The World Trade Center complex in Manhattan consisted of a number of different buildings all made by different architects. The structure known as 7 World Trade Center, and alternatively as the Salomon Brothers Building, after its main tenant, was opened in 1987. It was designed by an architectural firm called Emery Roth & Sons, a family business whose approach ranged from ‘international style’ to ‘postmodern’, and who most often played the role of the project architect assisting a more famous counterpart such as Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.
7 World Trade Center or simply ‘Building 7’, stood in the shadow of the Twin Towers as they fell on September 11, 2001. The South Tower collapsed at 9.59 am, the North Tower at 10.28 am. But on that day, at 5.20 pm, 7 World Trade Center collapsed too, without being hit by a plane. The reported cause was the damage that had been inflicted on its structure by fire, resulting from debris falling from the Twin Towers.
7 World Trade Center was a run-of-themill, almost anonymous office building. It did not have the iconic quality of the Twin Towers and its collapse went almost unnoticed as a footnote to the day’s ‘real’ events.
Yet there is an unsettling series of footnotes to that footnote. In a stunning news report, BBC World television told its viewers that the Salomon Brothers Building had collapsed more than 20 minutes before it actually happened. The building was even visible on screen on the Manhattan skyline, as reporter Jane Standley stood in front and a ‘newsbar’ reported its collapse. To date, no credible explanation has been given for the report.
7 WTC had been hit by burning pieces of the Twin Towers, but not by a fuel-laden aeroplane. However, it collapsed straight into its own footprint. According to those who argue that 9/11 was a false flag operation by the US government, the collapse bears the hallmarks of a controlled demolition. And the property developer Larry Silverstein, who owns the entire World Trade Center complex, knew about it, they claim. In one video fragment, widely available on the internet, Silverstein says that he’d decided ‘to pull’ Building 7 — meaning, in common language, bring it down by explosives. This interpretation of ‘to pull’ was later denied by Silverstein: 7 WTC had been ablaze and the decision was just to let it burn. But could that have caused a complete collapse? Even those who do not like the conspiracy theories cannot help wondering why the building came down like it did, and why BBC World reported it before it happened.
Unremarkable 7 WTC is an antisymbol in the 9/11 aftermath, in almost complete contrast to the Twin Towers. The architect of the towers, Minoru Yamasaki had also designed the controversial Pruitt- Igoe housing complex in St Louis, which was declared to be a ‘failure’ soon after its completion and was demolished on 16 March 1972. For the postmodern architect and writer Charles Jencks, this was the day that ‘modern architecture died’. The image of the demolition of Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe became, with Jencks’s help, a small precursor of 9/11: physical destruction as the symbol of the end of an idea.
Slavoj Zizek has written:
“The point is not to play a pseudo-postmodern game of reducing the WTC collapse to just another media spectacle, reading it as a catastrophe version of the snuff porno movies; the question we should have asked ourselves as we stared at the TV screens on September 11 is simply: Where have we already seen the same thing over and over again?
The fact that the September 11 attacks were the stuff of popular fantasies long before they actually took place provides yet another case of the twisted logic of dreams: it is easy to account for the fact that poor people around the world dream about becoming Americans — so what do the well-to-do Americans, immobilised in their well-being, dream about? About a global catastrophe that would shatter their lives — why? This is what psychoanalysis is about: to explain why, in the midst of well-being, we are haunted by nightmarish visions of catastrophes."
Is the collapse of the Salomon Brothers Building a disaster? Even though directly connected to the 9/11 attacks, it lacks not only iconic impact but also victims, as it was fully evacuated prior to its collapse. The anonymous corporate architecture of 7 WTC allows for its reading beyond ‘iconomy’, beyond the regime of destination architecture and city branding. In 7 WTC, architecture is only postponed collapse, the force that makes a structure stand upright until it is inevitably brought down by ‘something’ (a political or ideological act). Paradoxically, it was the destruction of 7 WTC that rendered it visible. In the meantime, investigations continue into what really caused the collapse. A conclusive outcome seems impossible, as the Salomon Brothers Building is gone forever.
Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, Rizzoli, 1984
Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Verso, 2002
Terry Smith, The Architecture of Aftermath, University of Chicago Press, 2006