But of course it was supposed to move, and it could have moved a lot more if it didn’t panic people. It was disconcerting nothing that large is supposed to move. I was there, high up in the south tower, about 10 years after opening, working on a project on a stormy day and could feel the movement. Even at 1:7 and a lower total height, the WTC moved when the wind blew. The WTC had an ‘aspect ratio’ (that is the breadth to the height) of about 1:7, while the slenderest of the newest crop of supertall towers is closer to 1:24. He was both passionate and felt personally responsible when it came to structural soundness and he was tortured, often publicly to tears, by the possibility that he missed something when it came to the WTC. 11, 2021 at 92, and he spent the last 20 years of his life grappling with every engineers nightmare. Robertson, the much lauded structural engineer who designed the structure of the World Trade Center, just died on Feb. And like La Cosa Nostra, these are not bold faced names, preferring to quietly exert influence via REBNY or donations to every politician in their sphere. As in mafia families, except they tend to be Jewish, not Italian, and there are more than 5. But even that makes sense if we consider that real estate families are the ‘5 Families’ of modern NYC. This is not to discount the money laundering that real estate, especially very, very expensive real estate, seems to be synonymous with. They are a point of pride that our schadenfreude proves (we care enough to hate them, and especially hate the occupants!). We want the tallest, the most exclusive and the most expensive, even if we can only gawk from the sidewalk. They might be the space race of homes seemingly a gigantic waste of effort, money and attention, but actually expressing the aspirational zeitgeist of the city (at least of this one). Abodes for the wealthy, at their best, are testing grounds for the ideas and technologies we will all inherit.
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