Twin giants - What will fill their shoes?

He considered 100 separate designs, including a single megatower, before making a final decision to build twins at1,350 feet. Heavy steal columns at the core of the building, thickened downwards, carried part of the load all the way to the bottom of the building. A gridwork on the outside of the building carried the rest, and also defended against the wind. On the exterior, the grid was visible as the long, vertical corrugated lines that wrapped all the way around the tower.

The basic problem of how to keep the towers up was solved, but their unprecedented scale opened up a Pandora's box of odd effects.

The traditional payoff of tall buildings is usually the sweeping, infinite vistas. But on all but a few floors, the windows were obstructed by the closely spaced vertical lines of the corrugated exoskeleton.

Despite the matrix of support, high gusts of wind used to rock, twist, and bend the towers, sending pencils rolling off desks on the top floors. And to get to those upper floors, thousands of occupants depended on a network of express and local elevators, 104 in each tower, requiring two trips and cutting into rentable space.

After the excitement of the engineering feat wore off, the buildings fell out of favor with critics. "In the history of buildings, they should be respected more for their engineering solutions than their architectural solutions," says Ms. Willis.

Many eulogies of the World Trade Center architecture suggest that the towers may be sorely mourned, but they were never dearly loved. "Blandness blown up to a gigantic size," in the words of the New Yorker's critic Paul Goldberger.

At the backbone of much commentary are complaints about the dehumanizing scale of the buildings. Previous skyscrapers that held the crown for New York's tallest - the Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building - employed a series of ziggurat-like setbacks, culminating in a point or a spire. The upward tapering performed the dual role of leading the eye along the ascent of a visually interesting summit and opening the skies for the sun to light the streets. By contrast, each of the twin towers was a square multiplied by 1,350 feet and sawed off like a piece of wood at the top. In the afternoon, two colossal shadows roamed over the cityscape, darkening life for the pedestrians beneath.

Even in broad daylight, the gargantuan scale of the towers was palpably threatening, a feeling compounded by their setting among buildings only half as tall. The architect Minoru Yamasaki, now deceased, anticipated the problem. He is quoted in Darton's book as stating that he reassured himself in the belief that "what really matters in Manhattan is the scale near the ground - it doesn't matter... how high you go. So I concentrated on providing human scale - a broad plaza, arcades, restaurants and fountains."

It didn't come off, according to most critics.

"I'm not sure that one gets a warm feeling standing next to something that is 1,500 feet in the air," says Bob Fox, a renowned New York architect. The best urban spaces, he says, proffer an invitation to the passer-by that says gently: " 'Please come in, rest, sit, contemplate.' I don't think anyone felt that about the World Trade Center Plaza."

The ancient reverence for the public realm is blossoming anew in architectural circles today, most famously in the school of New Urbanism. In New York's rebuilding, these humanistic principles will undoubtedly get more play than they did in the '60s and '70s, and will compete with the realities of political and economic interests to determine what kind of office building and what kind of memorial will be built on the ashes of the towers.

When the rebuilding committee will convene, what shape that committee will take, and what procedures it will adopt are questions for another day. However, its membership is certain to include representatives of Mr. Silverstein, the Port Authority, the state and municipal governments, and concerned community groups.

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