SYMBOL

[Bill Stewart]

Sandy Wrote:
 > The question is not, "Can 250-story buildings be made safe?"
 > The only question is "How can they be made safe?"

The related question is "How can they be made economical?";
Todos Santos may have been, but it had the advantage of being fictional,
as did Gibson's nanotech-Nippon buildings that grew at night when
nobody was looking.  Unless we can get the economic systems
to support the number of people who work in a building like that,
including commuting costs from residential areas,
to balance out the benefits of working near each other,
the non-replacement of the building will be just evolution in action.

Donald Trump is a capitalist - if building his proposed
kilometer-high New Trump Tower would have made sense without
the subsidies he's been so good at talking New York into giving him,
it'd probably be built by now.  It's not.

Rebuilding it doesn't make sense, though I did enjoy the picture
that's been floating around the net of the replacement building,
four towers shaped like a hand with the middle finger extended. :-)
If it weren't for the near-infinite value of land in Manhattan,
I'd say it would be better to build your basic eternal-flame monument there.

At 09:47 AM 09/16/2001 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>The looming Bauhaus boxes of the World Trade Center never inspired me
>in the slightest way.

Agreed - the Empire State building and Chrysler Building are cool,
but the WTC was ugly, though the view from the restaurant was impressive.

(...and the John Hancock tower in Boston at least had the entertainment value
of guessing where the next glass window was going to fall off...)


>By contrast, the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis in Athens
>really _did_ inspire me. I guess this is why I like the Getty Center so much.

And the Parthenon lasted over 2000 years - it didn't turn into a ruin
until the Turks blew up the ammunition storage there in the ~1850s.

>Some years ago (mid 1960s), IBM decided to move the bulk of its
>headquarters operations _out_ of Manhattan to places like Armonk and
>Yorktown Heights, north of NYC. They found many of their execs were
>already living in those areas, and younger workers could buy actual homes
>in the suburban areas.   Likewise, my old company, Intel, decided ...

The Internet makes it possible for anybody to work from anywhere they want.
Of course, that's why everybody moved to the San Francisco Bay Area
to be near the action :-)