Travel to U.S.: East: Manhattan: Starchitecture: Photo 12

One of the two World Trade Center towers, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, completed in 1975, and destroyed on September 11, 2001. The buildings had never been celebrated for anything other than their size, but on that clear day and in the days to come their loss was felt acutely around the world, at least partly because it suggested that America was no longer a haven in a dangerous world.

The towers had been commissioned by the New York Port Authority. Each had four million leasable square feet spread over 110 floors and 1,250 feet. The peripheral steel frames were weight-bearing, and on the day of their destruction the heat of 300 tons of burning jet fuel weakened them so that the upper floors collapsed like a hammer onto the otherwise intact floors below.

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