World Technology Center

A lot is happening behind the scenes...
Since the publication of our report at at the end of August, we have been been busy bringing and communicating the World Technology Center to life. Our team are implementing new and updated chapters for our documentary, and thus the revised script is currently being narrated by Haru Morioka.
In parallel, we're rendering the campus in a more advanced architectural software package that will include the various labs, cleanrooms, education classrooms, library, the mall, residences, offices, and the atriums. In addition: nighttime views and axonometric drawings/graphics will be included, and especially in our Press Kit. Our team also working through our first CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulations.

We originally said sometime in September. Once the report was out, we knew the documentary and press kit could be a lot more, so we're giving them the time to get to the high standard the initiative deserves.

Therefore, release is now planned for Q4 2026.

Read the full update:

An Update on our Documentary and Press Kit At the end of August we published the First Edition of our contextual report, America's Twin Towers: History, Legacy, and the Case for Renewal. It is the most complete account of the World Technology Center to date. It sets out the project's vision, its principles, its economic case, and the phased....

Today is International Day of Peace 🕊️ We are returning to the idea at the root of our project.

In his statement on the original World Trade Center, Minoru Yamasaki called the relation of world trade to world peace "paramount in importance." He hoped the complex would become a living symbol of dedication to peace. In a less-quoted passage, he also hoped it would advance the art of building itself.

The World Technology Center carries that conviction into a new century. The original gathered nations around trade. Our proposed twin-tower campus on Chicago's Near West Side would gather them around science, through shared laboratories, international collaboration, and paid apprenticeship pathways into frontier research.

The United Nations' theme for this year, Invest in Peace, honors the "everyday architects of peace." We believe laboratories, lecture halls, and public plazas are some of the best places to find them.

Read the full reflection:

The Architecture of Peace On the International Day of Peace, we return to Minoru Yamasaki's founding conviction and to the new purpose that carries it forward. Raphael J. Chryslar, founder and chief designer of the initiative delivers these remarks:"Ten days ago, the world marked twenty-five years since the morning the Twin....

— Meet our team —

Behind every drawing, every page of the report and every frame of the documentary is a small group of people spread across four countries who believed this is worth doing. We are a non-profit philanthropic-driven initiative, a growing network of professional collaborators in industry and academia from around the world.

Raphael J. Chryslar - Founder, Chief Designer and Project Lead.

A UK-based aerospace engineer with a neurodivergent mindset. In 2026, he earned his Master of Engineering with 1st Class Honors at the University of Hertfordshire and is working as a successful AIT engineer (Assembly, Integration and Testing) in the spacecraft manufacturing industry. Chryslar possesses years of diverse and articulate skills in Computer-aided design (CAD) packages in CATIA V5, AutoCAD, and SketchUp. He demonstrates auto-didacticism (self learning) and hyper-focus in bridging his knowledge from aerospace and systematic thinking into the discipline of architecture, which presently includes self-directed learning in BIM (building information modelling) and networking. His lifelong interest in the Twin Tower silhouette stems from childhood and his deep-fascination in engineering and industrial history. Chryslar is also a steel mill enthusiast, industrial photographer, STEM author, educator, and an artist in fine art, drawing and graphic design.

Haru Morioka — Deputy Designer

Recently promoted, and twice awarded the Award of Excellence in architecture for two projects rooted in his own community in Japan — "Tokyo Vertical — Marine & Sky" and the "Akita Heritage Center." He founded his own design studio, Ohm Studios, and once served as an Ambassador at the Hiroshima Junior International Forum. As a senior student of the Makuhari Junior and Senior High School, he helps in the design of the campus buildings and nature landscape, handles our graphics and media, and is the voice of our upcoming documentary.

Kenneth Gardner — Structural Engineering & Design Guidance

The reason this initiative exists. A structural engineer from New Jersey who worked at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the 1980s, and who in 2005 presented Twin Towers II alongside Herbert Belton — a supporting architect who had worked on the original World Trade Center. He joined us five months ago and has shaped our thinking ever since.

