Fwd: Building Fast and Slow: The Empire State Building and the World Trade Center

The Empire State Building and the World Trade Center make for an interesting comparison. In many ways, they’re similar. They’re both iconic Manhattan skyscrapers (they were built just 3 miles apart) that sit right next to each other in the sequence of “world’s tallest building”. Both started out as projects aimed at creating (among other things) a large amount of commercial office space, and were later nudged by their owners into becoming the world’s tallest building. Both were completed in the midst of a severe economic downturn (the Great Depression and the 1973 Oil Shock, respectively), and took many years to be fully occupied. The Empire State Building would be only partially occupied through the 1930s (making money largely from visitors to the observation deck), and the owners were only saved from bankruptcy because the lender (MetLife) didn’t want the building. It wouldn’t start to turn a profit until after WWII. Similarly, the World Trade Center didn’t reach full occupancy in 1980. In both cases the building owners had to coerce government agencies to use much of the available space. (View Highlight)

Lamb later stated that “the adaptation of the design to conditions of use, construction and speed of erection has been kept to the fore throughout the development of the drawings of Empire State. Whatever “style” it may be is the result of a logical and simple answer to the problems set by the economic and technical demands of this unprecedented program.” (View Highlight)

There were many other examples of this sort of simplification. Though there were 5704 aluminum spandrels on the exterior, there were only 18 different variations (View Highlight)

To minimize the time workers spent traveling to get food, cafeterias (set up by a local restaurant) were set up on the third, ninth, twenty-fourth, forty-seventh, and sixty-fourth floors. (View Highlight)

at its peak, nearly 500 trucks were arriving each day (about one truck a minute), and nearly 3500 men were working on the building at once. Each truck was sequenced - if a truck missed its place in line, it had to come back the next day. Nine cranes were used to lift the steel into place. The builders describe the process as like an assembly line of standard parts, the “purchase, preparation, transport to site, and placing of the same materials over and over again”. But repetitiveness shouldn’t be confused with ease of operation - keeping the project on schedule was monumentally difficult. In his memoirs, Paul Starrett states that “the strain of erecting the Empire (View Highlight)