Attn JYA
mattd
mattd at useoz.com
Fri Nov 30 22:45:43 PST 2001
"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
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