No comments about MIT Campus Planning 1960-2000: An Annotated Chronology.

No comments about Urban Public Transport Today.

No comments about A New City (Land Boom Melbourne in the Photographs of Charles Bristow Walker).

2 comments about Levittown: The First 50 Years (Images of America (Arcadia Publishing)).

1. I totally disagree with anyone who believes "Levittown deserves better." Arcadia Publishers require all their authors to follow a specific format and how the book gets printed has nothing to do with the author(s). Tova Navarra's exceptional introduction gave me a perspective on Levittown as the prototype American tract home that was accessible and well-chronicled in such a short (also required) format. I also know that authors of these regional history books often have a hard time acquiring photographs, often have to pay for them to be reproduced from originals that library collections do not circulate, and I noticed photos of Billy Joel's family in their Levitt home in Hicksville, which impressed me. It must be that these authors went to more trouble than people realize. I loved this book---I don't have lots of time to read longer histories, and this book gave me everything I enjoyed knowing in one sweet nutshell.



2. I expect this sold a few copies in Levittown but if you want a pictorial history of this fascinating suburb, as I did, forget this book. Unfortunately nearly every one of the two hundred photos is either blurred, soft focused or not even relevant. It is as if the originals were all photocopied and these copies sent to the printer. The inflexible layout means all the photos are either one or two columns wide and printed with a 133 screen on soft paper does not help either. I can only guess that the authors wanted to produce the book as cheaply as possible, nearly all the photos are copyright free (I assume) and credited to the Levittown Public Library Collection.
   
   The most interesting chapter to me was the one dealing with the construction of Levittown, even with the awful photos you can see the wood frame construction of the houses, the cement block floors with the heating pipes and there are several pictures of the Cape Cod and Ranch type units which make up the 17,500 houses in the suburb. In the back of the book are several photos (and these, taken by co-author Tova Navarra, are probably the best in the book) of the remodelling that most of the houses have gone through depending on the owner's needs.
   
   Plenty of photos show life in Levittown but as they are no better than snap-shots they don't do justice to the people shown, the place or the reader. All very disappointing because having just read Barbara Kelly's excellent book `Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown', I think there is an opportunity for some publisher to do a well designed coffee-table pictorial history with good photos of the houses, their interiors, construction, community life, house blueprints, maps and more. `Levittown: The First 50 Years' makes me want to know more and done properly.
   
   ***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

No comments about City Branding: Image Building & Building Images.

No comments about The Architecture and Memory of the Minority Quarter in the Muslim Mediterranean City (Aga Khan Program of the Graduate School of Design).

No comments about Urban Spaces #1 (U. S. Ad Review).

No comments about New City Spaces, Strategies and Projects.

No comments about Dar es Salaam. Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis.

5 comments about Twin Towers: The Life of New York City's World Trade Center.

1. While of three books I've read on the subject, this gives the most detail on construction, it still feels a little light, leaving off construction essentially at the foundation and saying that the rest of it went up, more detail on the steel construction beyond the grillage foundations would have been interesting, particularly the column trees for the exterior.
   
   As an academic work, it doesn't really work, because Angus seems desperate to document his sources. He spends two references for a conversation with a window washer (p.153), footnotes a citation for a paragraph where the speaker is explicitly named, quoted, and he said, "blah blah blah." Now are we really so stupid as to need a citation to know that the guy whose name appears in the paragraph to whom the quote is attributed that it needs a footnote in the back of the book to confirm it was him and that he said it? Isn't he quoted? All the references tend to slow down the book, if you bother to read them.
   
   Gillespie even feels the need to back up a statement about the mall-walking trend so we've got a source for that (p.211), another citation for a well-accepted fact (Otis' invention of the safety elevator), and another curious item - Gillespie's intense compulsion for referencing and footnote "bloat" extends in a bizarre fashion to where he references the same conversation four times, yet creates a new footnote every time, backing it up with "Ibid." Why can't the original footnote be cited? A personal conversation does not have a page number to distinguish one reference from another, so what's the point?
   
