Why did hijackers choose the World Trade Center?

 In summary the Twin Towers were the greatest symbols of the United States ever constructed. No other landmark came close; not in their scale, not in their presentation, not in the fact they were testaments to what Americans can do if they push themselves to their full potential. No other nation had a pair of skyscrapers like them. It took breakthroughs to get them built, against all odds and even once they were completed had to earn their respect as landmarks. At a time where they sat empty in a broken economy and were loathed as white elephants by New Yorkers, the towers became personalities in themselves and over the course of decades became accepted by the city and the country. Nicknamed “David and Nelson” (David being 2 and Nelson being 1) after the Rockefeller brothers that first began talks of their creation in the 1950s, the towers were the American success story.

But where there is the passion to create for good, there is the passion to strike with evil. Pictured is 15 year old Osama bin Laden on a family vacation in Falun, Sweden with his 22 siblings in 1971. He’s a quiet, reserved boy that goes to summer school at Oxford, but here he’s along for the ride while his 26 year old brother negotiates a lucrative business deal with Volvo, which he kicked off ordering a substantial lot of trucks for his Saudi construction company. Around this time the South Tower has been structurally topped out and the North Tower is welcoming it’s first tenants, mostly the Port Authority.

There is an interesting argument to be made that the buildings were attacked by bin Laden as a statement for the Twin Tower’s “sinful” Islamic architectural influence. Minoru Yamasaki, the second generation Japanese-American architect behind the WTC, was a flagcarrier of architectural trend that merged modernism with Islamic influence. To quote a fantastic biography of his name by Dale Allen Gyure about the 70,000 square foot Dhahran Air Terminal he designed for Saudi Arabia in 1961, originally a US Air Force base but later a civilian airport:

“In retrospect, the Dhahran Air Terminal became a prototype for a new ‘modern Arab’ architecture that would resonate throughout the Middle East. Yamasaki was among those few high-profile architects in the first wave of Westerners to design for that region. Only the ambitious campaign by the Iraq Development Board to commit to modern architecture for Baghdad in the 1950s preceded him. Iraq and Saudi Arabia at the time were reaping its own benefits from the initial influx of oil revenue, and its leaders were eager to upgrade the nations facilities, amenities and reputation.

The building’s image would be one of Yamasaki’s biggest challenges. He realized the importance of giving the new terminal an Arabic flavor, but what that meant proved elusive. Traditional Saudi architecture offered few examples for emulation, and there was barely any large-scale concrete construction in the country. Yamasaki settled on the pointed archs and the lacy carvings of the mashrabiya as the salient characteristics of Arabic art that might form the basis for a modern expression. Rather than copying Arab or Islamic buildings, he took the architecture and decorative designs of the area as a starting point for his own modernist impulses.”

Now Mr. Gale Gyure goes on to say that the Twins are not a continuation of this Islamic modernist blend style and that the tridents and roofline exist because of structural needs and such, buuuut…its not too big a stretch to say to an untrained eye they look pretty damn similar as well.

The Twin Tower’s were perhaps Yamasaki’s biggest canvas for this. He received the commission for the World Trade Center the following year (in part due to Port Authority direct Guy Tozzoli’s fondness for Yamasaki’s “United States Science Pavilion” building at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.

The earliest variants of the twin towers plan was much more fluid and traditional of Yamasaki’s previous works in the Middle East, and the plan that broke ground in 1966 was sort of the generalized, ‘acceptable’version. Or, as NYT architectural critic Ana Louise Huxtable called it, “General Motors Gothic”. Quoting this informative Slater article from December 28th, 2001 with my additional photos.

“Yamasaki described (the WTC) plaza as ‘a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area.’ True to his word, he replicated the plan of Mecca’s courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city’s bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really.

Yamasaki’s courtyard mimicked Mecca’s assemblage of holy sites—the Qa’ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca’s.”

Certainly Osama bin Laden would know about Mr. Yamasaki, not on a personal level but be aware of his status as the cherished architect leading a new skyscraper age in Saudi Arabia, and when the towers were opened he would be aware it was Yamasaki who designed them. Yamasaki was the preferred architect for the Saudi royal family and, in the eyes of that college student studying civil engineering who resented the royal family and already rejected modern influences (he did not watch movies or listen to music during his study years and was described as a sheikh, or devout in classical Islamic scriptures and traditions), Osama bin Laden would likely view the towers with scorn and disgust; a Western icon hiding in the clothes of holy Islam.

So, in his eyes, that’s all more reason to bring them down. Rot in hell, bastard.