ABSTRACT
North America changed on September 11, 2001, the day terrorists flew three hijacked commercial airplanes into buildings in the United States; a fourth crashed before reaching its target. A plane flying into a skyscraper was not unknown in New York City. While the new buildings and the memorial at the World Trade Center site were being designed and built, construction of other skyscrapers elsewhere in the United States was largely in suspension due to a profound business downturn. In the 1980s, architects had begun to use computers to an increasingly greater degree, both in the building construction process for organizing work flow schedules for optimum efficiency and in structural calculations and structural design. As we move into the twenty-first century, the distinction of having an architecture that could be said to be identifiably "American," stops making sense as buildings in the United States are not necessarily designed by citizens of the United States.
