Architecture, Al-Qaeda, and the World Trade Center

Abstract

The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center has been widely interpreted as representing a new form of terrorism born of anti-Western political sentiment. This article challenges such interpretations by contextualizing the attack not as an original act in creating a new form of terrorism born outside the West but as the culminating act in the perpetration of a relatively long-standing tradition of waging war on modern architectural forms that originates in the West itself. The argument is that we can understand Al-Qaeda not as a force born outside Western control and civilization but, in opposition to that reading, as very much a product of the development of Western modernity. The weight of symbolic value that Al-Qaeda derived from its attack on the World Trade Center was, this article argues, a product of the extent to which the vertical and orthogonal form of that particular building had become incongruous with the newfound fluidity and dynamism of more contemporary Western forms.