   Further, most references in the book are to articles in the New York Times, the New Yorker, op-ed pieces from other newspapers, and a few sources of dubious academic quality - The AIA guide to New York, and a few Architecture trade magazines. Now, if this is supposed to be taken seriously as an academic work, why are all the references to newspapers and not to the people quoted in those articles - Had I been quoted second-hand in this fashion, I would have appreciated instead a call from the author verifying the quote. No such effort appears to have been made here.
   
   For an academic work, Gillespie is very friendly with the Port Authority staff, to the point of Stockholm Syndrome when you contrast the portrayal of property seizure and demolition with "Divided we Stand."
   
   As a work of popular culture, the book fails because there are so many references and footnotes that you can't read it.
   
   It isn't popular journalism and it isn't academic research. Some editorial guidance here would have been useful. American Studies, by implication, is a fuzzy, ill-focused field where you document everything but say little. The book isn't architectural criticism, nor is it government criticism, nor is it history.
   
   Getting over that part, this book by far has the most hard engineering information so far, so if you are a conspiracy nut looking for "proof" or an engineer looking for information on construction, there is a chapter on that, including details on deaths during construction (8, none of them iron workers, p.84), a discussion of the windows (22" wide, p.79, except the top floors cleaned by hand), high strength steel for the columns (p. 78, although anything other than 36 ksi steel was `high-strength' at the time) and a mention of the design wind speed for the towers (p.81) - 150 mph. Although strictly, it doesn't say if this is fastest mile or 3 second gust, so there is still some mystery left for structural engineers. There is also some information about wind tunnel studies and motion studies for the towers.
   
   By far the best information on the floor system so far is that they were 32" deep fabricated steel trusses, by Laclede Steel. Exterior Column triplets were either two or three stories tall which demonstrates how the wall system fit together, (lapped) as well as column spacing of 3'-9" (p. 79). We can estimate floor to floor height from p. 113, where the 103rd floor is indicated at 1254 feet above ground level. There is also a floor plan, clearly showing interior columns in the trade center (and the book was published in 1999, so conspiracy theorists beware, I've seen some theories on the Internet that claimed there were no interior columns in the building, well, there goes the credibility of that conspiracy theory.).
   
   If you are looking for information on the mechanical systems, Chapter seven discusses them in some detail, much more than "Divided we stand's" section on the Physical Plant, which discussed instead a tenant survey! Chapter seven also includes a quite interesting side note about how the freight elevators would shut down in high winds (p.207), making garbage removal a challenge.
   
   Lastly, there is a tidbit about how the Empire State Building at 1,432 feet sways 3" in the wind. (p. 80). That's about H/5800, which seems very stiff compared to more contemporary construction, but it might be right, the Empire State Building is a different structural system and a different material, and based on comments in other books, it has masonry fire stairs that will also stiffen the structure.
   
   My only question now is: Is our window washer Camaj Roko or Roko Camaj? (Read "102 minutes" for more on that, where he also appears, with his names reversed, so which one is correct?)



2. This book was written in 1999 as pressure was mounting for the Port Authority to turn the WTC over to a private agency. The book was reissued shortly after September 11 as the only scholarly history of the WTC. It's a fascinating study of political pressures and engineering feats.

   It's impossible to discuss the World Trade Center Towers without first understanding the New York/New Jersey Port Authority. Conceptually, it was unique when it was created in 1921. Authorities - quasi-governmental agencies that were authorized to build projects and then levy user fees to pay for them - had a long and well-established history in England. What made this new authority unique in 1921, when it was created to build the Holland Tunnel, was that it was granted a charter to build facilities, i.e., multiple projects.

