Skyscrapers

People come up with the idea of skyscrapers as soon as several years before our century. That took place in Chicago but skyscrapers flourished in Manhattan, New York. Their rise was possible, first of all, thank to the skeleton construction and, the second thing, due to the safe elevator constructed by Elisha Otis, making moving around the building fast and comfortable.

EMPIRE STATE BUILDING
Empire State Building is an office building in New York City. It is situated in the Manhattan at number 350. Empire State Building is one of the famous and well-known buildings in the world. This office building is still the symbol of nervousness splendour and the specific quality of being irresistible. Everybody has always thought of it as of the highest construction in the world and although there are higher ones nowadays, it is still considered to be the leading one.
Numbers referring to it are also impressive: the 102 – stored building is 381 meters high, its total height comes up to 49 meters, with the TV aerial at the top. The buildings is situated in the Fifth Avenue and takes the area of 8 hectares. It weighs 331 thousand tones but its foundations are only two stores deep. It is supported by steel girders which weight over 54 thousand tones. Empire State Building is based on steel construction joined with rivets. 10 million bricks were use to put it up and the total length of the electric wires equals 629 kilometres. Summing up, the surface of all the windows comes up to 2 hectares. The stairs include 1860 steps. Once a year there is a competition in climbing the stairs organised. The shortest time ever recorded is 20 minutes. There are enough office rooms for 15 thousand workers and lifts can take about 10 thousand people per hour.
The authors of the whole project were Shreve, Harmon and Lamb, and it is also claimed that the total amount of money devoted to it came up to 41 million dollars. The building was being erected unbelievably fast. It was 4.5 floor higher every week and in the period of an extreme intensification of work there were 14.5 floors added in days.

The office building was opened on the 1st of May 1931, after 410 days of putting it up. Empire State Building was built in the elegant style of Art Deco. Inside the building there is a 3-floors high and 30 metres long hall. It was decorated with pieces of art presenting seven miracles of the world and the eighth one – Empire State Building itself.
For many years Empire State Building had been the highest building in the world. And despite the fact that there are lots of higher constructions today, still remains the symbol of New York City.

WORLD TRADE CENTER
Its building was started in 1966 and it was opened for the public on the 6th of March 1973.
The World Trade Center includes 7 buildings among which two twin towers are the most famous. The second tower is 415.22 metres high and the top point of the aerial of the first tower is placed at the height of 521.2 metres. So it is 46 metres higher than the aerial of the Sears Tower. Both towers are 110 floor high and include 406 thousand square metres of surface used. Each of them has 99 lifts and 43600 windows containing 182880 m2 of glass. 50 thousand people work there in various companies and organisations. Over 70 thousand tourists visit the place every day. On 107th floor in the second tower there is fine, you can have the view reaching 45 miles all around. The complete surface of all the 7 buildings equals 1114800 square metres. The height of the higher tower had been a record for four years.

CHRYSLER BUILDING
This building achieved a success with the power of progress. It was rised by William van Allen for Walter Chrysler. At the same time his former co-worker was putting up the Bank of Manhattan in Wall Street. Von Allen put it up height of 282 metres and stopped working. His rival rised the roof of his skyscraper 0.5 metre up and declared breaking the record but the clever von Allen put up the spire, which had been prepared earlier and kept top secret. Thanks to that the building reached the height of 319 metres. However, the Chrysler Building was the record holder for only several months. In 1931 Empire State Building became the new record holder and remained to be one almost to the end of the 60s.