Darcellus L. Wrice — Financial Strategy & Risk Advisor

Founder and CEO of Wrice Financial Group in Chicago. Since joining the team in the late spring, Wrice provides support and collaboration in outlining and refining the financial and economic mission of the vision. His work ensures that our economic framework, reports, our proposition and strategic planning are honest and grounded.

Ngosa Ngosa — Supporting Structural Engineer

An aerospace engineer who runs the structural FEA and damping analyses, as well as wind studies, ensuring that the structural design can handle the loads subjected to them.

Taffazal Subhani — Engineering Specialist

A façade engineer working on fire suppression and building physics, including transparent solar panels built into every window of the towers.

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Our wider supporting network consists of individuals from industry, architecture, legal profession and academia - whose encouragement and advice (whether substantial or in passing) have strengthened this initiative immensely.

Our official contextual report is now available to read on ResearchGate and Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22554648

Learn more at www.worldtechcenter.org

Sidenote: Contrary to many popular accounts and earlier third-party media, the project is not a data center.

On this day of national mourning and remembrance, our team leader delivers this message:

“Twenty-five years ago this morning, 2,977 people went to work, boarded a plane, or answered a call for help, and did not come home.

We remember them today. The passengers and crews of four flights.
The workers in the North and South Towers, at the Pentagon, and the men and women whose resistance ended a fourth aircraft in a Pennsylvania field. The firefighters, police officers, and paramedics who climbed while everyone else descended. And the families who have carried every day of the quarter-century since - for whom this is not an anniversary but a Friday, and a birthday missed, and a chair that has been empty.

There is now a generation of engineers and students old enough to join this profession who have no memory of that morning. They know it as history. That is exactly why it must be spoken about carefully, and often, and by people who are willing to say plainly what was lost: not only lives, though that first and above all - but a silhouette, a skyline, and the confidence of a country that had built the tallest thing in the world and assumed it would always stand.

The World Technology Center does not build in New York, and it is not a memorial. That ground is hallowed, and what stands there now is theirs to keep. What we propose in Chicago is something different: a working campus of laboratories, workshops, classrooms, and public space, carrying a silhouette the world already recognizes, given over entirely to discovery. A spiritual successor, not a reconstruction. We chose that form because architecture carries meaning, and because the most complete answer to an act of destruction is not a replica of what was destroyed, but proof that the ambition behind it survived.

When the towers stand, September 11 shall be observed on this
campus as it should be. The flag at the spire will be lowered to half-staff, and the exterior lighting lowered with it, to the level of mourning. The campus will close to all but essential personnel. No lectures, no laboratories, no business. One day each year, the work stops, and the buildings speak only in the language of remembrance. On the anniversaries of great achievement, the light rises again.

That is the whole argument of this project, written in a single day of the calendar: that a nation can grieve honestly and build anyway. That the two are not in tension. That the reaching spire and the lowered flag belong to the same building.

To the families, the survivors, and the first responders - including those who have died in the years since from what they breathed on that pile - we hold you in our thoughts today, and we take our instructions from you about how this memory is handled.

We shall never forget. We shall rise again.”

Raphael J. Chryslar

Narrated by Josh Porter, our official showcase video describes in brief detail the World Technology Center, a proposed mega-project in Chicago conceived as a vertical national laboratory campus for science and technology, education and public inspiration. It would serve as the United States’ national instrument for STEM discovery, education, and technological prosperity. Its architectural significance are Twin Towers that carry forward the iconic silhouette of the legacy, which were considered to be one of America’s most emblematic skyscrapers in the second-half of the 20th Century.

Not a conventional real-estate development project, the World Tech Center would be a mixed-use civic and scientific undertaking conceived for the mutual benefit of the public and private sectors alike — a place where universities, established companies, start-ups, national laboratories, and government authorities could work side by side; where dedicated workshop space brings regulators and researchers into daily contact; and where success is measured in scientific capability, education, employment, and inspiration rather than rentable square footage. Equipped with state-of-the-art laboratory, residential, educational and workspace facilities in a wide variety of disciplines, it would be a major hub to facilitate all of the above in a vastly efficient environment.

