A New York state of mind

Yet the targeting and destruction of the city's tallest towers doesn't mean the death of skyscrapers. The impulse to build high is rooted deep in human nature, going back as far as the pyramids.

Skyscrapers are a peculiarly American invention - cathedrals to commerce and civic hubris. In their unabashed grandeur, their ability to make people feel both exalted and small, bringing together whole cities, they're inseparable from New York.

"The sky has always been the limit for us," says Robert Stern, dean of the Yale Architecture School. "It still is a symbol, as those buildings were, of our open society, our sense that anything is possible - our self-confidence, that we would throw ourselves up into the sky."

Beyond their symbolic function, New York's skyscrapers have played a distinct role in shaping the city's character. All that vertical space allows for the kind of density that gives New York its energy and drive.

At the Rainbow Room, waiter Sabbir Rahman says he had three friends who worked at a restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center's north tower. Even though they're now missing, the Bangladesh native feels "proud" to work in such an ascendant spot. Tourists from all over the world come here, he says, and buy $12 drinks at the bar, just so they can linger over the view.

Admittedly, when the World Trade Center made its debut in 1973 as the world's tallest building (a distinction soon lost to the Sears Tower in Chicago), many New Yorkers found it more offensive than impressive.

Rising inexorably along the edge of the Hudson River, the towers seemed jarringly out of scale with the lofts and warehouses of lower Manhattan. "It was an act of defiance" to build it, says Dr. Stern. New York's economy was in a tailspin at the time, and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller basically "willed these buildings into existence, to reinforce New York's future...."

Over the next three decades, New Yorkers grew accustomed to the towers as a familiar sight on the Manhattan skyline - a landmark that oriented them within the sprawl, reassuringly fixed on the horizon.

For this reason, many New Yorkers are now grieving the loss of the buildings themselves and not just the lives inside them.

"They were part of our visual vocabulary - America's visual vocabulary," says architectural historian Judith Dupré. "And that literally has been erased, and that's a great psychic loss."

Already, this sense of loss is driving the demand to rebuild. While virtually everyone agrees that the site must house a memorial of some sort, there is an equally strong insistence for new towers. It reflects a desire to show that the city has not been cowed.

"We have to build back, because the forces that are attacking us are forces that want to roll back society thousands of years, that really want to reject what America stands for in modern life," says Stern.

Still, many New Yorkers are wary of building 110 stories again - or anything close to it. For one thing, they wonder who would be willing to work in an office that takes 45 minutes to evacuate by stairs.

Some suggest, too, that the new building would best memorialize those who died by not striving to be the "tallest," but by expressing a certain humility.

"There must be some way to design a new set of structures that are just as gloriously ascendant, but that acknowledge America's new understanding of its role in the world," says Ms. Dupré. "Maybe it's not going to be as important to build 110 new stories. But I think that it is important to rebuild. And rebuilding well could be an incredible act of healing."

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