   The idea for the WTC was conceived during a period of relentless optimism [Kenney] but "completed during a period of national gloom and retreat [Vietnam, 1970's, and Nixon's collapse.]" There were political aspects, aside from the desire to build the world's tallest building, and there was always the pressure from New Jersey to reduce bridge and tunnel tolls. A new project that would use these surplus funds would help to relieve that pressure. It was a project that was lauded by the critics at first, then reviled, only to be resurrected in the minds of New Yorkers, but never as an architectural triumph. It had the misfortune to fall between two architectural periods: International Style, with massive amounts of glass, and Postmodern, which represented a return to the more colorful and decorative building facades. Its Japanese architect, Minoru Yamasaki, used unique aluminum curtain walls that had been dyed to reflect light in unusual ways. The floor-to-ceiling windows were smaller, about the width of a large man, and set back from the curtain. This reduced heating and cooling expenses and eliminated the sense of vertigo that plagued other skyscrapers that had office space right up to the edge of the window, a more floor-efficient design. Yamasaki went through eighty iterations of the design, sometimes using three or four towers, but eventually settling on two. The spacing between them became critical because if placed too close together the winds sweeping down could create sympathetic vibrations in the buildings, destroying their integrity, i.e., a euphemism for causing them to fall down.

   The engineering was incredible, and the building could not have been built without technologies developed in other countries. The "Kangaroo" cranes that hoisted themselves up the elevator shafts were developed in Australia. Nothing like them was available in the United States. They were needed to raise the very heavy steel columns that were the load- bearing walls, another unique design feature of the buildings, and the floors. It was initially thought that only U.S. Steel or Bethlehem Steel, the two largest steel companies in the United States, would be able to supply the enormous quantity of steel needed - the drawings for the steel construction weighed over 650 pounds - and Andrew Tobin, the Port Authority's director, thought that by involving them early in the design stage he would get a reasonable bid from them. Not so, and Tobin was so angry with their overbidding, which bore suspicions of collusion - a later investigation revealed no evidence of that - that he contracted portions of the steel to smaller companies, thereby saving over 30% of the anticipated costs. Going to different companies and subcontracting and bidding for smaller lots was to become the industry standard because of the cost savings.

   Because the building was so close to the river and excavation for the huge buildings had to go deep down to hit bedrock (enough soil and material was excavated to create Battery Park, an eighteen-acre site that extended Manhattan Island an extra 700 feet into the river and creating additional real estate worth [$]), some method to keep the water out was needed that would not affect the adjacent structures. A slurry method imported from Italy permitted concrete and steel reinforcement for the huge "bathtub" that kept the water out. Slurry containing betonite clay was pumped in as the trenches were dug and then pumped out as concrete and rebar were placed to create the final walls.

   The effect of sway on humans had to be tested. The buildings had to be flexible; any degree of stiffness could be built in, but it could not be changed after the building was complete. At its top the Empire State Building sways three inches in a one hundred-mile-per-hour wind. Swaying rooms were built to test people's reactions. Psychologists found that people would tolerate up to eleven inches of slow sway. That represented winds of 140 miles per hour, wind speeds that had never occurred in New York. The building was designed to withstand much higher gusts than that.

   Wind can cause other problems. On a gusty day, the buildings twisted and moved so much that the freight elevators could not be used. They were the only elevators to go all the way to the top - all the others had shorter runs to assorted lobbies where commuters changed cars - and the 1350-foot cables would slap around too much. Everything had to be inspected daily. The elevators made 450,000 "movements" (one person on one trip) per day.

   The Port Authority has its own police force, and forty-two officers were assigned to the WTC buildings. It is a unique force in that the officers have bi-state authority, the only police force in the country to have such authority. In fact, their jurisdiction lies in a circle with a twenty-five mile radius from the Statue of Liberty.

   It's impossible to recount all the riveting (not a pun, since no rivets were used) details of the gargantuan buildings. It's a fascinating story of a building, and, aside from the enormous human tragedies of September 11, it was a great engineering loss as well.




3. This book gives a inside view of the birth and the death of the World Trade Center. It shows how the rush to construct this late edifice led to many defects that were exposed on 9-11-01.



4. Let's be honest. If September 11, 2001 doesn't happen, this is a two-dollar steal at a Kiwanis Club book sale. But now, Mr. Gillespie has given us a nicely written obituary of a monument to urban America. Pre-9/11, I wouldn't have given this book a second look. Now, I'd recommend it as a necessary part of any person's library.



5. This book describes what went into the desigin, planning and construction of the World Trade Centers. If you like to find out what goes on behind the sceens to make things happen, get this book and remenber a great land mark.