Its mission answers four national needs: the decline in long-horizon civic ambition, the fragmentation of the American STEM ecosystem, the over-concentration of innovation in a handful of coastal regions, and the estrangement of the public from the science that shapes its future.

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A Legacy Carried Forward

No aspect of the project has been weighed more carefully than the ethics of restoring a form so bound up with national sorrow. The proposal honors both convictions that emerged after September 11, 2001: the longing of many — including many bereaved families — to see the towers rise again, and the equally sincere conviction that the ground where they stood must remain a place of rest.

By raising the silhouette anew in a different city, the project keeps faith with both: the hallowed footprints at Ground Zero remain undisturbed as the memorial they have rightly become, while the towers' spirit is given a new and constructive life as a spiritual successor devoted to discovery.

This initiative from its roots have gathered roughly ten thousand signatures of support, including from some family members of 9/11 victims, and it carries forward Minoru Yamasaki's founding conviction that such a structure should stand as a living symbol of peace, cooperation, and human dignity.

Technology is defined as "the application of scientific knowledge to solve problems."

It deals with the creating and use of technical means and their interrelation with life, society, and the environment, drawing upon such subjects as industrial arts, engineering, applied science, and pure science.

The World Technology Center — Official Showcase Video Narrated by Josh Porter, our official showcase video describes in b...

📘IT'S FINALLY HERE 📖

After many weeks of cross-checking, review and re-edit, today we are pleased to announce that our first edition of our contextual report: America's Twin Towers: History, Legacy, and the Case for Renewal — the full report behind our initiative - has been published on our website.

Read here:https://www.worldtechcenter.org/_files/ugd/5fde37_aa149fe7973e481fb8acaa0801867da3.pdf

The report underscores the roots behind our initiative: the story of the original Twin Towers and the people who built them, the long civic campaign to see them rise again, and our case for why the silhouette should rise again — this time devoted to science and technology.

Our documentary and press kit will follow (tentatively) on or around September 7th-14th.

Contextual Report Update – Final Review Underway

A message from our founder Raphael Chryslar

"Over the past few weeks we've made significant progress on the World Technology Center's contextual report and accompanying media materials. Alongside this work, we've also released recent YouTube videos on July 4th and 20th to commemorate the America250 birthday and Apollo 11 anniversary, respectively.

Following a substantial round of revisions, the report has now entered its final review stage.

To ensure the highest possible quality and accuracy, co-authors have requested a little additional time to review the latest edits before publication. As a result, our release schedule has shifted slightly into the first weeks of August.

While this means a second delay, we're committed to releasing work that has been carefully reviewed and meets the high standards we set for ourselves. I believe it's worth taking the extra time to ensure every section is as accurate, clear, and professional as possible. As this initiative is continuous and evolving (with further publications, contributions and updates expected our team grows in the coming months and years), our report shall be released as a first edition in August 2026.

Thank you all for your continued patience and support throughout this unique journey. On behalf of our team we look forward to making our official publications in the first weeks of the month."

Read on our website:

Contextual Report Update – Final Review Underway A message from our founder "Over the past few weeks we've made significant progress on the World Technology Center's contextual report and accompanying media materials. Alongside this work, we've also released recent YouTube videos on July 4th and 20th to commemorate the America250 birthday and Apol...

