WTC Book.pdf

W ORLD T RADE C ENTER

The Giant that Defied the Sky

By Peter Skinner

Preface by Mike Wallace

Editorial Project

Valeria Manferto de Fabianis

Graphic Design

Patrizia Balocco Lovisetti

Contents*

Preface

by Mike Wallace : 4

Introduction : 5

Manhattan Before the Twin Towers : 11

The Twin Towers: Design and Architecture

by Giorgio Tartaro : 16

The World Trade Center in Movies and Media : 23

The New Heart of the Financial District : 28

September 11, 2001 : 34

* Note: Not all photographs for World Trade Center are integrated here. We have

included any photographs for which we have permission to print.

Preface

by Mike Wallace

The hijacked planes that zeroed in on New York and Washington with

such murderous accuracy obviously chose their targets for a reason. They

didn’t attack Los Angeles and Miami, after all. Why not? It’s reasonable to

assume that they chose cities and buildings that they believed had great

symbolic and actual potency: the respective headquarters of the military

and financial institutions whose decisions have tremendous impact

throughout the globe.

As we’ve seen from the outpouring of

support from around the world, millions

of people love and admire the United

States and its pre-eminent urban

centers.

But others hate us passionately. Not,

despite what some say, because we are

the land of the free and good, but

because the nation has embraced

policies from which they feel they’ve

suffered. Driven by calculated strategy

and suicidal fanaticism, they’ve dealt a

terrific blow to proud towers and

command centers alike.

New Yorkers are rolling with the blow

magnificently, despite the added shock

of having it come both figuratively and

literally out of the clear blue sky,

shattering our sense of invulnerability.

But that sense always rested on a truncated reading of history. While the

particular form of the attack was fiendishly novel, New York, over nearly

four centuries, has repeatedly been the object of murderous intentions.

Figure 1

Through a combination of luck and power, we have escaped many of the

intended blows, but not all

of them, and our forebears often feared that worse might yet befall them.

In recent decades, some opponents of the expanding global cultural and

economic order of which New York and Washington were seen as

headquarters, turned to terror. The resulting mayhem seldom touched

New York’s shores—the first World Trade Center attack was a notable

exception—but fantasies about urban

destruction exploded in popular culture.

The popularity of cinematic depictions of

overseas (or alien) predators wreaking

havoc on New York and Washington, with

the World Trade Center and Statue of

Liberty as attendant casualties, was perhaps

also fueled by antagonism to Big

Government and Big Corporations.

Now these fantasies have been horribly

realized—one reason that we’ve repeatedly

heard stunned witnesses exclaiming the

devastation seemed “unreal” or “just like a

movie.” This is not to say that terrorists are copycats and that Hollywood’s

to blame, but rather that cultural producers, like almost everyone else,

tend to assume that New York and Washington are the likeliest targets.

One consequence of reality having caught up to fiction might be a new

reluctance to spin such fantasies—a reissue of “Independence Day” was

just postponed—though it’s equally likely that someone is already hard at

work on a mini-series.

More hopefully, our shattered sense of invulnerability will be replaced by

a sober appreciation of the fact that, even as we mourn our casualties, take

prudent precautions to prevent similar attacks, help track down and

punish those responsible, and reconstruct our city, our generation of New

Yorkers, like those that preceded ours, has witnessed and survived a

cataclysm even worse than our imaginations had been able to conceive.

Nocturne in black and gold.

The Twin Towers are reflected in

the waters of the Hudson River.

Figure 13

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