Architecture as eternal delight: reflections on the attack of the World Trade Center

According to Manhattan architect Laurie Kerr,

Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca's courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city's bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square tower-minarets. . . . Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites--[with] the Qa'ba [a cube] containing the sacred stone....

At the base of the towers, Yamasaki used implied pointed arches--derived from the characteristically pointed arches of Islam... Above soared the pure geometry of the towers, swathed in a shimmering skin, which doubled as a structural web--a giant truss. Here Yamasaki was following the Islamic tradition of wrapping a powerful geometric form in dense filigree....

The shimmering filigree is the mark of the holy. According to Oleg Grabar, the great American scholar of Islamic art and architecture, the dense filigree of complex geometries alludes to a higher spiritual reality in Islam, and the shimmering quality of Islamic patterning relates to the veil that wraps the Qa'ba at Mecca. After the attack, Grabar spoke of how these towers related to the architecture of Islam, where "the entire surface is meaningful" and "every part is both construction and ornament." (16)

Based on the above analysis, Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta's hatred for the West can be said to include an abhorrence for modern architecture and its disrespect for traditional design. Additional support for this claim is an essay about hatred of the West by scholar Avishai Margalit and writer Ian Buruma. They explain that "Occidentalism, which played such a large part in the attacks of September 11," invariably involves "a deep hatred of the city." Margalit and Buruma argue that the presence of the modern city is constantly felt even in remote areas of the Islamic world through

advertising, television, pop music, and videos. The modem city, representing all that shimmers just out of reach, all the glittering arrogance and harlotry of the West, has found its icon in the Manhattan skyline, reproduced in millions of posters, photographs, and images, plastered all over the world. You cannot escape it....It excites longing, envy, and sometimes blinding rage. (17)

Clearly, one critical deficiency of modern architecture is an understanding of human nature within societies where spiritual leaders govern. These societies use an architectural language in which religion, rather than aesthetic or legal norms, regulates the significance of building forms and details. It is entirely possible that the modern insensitive replication of meaningful religious architectural and urban design contributed to the hatred that fueled the desire to attack the World Trade Towers.

Reducing the Nature of Materials by Quantifying the Physical World

In the weeks and months since the fall of the buildings, the process of grieving has been marred by serious questions about the culpability of the building materials, structural system, and floor layout of the two monoliths.