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Architecture, Al-Qaeda, and the World Trade CenterRethinking Relations between War, Modernity, and City Spaces after 9/11University of Sussex 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.
Key Words: Al-Qaeda • terrorism • war • architecture • World Trade Center • modernity • Virilio • technology • city • politics • cybernetics
Space and Culture, Vol. 7, No. 4,
396-408 (2004) This article has been cited by other articles:
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