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This article in the Guardian reminds us that World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki also designed the Pruitt-Igoe towers, a public housing project that was so unpopular it was imploded on national TV in 1972. For architect and theorist Charles Jencks, the Pruitt-Igoe tear-down was a turning point in architectural history, signaling the end of deterministic, Cartesian Modernism and the beginning of postmodern eclecticism. The article describes the WTC towers as "respected rather that loved," but even that seems generous. The towers were hideously banal; the only thing they had going for them was intimidating scale.
On the sheer, perverse un-naturalness of skyscrapers, J. G. Ballard's mid '70s novel High Rise comes to mind. Ballard envisions attacks not from without but within, as war breaks out among the upper and lower strata of an enormous, sealed-in, glass-and-concrete residential building. Instead of office-workers racing to the lower floors, the book describes a violent quest by lower-floor residents to reach, and conquer, the top of the building, where the elite-of-the-elite dwell. The book is a dark, Lord of the Flies-type parable, rather than a tale of camaraderie and heroism such as we've seen in the aftermath of the WTC disaster, but the point is it's hard to think about huge, hermetic, man-made structures without thinking about related cataclysmic scenarios. Big buildings are a real estate necessity in super-dense NY, but no one should be romanticizing (or vowing to rebuild) Yamasaki's twin follies.