Title: Urban Scale
Text: The scale of the World Trade Center was unprecedented. The Twin Towers were not just the tallest buildings in the world at their completion, they were also the largest in terms of floor area. At 209 feet on a side, their floorplates covered about an acre, and each building exceeded four million square feet, with around eleven million square feet for the complex. At the time, this was more than the total downtown office space of Philadelphia, Los Angeles, or Boston.
The population of workers was approximately 50,000 and 150,000 people passed through the complex on a daily basis including PATH and subway commuters and business visitors. Tourists to the World Trade Center observation deck topped two million a year.
The size of the site is hard to fathom.
At twenty acres, it equals almost nineteen football fields. In terms of typical midtown blocks, the area compares to the original Rockefeller Center, which covers three full blocks between Fifth and Sixth avenues.
The oversized, abstract character of the superblock plan presented a striking contrast to the densely developed blocks in the historic core on Broadway and around Wall Street. In the 1980s, the World Financial Center extended the giant scale of the full-acre footprints in an expansion of the commercial zone across West Street. The ensemble of Postmodern skyscrapers designed by Cesar Pelli make reference to the set-back forms of the 1920s, but rise less than half the height of the Twin Towers.
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