Special photographic effects  L.B. Abbott
Mechanical effects A.D. Flowers / Logan Frazee / Gerald Endler
Optical cinematography:  Frank Van der Veer
Matte artist: Mat Yuricich
Storyboard artists: Joseph Musso
 

Text by Joseph Musso:

Frank Van de Veer and his partner, Bill Dorney, were originally with 20th Century-Fox before it phased out its Special Effects Department. Barry Nolan did his optical photography. Matt Yuricich usually did his matte painting when necessary and available.

Besides the miniatures of the Tower and Peerless Building being composited into the San Francisco skyline, The Towering Inferno did indeed use matte paintings. They were done by Matt Yuricich. They include:
* The down shots in the stairwell shaft that Paul Newman, Jennifer Jones and the 2 children climb down it.
* The down shots in the elevator shaft that McQueen and the firemen repel down in
* The pipe shaft that Newman climbs up in.
* The Master shots of the water tank room that Newman and McQueen enter and leave to set the charges

4-story full-size sets of the stairwell were built, the elevator shafts, and 8 feet of the pipe shaft and laid a blue screen below, composited with Yuricich's mattes of the rest of the floors below to give the illusion of infinity.
There was only one water tank that was filmed at a building in Century City, near the Fox Studios (Century City was part of the Fox backlot that was sold off when Cleopatra got into financial trouble). Plastic numbers were used on the full-size tank for the inserts of Newman and McQueen setting the charges. Miniatures of the tanks were used for the explosions. Photos of Yuricich's composited matte paintings of the pipe shaft and water tank room are pictured on page 199 of L.B. Abbott's Special Effects book “wire, tape, and rubber band style”.