTSON: And the multiple use buildings have a special problem because it'svery much easier to have a residential space and to take into that residential space inrelatively small quantities that which you can carry � a very large volume of whatevermaterial you want to get, whether it's bombs or bio-materials or gas or whatever.

Q: The point has been made that the tallest buildings in the last quarter century areoutside the United States. Should New York want to recapture the mantle of the world'stallest building � at least one of you think the World Trade Center should not be rebuilt inits present form? Do any of you care to venture as to what should be put in that space?

CAMPBELL:Should we compete for the tallest building? [NO RESPONSE] I don't hear alot of enthusiasm. What should be built on that site?

ROBERTSON: Can we make it a place of commerce?

FOWLE: We have the architects, planners, civic activists and government peoplehave organized a phenomenal coalition in New York to try to decide this type of thing.

And not only what to do on that site, but what to do to make sure that downtownremains and continues to be a vital urban place in the whole region and how we canconnect to it.

My personal opinion, and I'm not speaking for the coalition, is that we ought to bethinking of creating a place rather than object buildings, that it should be something that is


defined � a place that is defined by architecture that is � gets its energy from the wholeworld. That we can invite architects from all over the world to create the architecture thatdefines that place and that place becomes the memorial itself.

CAMPBELL: I'll just throw out two ideas. One is that lower Manhattan which isabout the size of Central Park ... [END TAPE 1/SIDE B]

[BEGIN TAPE 2/SIDE 1]CAMPBELL: (Continues - picks up mid-sentence) ... ideally to make a chunk of an ideal21st-century city whatever that turns out to be. And I would think that would be somethingin touch with the streets, in touch with the waterfront and somehow presenting itself asbeing also in touch with the world electronic culture that we live in. That's a big deal.

I think this is a real opportunity. The fire of London was a terrible disaster and it wasa tremendous opportunity of the rebuilding of many buildings and these things do becomeopportunities, if we seize them.

Q: I would like to get some consensus from the panel � let me just preface this bysaying I loved the World Trade Center and I remember the Empire State Building as achild.

But I've seen some things in print and elsewhere saying that this is not a new issue,it's just been revived again of what happened September 11th. Businesses arereconsidering the wisdom of locating in skyscrapers, because they make such invitingtargets.

Moreover the social, public issue that is raised is should we put so much of ourcommerce and our security all in one place like this? Should things be spread out a littlebit? Should cities take on a different tone? Perhaps not like Houston or Los Angeles, butat least modified from the skyscraper cities that we've seen.

KATZ:I think what I suspect is going to happen in New York is, again, very similar to whathappened in London. The financial district of London was concentrated in the City ofLondon � was threatened over a period of time by bombing and a number of other things.

And for a number of reasons, it diversified to a number of centers in the City ofLondon, which actually was quite good for London. Because it revitalized areas,residential areas.

And although it had high rise buildings suddenly popping out all around London �and initially, for about ten years, people resisted it, led by the Prince of Wales.

But now when you visit London, it's quite fantastic to see all the sub centers allaround the center being quite special and I think you're right that the over centralization incentral Manhattan wasn't necessarily a good thing.


But I don't necessarily think because there's going to be dispersion there will be anabandonment of the high-rise building. The high-rise building does have tremendouscommercial benefits in terms of land use, concentration of resources, flexibility, and youcan go on.

And, again, if you don't build high-rise buildings, then you're going to build morehighways and more sprawl. SO, it's more than just the building, it's the whole city as youwere alluding to.

CAMPBELL:Are companies leaving lower Manhattan? Has there been the dispersal thatpeople were afraid of?

KATZ: Well, I'll give you an example. We were doing a building for Morgan Stanleyat Times Square across the street from their current headquarters, another building theyown. So, they had the notion of being on campus.

Less than a week after September 11th, they sold that building to Lehman Brotherswho were in the World Financial Center and that's now the Lehman Brothers building. Theopening I think is next week.

And what you're going to see is that less concentration or the concept of the urbancampus will be less prevalent. But whether they're going to � how far they're going to gois the question.