“𝙆𝙣𝙤𝙬𝙡𝙚𝙙𝙜𝙚 𝙞𝙨 𝙛𝙪𝙣𝙙𝙖𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙡 𝙩𝙤 𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙝𝙪𝙢𝙖𝙣 𝙖𝙘𝙝𝙞𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙨 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙜𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙨.
𝙄𝙩 𝙞𝙨 𝙗𝙤𝙩𝙝 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙠𝙚𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙖𝙙𝙫𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙚𝙨 𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙠𝙞𝙣𝙙.
𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙘𝙝 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙠𝙣𝙤𝙬𝙡𝙚𝙙𝙜𝙚 𝙞𝙨 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙗𝙧𝙤𝙪𝙜𝙝𝙩 𝙢𝙚𝙣 𝙩𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙢𝙤𝙤𝙣; 𝙗𝙪𝙩 𝙞𝙩 𝙩𝙤𝙤𝙠 𝙠𝙣𝙤𝙬𝙡𝙚𝙙𝙜𝙚 𝙖𝙡𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙮 𝙖𝙘𝙦𝙪𝙞𝙧𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙤 𝙢𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙞𝙩 𝙥𝙤𝙨𝙨𝙞𝙗𝙡𝙚 𝙩𝙤 𝙜𝙚𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚.” - 𝙉𝙚𝙞𝙡 𝘼. 𝘼𝙧𝙢𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙤𝙣𝙜

On July 20th 1969, humans first landed on the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission. To symbolize that historic achievement, the Science South Tower's spire of the World Technology Center will rise to 1,969 feet (600.15 m).

The building complements its twin as the campus' hub for general scientific research, cleanroom laboratories, and art and design workshops. The tower will honor John F. Kennedy, whose commitment to tasking the nation of achieving a crewed lunar landing by the end of the 1960s — and that charge be the United States chooses to do such things "not because they are easy, but because they are hard". This remains the defining modern statement of public scientific ambition. As a nexus for discovery and innovation, the building would provide lecture and meeting rooms for teaching and networking, alongside general sciences laboratories, cleanrooms, and offices for prestigious national and international institutions. Candidate tenants identified during concept development include the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), Purdue University, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Iron and Steel Institute, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, and the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS).

From this spire the largest waving flag of the United States would be flown - raised tall as a standing symbol of American leadership in exploration and discovery and lowered to half-mast on days of national observance and mourning. The second is the Wonders of the World restaurant, a large dining venue on the 107th floor conceived as a reincarnation of Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the original World Trade Center. In combination, the two towers express the project's central metaphor: science and technology as equal partners, standing side by side.

https://youtu.be/tdGrny2riNU?is=bWX3qXm_zeJF7uIw

1969 feet On this day in 1969, humans first landed on the Moon during the Apo...

Happy 250th, America! 🇺🇸
Our introductory showcase video about our vision has been published.

America's Twin Towers - the Vision of the World Technology Center (Introductory video) Official short introductory video of the proposed World Technology ...

Founder and project lead Raphael J. Chryslar has a brief but important update regarding our upcoming media publications.

"I am happy to announce that our comprehensive report "America's Twin Towers: History, Legacy and the Case for Renewal" has been completed in its written form and is now in the final cross-review and sign-off with co-authors (including Ken Gardner) and our wider network. As mentioned previously, it is a 100+ page document that contains extensive literature review, technical work, and various discussions to a high standard. Supplemental material within includes renders and diagrams.

On behalf of our team I have made an important decision. In my statement on Fox 32 News back in May, I mentioned to release the materials on July 1st, which was aimed to join the observations of America 250 (the semi-quincentennial). However, since my interview there have been several delays that were not anticipated. Rather than rushing the release during a crowded holiday week, we are prioritizing accuracy, quality, and a professional standard worthy of the scale of the proposal.

On the 4th of July, we will publish an official short video showcase on our YouTube channel: featuring a first look at the towers, the campus, and the vision behind them. Consider it the opening note.

The full report and press kit will follow in mid-July, in the days around the Apollo 11 anniversaries. For a project rooted in engineering, ambition, and the long arc of human achievement, I feel that there is no more fitting window to present it in full.

We are not in a hurry. We are doing this right.

Thank you to everyone who has followed the project so far. Your patience and support are greatly appreciated."

— Raphael Chryslar

Read on our blog:

A message from our team lead Founder and project lead Raphael J. Chryslar has a brief but important update regarding our upcoming media publications.I am happy to announce that our comprehensive report "America's Twin Towers: History, Legacy and the Case for Renewal" has been completed in its written form and is now in the fina...