John L. Tishman,
who built sites such as Walt Disney World’s Epcot theme park and the World Trade Center towers in New York and other landmarks, has died at 90.
John Tishman, who shaped the skyline of America as the builder of conspicuous structures such as the World Trade Center towers in New York, the Epcot theme park at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., and the John Hancock Center in Chicago, and who was also an important innovator in the construction and building industry, died Saturday at his home in Bedford, N.Y.. He was 90.
A family spokesman said the cause was respiratory failure.
Like the Hancock Center that was built in the late 1960s, the twin Trade Center towers completed a few years later reached above 100 stories and were among the first buildings anywhere to attain that level.
In addition to his work as a builder, Tishman was regarded as a leader in the relatively new and specialized field of construction management. In this area, an intermediary, positioned between owner and contractor, tries to streamline the building process, to save money and foster greater efficiencies.
Tishman also has been credited with introducing a cost-saving feature of the modern workplace: the system by which lights turn on and off, seemingly without human intervention, as people move about a building.
Although he did not invent the devices that control illumination by sensing motion or body heat, or both, he helped foster their widespread use.
“We purchased a sensor system that an inventor had not previously found a use for,” Tishman wrote in “Building Tall: My Life and the Invention of Construction Management,” co-written with Tom Shachtman in 2010.
After Infracon was manufactured for his firm by others, he wrote, “We installed the new heat-and-motion sensors in buildings that we built for ourselves, particularly in the conference and meeting rooms of our hotels, and in several instances, in areas within buildings that we built for others.”
In Los Angeles, he put up Century City and, in Detroit, the Renaissance Center. In addition to skyscrapers, he was credited with New York’s Madison Square Garden, which had ample detractors for its ungainly appearance but is still regarded as one of America’s foremost sports and entertainment arenas.
Tishman was born in New York City on Jan. 24, 1926. During World War II, Tishman served as a Navy officer. He received a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Michigan in 1946 and soon joined the family’s Tishman firm.