“The city,” wrote EB White, “for the first time in its long history, is destructible.” In this eerily prescient passage from Here Is New York (1948), he continued: “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.”
New York in those days was a vertical city of architectural optimism, of faith in technology (steel frames, elevators, air conditioning) and its ability to define itself through construction. But as the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio pointed out in the 1990s, the invention of the plane was simultaneously the invention of the plane crash. The Empire State Building was designed to have an airship docking station at its crown, but when the pilot of a small blimp first attempted to dock, the eddies from the fierce winds proved too much. In 1945, a B25 bomber did crash into the tower, killing the crew and 11 office workers inside. A celebrity building as soon as it was completed in 1931, the Empire State played a starring role in 1933’s King Kong, the great ape transposed to the concrete jungle to scale its new symbol.
In 2001 we found ourselves glued to screens once more but for the worst possible reasons, deeply unsettled as we watched the towers explode into flame and collapse in clouds of dust. It was difficult in the dazed, numb days that followed 9/11 for any of us to think about the future or about architecture.