I think if they stay within the region of New York, which includes large parts of NewJersey and Connecticut � again, I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing. In fact, thereare very positive things to it.

QUESTION: Living in the kind of quintessential American low rise city, we have a problemwith gridlock like no one else and we all suffer for it.

These high-rise cities that you talk about for the future that are growing � what sortof transportation solutions do you foresee? Canary Wharf did a wonderful job ofintroducing light rail. And it's a wonderful complex to visit.

How do you see America, the land of the automobile, marrying the land of high-risecities? The two don't seem to work out very well.

CAMPBELL:High-rises don't necessarily create high density. If you take downtownHouston and you factor in all the freeways and all the parking lots that serve those high-rise buildings, you have a rather low overall density.

The Prudential Center, when it was built in Boston, has a floor-area ratio of a littleless than four, about the same as the rest of the back bay.


So, it is utterly dependent on transportation. Ninety percent of the workers in theWorld Trade Center came not in automobiles but by foot or by subway or bicycle orwhatever other means, so I think it is a very critical question.

FOWLE: The early cities were developed along the lines of transportation, so thenodes would start along the railroad line or you could actually force development of citiessuch as New York and Queens by putting in the subway line.

And then the people would come and build, and so forth. And I think what'shappened now is that we've gotten to such a degree of sprawl where there is no focus.There are no centers. The center is the shopping mall.

And we need to start refocussing these centers so that you do get concentrations ofpeople, not necessarily high-rise, but at least densities where people can walk to theirgrocery store. They can walk to the movie theater.

And then they can � then you can start to reconstruct transportation systems suchas light rail that connect the centers and the people that aren't on those centers or in thosecenters or on those lines � would then have to drive to those centers, but they don't haveto drive all the way to the main center.

CAMPBELL:Maybe you have to put the light rail in first or you'll never get those centers.

KATZ: The lesson overseas is that you plan high rises together with public transportation.And, you know, I think a lot of this comes out of Washington. If we give 15 billion dollars tosupport the airline industry, surely we can find a few billion dollars to support publictransportation.

[APPLAUSE]

FOWLE: The government subsidy for the automobile ranks first among allgovernment subsidies. Agriculture is second.

The idea that there's a subsidy for AMTRAK, the tiny amount of money that's spenton that � but that's the only term � that's the only government function to which we eversee the word subsidy attached.

KATZ:Today, we came from New York to Washington. It took three hours to take a trainride that in Japan takes an hour. And above the stations in Japan, that's where you get thehigh-rise construction.

Q: I was curious about the assumption that everybody seems to be making prettyeasily that high rise, high density is desirable and low rise, as you call it, sprawl is not.


I had the misfortune to hitchhike through the city of Novi Belgrade, which wasdesigned by LeCorbusier. And not only was I relieved to get out of there, but everybodywho lived there was too.

Conversely, there were people from places like Belgrade and Hong Kong veryeager to go to Southern California. They have a system of housing there called the single-family detached - and, which I think, you described as sprawl, using up land that if youlook a little closer at your picture, you can see it's the Mojave Desert that had no prior use.

I'd like to ask, to make this as difficult as possible, whether your condemnation ofsprawl is based on your professional industry interests or on your eastern provincialism?[LAUGHTER]

CAMPBELL: It's incredibly resource consumptive that pattern of settlement as comparedto any other pattern of settlement. Even if you don't count the automobile, which uses up agreat deal of resources, just the other energy that goes into those places is much higherper unit of dwelling than any other way you can build.

And in a century in which we're looking at the survival of the planet earth in theface, it seems to me that's got to be an issue that I should let someone else talk about.

FOWLE: And if you look real carefully at that slide, you'll see behind every one ofthose houses is a swimming pool and there's at least two cars in the parking garage andat least one of them is an SUV.

And it's the only way they can get anywhere, whether it's to buy a newspaper or goto school. It's as environmentally irresponsible as you can get as far as I can figure out.And if it continues and we're dependent on oil from the Middle East, it just makes nosense.

