The Lost Twin: The Lone, Shrunken World Trade Center Tower in Oklahoma

As you drive along a curve on Interstate 244, the skyline of Tulsa is visible through the windshield, with the lollipop trees forming the outskirts of the city.

This view of Tulsa looks like a storage yard with a variety of twentieth-century structures, one of which is particularly recognizable.

The Bank of Oklahoma (BOk) Tower is strikingly similar to a shrunken World Trade Center tower, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the same architect of the Twin Towers.

The BOk Tower was built as part of an urban renewal project in 1976 called the Williams Center, which was modeled after the World Trade Center.

The BOk Tower sits at the end of South Boston Street, an address that pays tribute to Tulsa’s nickname as the “Oil Capital of the World” by naming its streets after other cities in alphabetical order, such as Rockford, St. Louis, Trenton, and Utica.

Yamasaki revived the concept of a Twin Tower but at a much smaller scale for the BOk building, which is 52 stories and 667 feet tall as compared to the former’s 110 floors (1,362 and 1,368 feet).

It has 31 steel perimeter columns on each side, which produces a similar visual effect of vertical lines on either face, much like the Twin Towers.

Additionally, the BOk has a two-storey lobby, with arched windows that are much bigger and rounder than the Venetian Gothic ogees that were featured in the World Trade Center.

As Jean Baudrillard commented on the Twin Tower’s design, it did not have a particular side that presented a facade.

It is astonishing to me that the Tulsa tower, as a remnant of the World Trade Center, is not more widely recognized. I did not find out about the connection until a couple of years ago, although I grew up in Tulsa.

Even as a child, when I was captivated by tall structures, I never noticed the similarity. To me, these were simply what large edifices looked like.

Yamasaki designed a two-building plan, each only 25 stories tall, for the Williams Center. John Williams, the corporate leader who aimed to reinvigorate downtown Tulsa, allegedly modified the plan by taking Yamasaki’s model and putting one structure on top of the other.

The outcome was a single building that does not qualify as a “third twin” because, by itself, it does not have the duality that Baudrillard saw as the only genuine quality of the World Trade Center.

However, it is a representation of that attribute, a tower replicated yet again, downsized and ordered as if from an inventory of urban design, in interchangeable pieces to be modified and constructed.

Tulsa’s tower, in both form and function, serves as a monument to commercial real estate and ambitions of reviving downtowns. It appears to have encapsulated Tulsa’s, creating a renowned landmark rarely seen close up, except by those travelling daily to their jobs within.

To the majority of its global audience, the World Trade Center’s slim silhouette, either in the distance or a picture, is all they can recall firsthand.

Eventually, the gap in lower Manhattan that can still be filled by this thin image will be filled by a new sight, which will speed up the memory’s fading.

However, Yamasaki’s building in Tulsa, which is hidden in plain sight, stands as another representation of the vanished towers.

Even incomplete, it remains standing. As time passes, this tower has taken on a surprising value as the event that made the World Trade Center so special is moved further away.

— Jonathan Taylor

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