The Skyscraper Museum is devoted to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future. The Museum explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence. This site will look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.
GIANTS:
The Twin Towers and the Twentieth Century
September 8 2006 — April 15 2007
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here for a virtual walk-through of the exhibit
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“GIANTS: The Twin Towers & the Twentieth Century,” commemorates
the original World Trade Center, viewing its creation in the context of
the technological ambitions of the 1960s and the hundred-year evolution
of New York’s skyline.
On their completion in 1971 and 1973, the Twin Towers were both the tallest
and the largest skyscrapers in the world. Innovative engineering carried
the structures to 110 stories, at 1362 and 1368 feet, and floors of nearly
an acre multiplied the space of each tower into more than 4 million square
feet. The scale of these giants has been exceeded only once in history,
by the contemporary Sears Tower in 1974. By comparison, the Freedom Tower,
the largest building planned for Ground Zero, will contain only 2.6 million
square feet, about two-thirds of their volume.
The exhibition features architectural and engineering models, construction
photographs and films, drawings and other documents addressing the planning
and design on the complex. The multimedia installation includes video and
audio clips, as well as interactive touch-screens that allow visitors to
view hundreds of construction photographs in the Museum’s collection
and to see and hear interviews of key figures in the Trade Center’s
design and development.
The dramatic installation design by Local Projects features light columns
that use the gallery’s unique floor and ceiling of mirror-polish stainless
steel to create the illusion of the slender pin-stripe columns of the towers’
facades.
Supplementary skyscraper.org resources:
WTC
Dossier
GIANTS culminates the Museum's longstanding interest in the history of the
Twin Towers. The WTC Dossier provides easy access to all Museum projects
and exhibits which have included the World Trade Center, as well as external
resources around the web.
VIVA2
VIVA2, the Visual Index to the Virtual Archive 2, is an interactive interface
providing access to The Skyscraper Museum's unique collection of more than
1,000 photographs of the construction of the World Trade Center towers and
the Empire State Building. VIVA 2 allows visitors to discover and compare
the building technologies and methods of the Empire State Building in the
1930's and of the World Trade Center towers in the 1960's and the 1970's.
* * *
This exhibition is made possible by a grant from the Lower
Manhattan Development Corporation, which is funded through Community
Development Block Grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
This exhibition is made possible with public funds from the New York State
Council on the Arts, a State Agency.
For more information on upcoming exhibits, please email [email protected]
or call 212.968.1961