CAMPBELL: I would argue that it also encourages people to live among people exactlylike themselves, in gated communities and things of that kind.

Where as the city � the point of the city � is to mix different people together andcreate a more democratic society.

Q: A question for Leslie Robertson. I appreciated very much the discussion of theforces that the World Trade Center and clearly how very far out of design tolerance theywere.

And, yet, having now seen the performance of those buildings, my question to you,sir, is do you have any regrets, or in retrospect, would you have done anything differently.

ROBERTSON: Oh, do I have regrets. Thousands of people died in those buildingsand you cannot not have regrets. I don't understand your question.


Q: Just in terms of the structural design, is there anything that you would have donedifferently?

ROBERTSON: Well, the project was designed 40 years ago. I've learned a lot aboutstructural engineering in the last 40 years. And would I have done things differently. Ofcourse I would have done things differently.

The more fundamental question is "Were the criteria wrong?" And I have to pointout to you that there are very many risks in life. We kill almost 50 thousand people a yearon the highway.

There are lost of risks in life, and this risk, at least to this moment in time, has notbeen a significant one.

And if we have to spend our resources, our energy, our money, our time in makingbuildings that are super strong to resist airplanes, I think, would be a tragedy.

Also, talking about this sprawl, you know, New York is very different. It's a walkingcity. And you have to � it's not a city that requires you to put in parking. It's quite the otherway around.

You know, you have to apply and get special permission to add parking stalls. Itapproaches the matter of the vehicle entirely differently than you do here in Washington ormost of the United States for that matter. It's an entirely different approach.

And I think it's very successful. I mean, we need more underground transportationin New York, don't misunderstand me. If you ride to Lexington Avenue, like I do, it's prettycrowded. But it's better than sprawl. Got to be better than sprawl.

Q: Mr. Robertson analyzed how the 767 jet fuel fires made the collapse of thosetowers inevitable and very modestly noted the fact that most people were evacuatedbefore they collapsed.

And I stood up to ask a rhetorical question with the opposite tone of the last one.How many thousands of people's lives were saved by the excellence of your design?

[APPLAUSE]

Q: I'd like to return to the Ground Zero and the reconstruction effort. There is acommittee of architectural firms in New York and at this moment, apparently, they arestudying the various alternatives to design the reconstruction, between having a memorialsite, the reconstruction of the buildings.

Of course, there are economics involved in that and the owners of the previoustowers would like to recover, probably, their investments. And I wonder if there is anyconsideration at this moment for the alternatives and strategies being discussed?


CAMPBELL:Let me try to answer that. The architects who are led by Marilyn Taylor, themanaging partner of Skidmore, Ownings and Merrill, are one group that is looking at this.So, is the regional plan association. So, are many intersecting coordinated groups ofdevelopers, planners and urban designers.

The owner is the Port Authority. The lessor is the guy that you're thinking of. He hashired architects to produce very quickly or redesign I think exclusively for the purposes ofgetting his insurance.

I think it's a straw man. I think it's going to take a year before we have any ideawhat's going to go on there. And I think it's going to be a very complex process in which alot of people are going to be involved.

For example, the Governor of the State of New Jersey is a critical player as one ofthe forces in the Port Authority. So, it's a very complex situation.

Q: I'm a developer who's been spending the last 20 years thinking about how thecomputer is changing the function of office buildings and the meaning of location.

And, Robert, I was particularly pleased to see the article you had written a fewweeks back in the Boston Globe talking about the skyscraper and you had mentioned twothings that struck home in terms of my thought process.

One was how few people actually get a window, because of the horizontal areas offloors of buildings which were really based on a paper based manual labor paradigm ofhaving room for the paper and the ability to consolidate all the people that had to accessthe paper and interact with each other, being in the same place at the same time.

Which is why transportation is such a critical issue. But the use of transportation todo office work is really a communications function, although it looks like it's atransportation activity.

The second thing I wanted to comment on was your other observation about yourfriend in the Hancock Tower who, when she worked on the 50-something floor, was kindof an abstract painting. But when she moved down to the 20-something floor, she felt likeshe was in a city.

