Bridge and Tunnel Club Blog Home
Bridge and Tunnel Club Blog

Freedom Tower Mockup Passes Extreme Tests

Of course you can’t fly a plane into it during a test, but that probably won’t ever happen again:

One World Trade Center has not yet emerged from below ground, but its facade has already survived earthquakes, hurricanes and an explosion that shook the earth a quarter-mile away.

In recent months, two full-size mock-ups of a few floors of the glass and aluminum facade have been built and tested. One is outside Los Angeles, in Ontario, Calif. The other was at a site in central New Mexico that can be reached only over dirt roads in four-wheel-drive vehicles.

At 1,368 feet, with 23 acres of glass-clad surface area, 1 World Trade Center will be subject to tremendous natural forces. The building, also known as the Freedom Tower (at a symbolic 1,776 feet, when its mast is counted), will be the tallest in New York City and as the skyscraping phoenix on the site of ground zero, it may be the target of terrorist attacks, too.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is building 1 World Trade Center, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which designed it, said both mock-ups performed well. The facade, called a curtain wall, is being made by Benson Industries of Portland, Ore. The engineering firm Weidlinger Associates is the consultant in blast-resistant design.

“Physical testing is a confirmation that curtain-wall contractors are in fact meeting performance requirements,” said Carl Galioto, a Skidmore partner. “Full fabrication of the curtain wall cannot begin until the mock-up specimen passes these tests.”

. . .

The first mock-up was subjected to a blast test in Socorro, N.M., at the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center, a division of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Because details might arm a prospective attacker — providing information like how much force the curtain wall is designed to withstand — officials would say almost nothing about the test of this mock-up.

“The simple answer is, yes, it passed,” said John McCullough, the project executive for the Port Authority.

Posted: April 9th, 2008 | Filed under: Architecture & Infrastructure, Need To Know
All Press Is Good Press . . . And All English Press Is Totally Irrelevant, So Muckrake Away, Sucker! »
« If I Give You Two Dollars And Get Back Three Dollars . . .

Recent Posts

  • “Friends And Allies Literally Roll Their Eyes When They Hear The New York City Mayor Is Trying To Go National Again”
  • You Don’t Achieve All Those Things Without Managing The Hell Out Of The Situation
  • “Less Than Six Months After Bill De Blasio Became Mayor Of New York City, A Campaign Donor Buttonholed Him At An Event In Manhattan”
  • Nothing Hamburger
  • On Cheap Symbolism

Categories

Bookmarks

  • 1010 WINS
  • 7online.com (WABC 7)
  • AM New York
  • Aramica
  • Bronx Times Reporter
  • Brooklyn Eagle
  • Brooklyn View
  • Canarsie Courier
  • Catholic New York
  • Chelsea Now
  • City Hall News
  • City Limits
  • Columbia Spectator
  • Courier-Life Publications
  • CW11 New York (WPIX 11)
  • Downtown Express
  • Gay City News
  • Gotham Gazette
  • Haitian Times
  • Highbridge Horizon
  • Inner City Press
  • Metro New York
  • Mount Hope Monitor
  • My 9 (WWOR 9)
  • MyFox New York (WNYW 5)
  • New York Amsterdam News
  • New York Beacon
  • New York Carib News
  • New York Daily News
  • New York Magazine
  • New York Observer
  • New York Post
  • New York Press
  • New York Sun
  • New York Times City Room
  • New Yorker
  • Newsday
  • Norwood News
  • NY1
  • NY1 In The Papers
  • Our Time Press
  • Pat’s Papers
  • Queens Chronicle
  • Queens Courier
  • Queens Gazette
  • Queens Ledger
  • Queens Tribune
  • Riverdale Press
  • SoHo Journal
  • Southeast Queens Press
  • Staten Island Advance
  • The Blue and White (Columbia)
  • The Brooklyn Paper
  • The Columbia Journalist
  • The Commentator (Yeshiva University)
  • The Excelsior (Brooklyn College)
  • The Graduate Voice (Baruch College)
  • The Greenwich Village Gazette
  • The Hunter Word
  • The Jewish Daily Forward
  • The Jewish Week
  • The Knight News (Queens College)
  • The New York Blade
  • The New York Times
  • The Pace Press
  • The Ticker (Baruch College)
  • The Torch (St. John’s University)
  • The Tribeca Trib
  • The Villager
  • The Wave of Long Island
  • Thirteen/WNET
  • ThriveNYC
  • Time Out New York
  • Times Ledger
  • Times Newsweekly of Queens and Brooklyn
  • Village Voice
  • Washington Square News
  • WCBS880
  • WCBSTV.com (WCBS 2)
  • WNBC 4
  • WNYC
  • Yeshiva University Observer

Archives

RSS Feed

  • Bridge and Tunnel Club Blog RSS Feed

@batclub

Tweets by @batclub

Contact

  • Back To Bridge and Tunnel Club Home
    info -at- bridgeandtunnelclub.com

BATC Main Page

  • Bridge and Tunnel Club

2025 | Bridge and Tunnel Club Blog