INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE: INFERNAL RETURNS On a late summer morning at the dawn of a new millennium, the identity

between architecture and the body returned with a sound like thunder. And

then it was doubled. The trauma of the September 11, 2001 attack on the

World Trade Center was so effective in part because it evoked the relation-

ship between architecture and our sense of embodiment. Just the day before,

such an identity between buildings and bodies seemed a quaint myth in

our age of transnational dot-com capital. Yet, between the impacts and the

Towers’ smoky absence, an intimate psychical identification seems to have

been made across the buildings and those who watched from a safe distance

or via telepresence. In the following days, the Towers’ destruction was re-

presented as a wound, a personal one for many, but also as a symbolic injury

to the collective political body of the nation and even to the nebulous body of

culture dubbed “civilization.”