So, I'd like you to comment on the human factor of buildings and the relationship tothe changing ways we're going to work.

CAMPBELL:As far as being near the window, I think the law is going to take care of that.In many parts of Europe you must be within 20 feet, something like that, six meters of awindow, seven meters, whatever it is.


I think we're going to see that kind of pressure from the workplace to solve thatproblem and we won't see � again the size of the floor in the World Trade Center was anacre. It was 40 thousand square feet. I don't see that happening again.

KATZ: Oh, I disagree with that. It's your personal opinion.

CAMPBELL: We're all expressing our personal opinion.

KATZ: I know, but you're saying it as if the law is going to take care of it. I think thetrends in some parts are to increase floor plate size.

Because one of the results of a paperless office is that there are more people onthe floors than less people. I think the reason in Europe they have to be close to thewindows is because of almost archaic laws or archaic buildings when buildings werepretty unhealthy.

One of the things you find when people are working with computer screens is theyactually don't look out the window. And half the buildings we design with floor to ceilingglass � we say, well, do you really need all that glass, because it's really energyinefficient. The developer insists on that to lease the building.

The moment the building is leased, all the blinds come in and people pull the blindsdown, because they work on a computer screen.

All I'm saying is we love slender tall buildings, but the reality of it is that in manyparts of the world that isn't the trend. And the other issue is that in Germany, while theydo that, they're all sitting in private offices.

In Japan, where they have the deep spaces, they like being together. Japanesepeople don't like being in private offices. So, the buildings are, there are no absolutes.

CAMPBELL:No, I understand that and I was using Europe as the example. Why we'rehaving a high rise building if you're not taking advantage of the high-rise building � I don'tget it.

FOWLE: I have to disagree, because if you're really doing environmental design oneof the most important aspects is the indoor environmental quality and you don't get indoorenvironmental quality being 60 feet from a window.

Part of it is daylight and modern office buildings, partly because of the computerhave fewer and fewer partitions up against the window, so the daylight can come in.

And by reducing the amount of artificial light that is required, it's the greatest thingyou can do to reduce energy consumption in a building. The greatest energy is used in theartificial lighting.


So, although there are certain tenants that will demand very large floors for tradingoperations and things like that, we're finding that even the Merrill Lynches of the world aresaying we don't want these deep spaces from core to wall, because we like to have areally nice working environment and have a variety of conditions and make the places ...

CAMPBELL:The other part of the question was when people get above a certain height,they lose touch with the street life of the city and the street life is the life of the city. I thinkyou're right in making that comment.

Q: I would just like to ask Mr. Robertson what he knows or thinks will happen to theseven story slurry wall created the bathtub for the World Trade Center?

ROBERTSON: This is the second time that the perimeter slurry wall � this is aspecial kind of wall construction that surrounds the World Trade Center � this is thesecond time it has been jeopardized.

The first time was the bombing in 1993. We dealt with that by adding hugehorizontal beams on top of existing concrete slabs to disperse the load. And at that time,incidentally, the slurry wall was stabilized by these sloping-down slabs going into big pilesof rubble sit upon refrigeration equipment.

So, the situation is not so very different today. Big pile of rubble � you'd besurprised incidentally how much of the below grade slabs are still in place.

But what's happening right now is that the new tie-back system is going in placealong the south wall now. More or less as with the original construction. That will allow thecomplete demolishing of the below-grade concrete construction back down to the rock.

That construction will turn and go to the north and how much of the existingbasement slab stays in place, I'm not sure. We're not working on that aspect of it. But asignificant amount will.

SUSAN HENSHAW JONES: I found out from a reliable source that the number ofpeople evacuated from the World Trade Center is 25 thousand. And, so, I really do saluteLeslie for enabling that.

[APPLAUSE]

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SUSAN HENSHAW JONES - National Building Museumnationalbuildingmuseum.net/pdf/Future_Of_Skyscraper... · 2011-10-07 · SUSAN HENSHAW JONES: Good evening ladies and gentlemen. My name