^#smrgSAHAF Cross Currents of American Architecture -

The airplanes that attacked the Twin Towers on September 11 unleashed forces of nature whose awesome magnitude is rarely experienced in modern cities. I am speaking about the natural energy of fire and gravity. The impact of the airplanes hitting the buildings ignited the firepower of fossil fuel. The intense flames quickly reached steel-melting temperatures. As the structural beams weakened, gravity overwhelmed the molten structures, pulling them down into the streets of New York City. Everybody and everything in their way pulverized. Before the eyes of a shocked world, the Al-Qaeda strike used the natural forces of fire and gravity to transform into murderous weapons two of the proudest technological achievements of the United States—the skyscraper and the airplane. The first skyscrapers ever built rose from the ashes of the great Chicago fire of 1871. Just as each succeeding generation of skyscrapers has been extolled as impervious to fire, the creators of the first modern tall buildings in Chicago were convinced that they were fireproof. By 2002, tall buildings in the United States have grown to over 1,400 feet. The first power-driven craft to succeed in defying gravity took to the air in 1903 in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Today, planes are logging 40,000 flights a day within the United States. The forces of nature had seemingly been bent to human desire. We had controlled fire and gravity. Modern civilization had tamed the untamable.