"The radical act of the terrorists opens a space for us to think radically as well," Michael Sorkin, director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at City College, writing in a special issue of the Sunday mazagine section of The New York Times that was published on 11 November 2001. One of the ironies of the spectacular destruction of the World Trade Center (WTC) on 11 September 2001 is the fact that, at the time they collapsed, the famous "Twin Towers" were obsolete and in need of being destroyed. Built for an enormous amount of money between 1966 and 1970 by the Port Authority of the State of New York, the Twin Towers were intended to house a great many foreign financial institutions and to provide everything that their managers, employees and clients might need (hotels, restaurants, shops, movie theaters, etc. etc). Despite the novelty of being the tallest buildings in the world -- a distinction that only lasted until 1976, when the Sears Tower was built in Chicago -- the Twin Towers were always money-losers as rental properties and required huge subsidies from the State of New York to remain solvent. As it turned out, visiting business men and women weren't satisfied to remain within the WTC's purportedly self-sufficient universe, and wished to venture (and shop and do business) outside of it. Because all of the windows in both towers were sealed up tight, and because neither tower was equipped to take advantage of its unique potential to generate power using the wind or solar energy, the WTC complex was ludicrously costly to heat and light. But perhaps most importantly, advances in information and telecommunication technologies decentralized the financial markets, which in turn "rolled back" the necessity for foreign institutions to be in close physical proximity to each other, Wall Street and the rest of lower Manhattan, which is precisely what the gigantic size and centralized location of the Twin Towers were intended to provide. Though this may be hard for some to believe, especially in these sentimental times, the Twin Towers were hated by many New Yorkers, who would have been happy if the goddamned things had never been built. An entire neighborhood was destroyed to make way for them. Fully twice the size of the buildings around them, they blocked the sunlight from getting through and stuck out like sore thumbs. Indeed, the Twin Towers were so excessively large that the only place one could escape them and see New York City's famous skyline without distraction was on top of one of the tower's observation decks! Their steel surfaces played havoc with radio and TV broadcasts, which meant that broadcasters were forced to move their transmitters (they had little choice but to put them atop one of the towers!). And unlike the modestly tall buildings at Rockefeller Center, which are surrounded by an "extroverted" or open space through which pedestrian traffic can move freely, the freakishly tall Twin Towers were surrounded by a blank, abstract space that was "introverted" and closed off. More inc pic at http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=98399&group=webcast