Robertson recounts role engineering Twin Towers

World-renowned structural engineer Leslie Robertson, chief engineer of the original World Trade Center in New York, spoke Wednesday about his design of the Twin Towers and said he had designed the buildings with an airplane impact in mind.

His design was sufficient to withstand the impact of the largest plane of the time, a Boeing 707, Robertson said.

But the force of impact from the larger Boeing 767 planes — first produced some 15 years after the buildings were constructed — was too much for the towers.

"All this talk of designing buildings for airplane impact is crazy," Robertson said. "I wouldn't want to live in that building. It wouldn't have any windows."

Robertson, who also served as chief engineer for the Bank of China building in Hong Kong, the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame and Robertson Hall of the Wilson School, spoke Wednesday in a broad discussion on topics ranging from pacifist politics of the 1960s to how to build a tall building.

The lecture centered around the highlights of his career and several pending projects, including the 95-story Shanghai World Financial Center, which will be one of the tallest buildings in the world when completed.

A self-described pacifist who gave the lecture wearing a peace pin, Robertson told students he had "a nontraditional education."

"In high school, I majored in shop and girls," Robertson said.

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After high school, he served in the Navy during World War II. He became a pacifist while in the service, and broadened his commitment to that political view while at the University of California at Berkeley.

"I became what you might call a radical liberal," he said.

Robertson was politically active during the McCarthy Era, and has remained so to this day. He occasionally rents buses to transport protesters to Washington, D.C., in memory of his hitchhiked trip to the city in his college days.

Though he was interested in architecture at Berkeley, a lecture by Frank Lloyd Wright, and Wright's personality, turned Robertson off architecture.

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After Berkeley, Robertson worked as a mathematician, and became interested in towers and their engineering. As a consequence, Robertson decided to become a structural engineer.

As the engineer for the World Trade Center, Robertson effectively invented a new type of building engineering that relied more on prefabrication of parts and the manufacture of steel beams than ever before in building tall structures.

Parts were manufactured in Tokyo and Pittsburgh and shipped to New York for assembly at the site.

A similar method was used for the construction of the United States Steel headquarters.

Robertson was invited to come to campus by the American Whig-Cliosophic Society as part of its speakers program.

The Robertson lecture was "part of our attempt to branch out in our speakers program to speakers with connections to politics, but not directly involved in politics," said Matt MacDonald '07, Whig-Clio president.