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For the first time in the trade center's history, there was nothing Guy Tozzoli could do to fix things. From the instant the south tower spit out its burning plume, like a great flamethrower over Manhattan, everything he had pieced together and nurtured was doomed to come horrifyingly undone.
Tozzoli and the towers' other creators -- most of them as innovative and as hardheaded as he was -- had over the decades made dozens of decisions, small and large, many now half-forgotten, that had suddenly become matters of life and death. When they determined the enormous size for the trade center, when they shaped it into an icon of international financial prowess and -- most important -- when they drew the blueprints for its construction, they had unwittingly written the script for its eventual destruction. Why did the towers initially withstand the impacts of jetliners without tipping over like felled oaks but then collapse, about an hour later, in two deadly implosions? Why did most of the people below the impact zones escape and live, while nearly all those above were trapped and died? The answers are deeply buried, like clues beneath the rubble, in the trade center's history.
The destruction of the twin towers erased, first and most tragically, some 2,800 lives. But a year after the nation began mourning those lives, something else is being mourned: the towers themselves. They were the biggest and brashest icons that New York has ever produced -- physically magnificent, intimately familiar structures. Their builders were possessed of a determination that sometimes crossed the line into hubris: they refused to admit defeat before any problem that natural forces, economics or politics could throw in their way.
The talisman that the builders brandished, again and again, to counter their opponents was the technological optimism of the early space age. The project's architects and engineers used brand-new, untested technologies to raise an unprecedented amount of real estate into the sky. They created a pair of lightweight, almost willowy structures that, they said, would nonetheless be able to withstand hurricane-force winds and other natural cataclysms -- as well as fire, explosion or even, they assured prospective tenants, the impact of a jetliner.
Even before they were built, though, critics derided the Buck Rogers quality of the towers, noting that new technologies and new architectural paradigms often bring new vulnerabilities. Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architecture critic at The New York Times, publicly aired her doubts in 1966. ''Who's afraid of the big, bad buildings?'' she wrote. ''Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don't know. The **** of triumph or tragedy at this scale -- and ultimately it is a **** -- demands an extraordinary payoff. The trade-center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world.''
In the end, they were both.
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James Glanz is a science reporter for The Times. Eric Lipton is a metropolitan reporter for The Times. Since Sept. 11, they have been investigating the attack on the World Trade Center and its aftermath.
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