ABSTRACT
Nearly ten years ago, in what seems from today’s vantage point like a relative age of innocence, I began assembling the materials for a book on New York’s World Trade Center. My strategy concentrated on observing these buildings as artifacts of a social moment that, in the developed world, coincided with the transition from industrial to information age values. For New York City, the rise of the WTC in the late 1960s marked the threshold between a mixed economy and an emergent monoculture of finance, insurance, and real estate. In their immensity and formal relation to one another, the towers autographed the skyline with an emblematic portal between these eras. They also announced the culmination of elite regional planning strategies several generations in the making, and celebrated, even as Fortune 500 companies fled the city, the emergence of corporate New York triumphantly astride the ruins of manufacturing and lesser commerce.
