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Introduction

New York in the 1960s was a city on the rise, and no project symbolized the confidence in "bigger is better" than did the World Trade Center. On completion in 1971 and 1973, the Twin Towers were both the tallest and the largest buildings in the world. Innovative engineering carried the structures to 110 stories, multiplying floorplates of nearly an acre into more than four million square feet of office space in each tower.

The scale of the buildings was in keeping with the enormity of changes in postwar New York, where modernity mattered more than history. Gleaming glass skyscrapers created new corporate corridors in a surging midtown office market. Downtown, though, choking congestion, obsolete piers, and aging buildings - whether the remains of the 19th-century waterfront or the last generation of classic Wall Street towers - signaled decline. In the 1960s and 1970s, planners and politicians envisioned Lower Manhattan transformed by an aggressive policy of urban renewal that would modernize physical conditions and reinforce the evolution from port to paperwork. The design of the WTC asserted the ambitions of the era to reshape both Lower Manhattan and the skyscraper as a building type.

The tragedy of 9/11 separates forever a "before and after" in New York's romance with its skyline. Nothing about the World Trade Center will ever be as acutely remembered as its destruction, but there is much to understand in the story of its creation that can inform and inspire our future actions. The reality of what replaces the Twin Towers will be a reflection of the powerful new history that has overtaken the site and, one hopes, of a new form of urban renewal.