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

Cross Currents, Fall, 2002 by Jean Gardner

Between 1985 and 1990, Atta studied architecture at the University of Cairo. (3) In 1992, unable to find work in Egypt, he went to Germany to study urban planning and preservation at Hamburg's Technical University. (4) He wrote his thesis on the conflict between Modernity and Islam evident in the renewal of the old quarter of the Muslim city of Aleppo, Syria, reputed to be the oldest continuously inhabited city. (5) According to Matthias Frinken, a partner in the Hamburg planning office, Plankontor, where Atta worked: "He was very critical of capitalistic, Western-development schemes....He was critical of big hotels and office buildings." (6) A Time magazine writer reported that Atta "bemoaned Western influence--specifically, the rise of skyscrapers--in Arab cities." (7)

The two destroyed monoliths at the World Trade Center were icons of just the kind of skyscrapers that are currently being built in Arab cities. These huge structures replace local, traditional urban patterns of living and working, which are closely tied to religious beliefs and practices. (8) The holy men of all three monotheistic religions--Islam, Christianity, and Judaism--all believe God destroyed Babylon because He "took it [the building of the Towers] as a challenge to Himself." (9)

Osama bin Laden shared Mohammed Atta's view of the World Trade Center as an icon of sacrilegious Western power. In an interview on November 9, 2001 with the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, bin Laden said: "The September 11 attacks were not targeted at women and children. The real targets were America's icons of military and economic power." (10)

Bin Laden had ample opportunity to know modern architecture well. He grew up in a prosperous family of builders, earning a degree in civil engineering in 1979. (11) The family success began when Osama's father won the trust of the Saudi King, Abdel Aziz ibn Saud, who reigned from 1932 to 1953. (12) By the late 1960s, when Osama was still a young boy, the family business had helped, "to rebuild the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem--the site to which the Prophet was transported in his Night Journey from Mecca....The family company also renovated the holy places of Mecca and Medina, so the bin Ladens can claim with justifiable pride that they have reconstructed Islam's three holiest sites." (13)

According to Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, in 1990 when the Saudi royal family invited half a million American troops into Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden was "outraged by the proximity of American soldiers, some of them women in unIslamic dress, to the holiest sites of Islam." (14) In February 1998, bin Laden issued a manifesto denouncing the United States "for occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula." He declared, "to kill the Americans...is an individual duty for every Muslim...in order to liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip." (15)

Perhaps as disturbing to Islamic extremists as U.S. soldiers occupying the sacred Muslim sites could also be the fact that the World Trade Center's architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was a leading practitioner of an architectural style that merged modernism with Islamic influences. Yamasaki became a favorite architect of the Saudi royal family, having designed the 1961 Dhahran Airport for them. One year later, he received the World Trade Center commission. In A Life in Architecture Yamasaki noted the influence of Islamic architecture on the World Trade Center. He described the central plaza as "a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area."