Rebuilding Babel: Urban Regeneration in the Modern/Postmodern Age

Abstract

We still live with the shock of 9/11’s mangled steel girders, pulverized cement, and incinerated human bodies, even after all the ashes have been cleared away and the reconstruction phase has begun. But what exactly will this rebuilding seek to replace or to correct? The fallacy being perpetuated, at least within intellectual circles, that the World Trade Center—or skyscraper design in general—was somehow the blameworthy epitome of Western imperialist modernity. It is certainly true that a certain set of “meaning[s] collapsed with the [WTC] towers,” as New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp wrote a few weeks after the tragedy (AR1): specifically, the meaning that, until September 11, 2001, skyscrapers once had for us. But we should not reductively synecdochize the WTC into an emblem of imperial (or, predictably, phallic) technoid (post)modernity. If we did that, we would be repeating the view of lead suicide bomber Mohammed Atta, who, before hijacking and piloting the first plane to crash into the WTC, had written his urban planning masters thesis in 1994 at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg on the Syrian city of Aleppo, railing against what he perceived to be the modern American building form of skyscrapers being inserted as alien intrusions into the Arab cityscape. With his deed, he certainly authored a horrifically enduring addendum to his thesis. Rebuilding Babel: Urban Regeneration in the Modern/Postmodern Age. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304730232_Rebuilding_Babel_Urban_Regeneration_in_the_ModernPostmodern_Age?_sg=5O2zmTq4ZMDeMDckUaSm8m1JcdrMYXbpWQ1k9gYgjtfuvyfPFYSZgE1L_QETxsBfw9_4QrCfZ22q64w [accessed May 04 2018].