SAN GIMIGNANO STORY
The World Trade Center didn’t start out as a Twin Tower design. It was the World Trade Center: a complex of office space, public space, retail space, and a major transportation hub. There were many dictates that Yamasaki was tasked with. One of them was that The World Trade Center also had to be the tallest building in the world.
While Yamasaki was exploring design ideas for the structure of the World Trade Center, he visited Tuscany, Italy. The Tuscan countryside is home to numerous small hill towns that at one time, around the thirteenth century (long before Italy became a unified nation) were their own small kingdoms. And each had fortifications and towers for protection and glory. San Gimignano is one such town and especially resplendent with towers. It was here that Minoru Yamasaki was inspired to design twin towers for the World Trade Center.
San Gimignano, Italy
I’d like to think that this point of view gave Minoru Yamasaki his inspiration. It’s uncanny, is it not? I visited San Gimignano and walked the streets hoping to find locations with “twin tower” views that might have been that inspiration. When I turned this corner and saw this view I was delighted beyond words! Here are two (almost) identical towers, offset, very simple but with a very powerful presence. With his inspiration, Yamasaki decided the main feature of the World Trade Center would be two towers, not one; twins, and they would be the tallest buildings in the world!
In thirteenth-century San Gimignano, wealthy merchant families were in competition and conflict. Often a family would build a tower beside their townhouse to demonstrate their prominence and success. The taller the better. But in 1255 the town government, fearing public danger from collapsing towers, forbade tower construction taller than the city administration’s tower Rognosa, 167 feet. Today 16 of the 72 original towers are standing.
To display their wealth and circumvent the law, the Ardinghelli and the Salvucci families both constructed two towers instead of one beside their respective townhouses. Here is the Salvucci townhouse, and you can see how the footprint of the shorter Salvucci tower on the left was designed to be the same dimension as the top of the taller Salvucci tower on the right. When visually stacked their combined height was taller than any existing single tower! An early expression of conceptual art?
The Salvucci towers can be viewed from several street perspectives that reveal how they were Minoru Yamasaki’s inspiration for his World Trade Center’s Twin Towers design concept.