The Attack

L'Assalto. Città uomini e architetture attorno ai fatti dell'11 settembre, edited by Giacinto Cerviere, Libria, Melfi, 2009 (pp. 181, € 18,00)

Most people will still remember what they were doing on September 11 at the time of the attack, which has sadly passed into history as the day of the collapse of the twin towers and as the largest terrorist attack in American history.

This writer was in the library studying a text on architecture without imagining how this dreadful blow to humanity was linked to, and partially dependent upon, the subject of his investigation. Like many, he always remembered this day as yet another episode in the history of the hatred between populations. We later learned to remember the tragedy with the famous cartoons of Art Spiegelman (author of Maus), who had already used the comic-book art to express sad human folly. But this book by Giacinto Cerviere helps read, in a different way, what was not only a simple story of people but also of cities and architecture as the book's subtitle explains with simplicity. September 11, beyond the mass murder, was an attack on architecture.

The book can be read with interest and curiosity because it speaks of facts that we experienced and because it clearly reveals some connections between events that have been overlooked thus far. The author tries to unravel, in what Franco Purini defines in the preface as a conceptual labyrinth, the set of religious, social, urban, human and political questions concentrated in the World Trade Center attack.

Cerviere puts order to the disorder with an accurate breakdown of the chapters. It begins with "Impure Western City," a rich in-depth analysis of the birth of New York since its colonization, when it was named Fort Amsterdam, and its development leading to the construction of the towers that touched the Manhattan sky. He then moves to the Arab world in the chapter "Orient, War and Architecture" in which he investigates the lives of bin Laden and Mohammed Atta, respectively Al Qaeda's founder and chief strategist, but also, and not coincidentally, civil engineer and architect. The original professions of the two terrorists contributed tremendously to their choice of target. The bombers' anti-American sentiment, designed to punish the United States, not only targeted people, but also symbols in order to destroy Western architecture considered so inferior to the Oriental. The third chapter describes the "Attack," with the two assaults on the World Trade Center, the first in 1993 and the second, and final one, in 2001. He cites the sadly prophetic words of Rem Koolhaas in "Delirious New York" - in response to a statement by the Russian writer Gorky he affirms that the critical and aberrant view of urbanization held by the masses will produce attempts"... to raze the City of Towers, to root out every trace of the infamous infrastructure as if it were a poisonous weed. "
The fourth part is entitled "From the Moon to the Earth," and examines the genesis of the Twin Towers, how they were designed by Minoru Yamasaki and how they were built.

In the next two chapters, "Time after the Disaster" and "The Rebuilding of the Temple," Cerviere addresses the problems of urban growth and the discussions regarding the reconstruction of Ground Zero after the tragedy. He describes the victory of Daniel Libeskind in the ideas competition launched after the collapse and his subsequent marginalization. In the final chapter, "The Architecture of Religion," the author examines the social, ethical and religious problems involved in the story of the towers, including the great distances and similarities that inextricably bind the West to the East. Everything is much more complicated than it might seem; it is no longer a question of vendettas between nations, but stories of people who, thanks to their training, made some specific choices. These are stories of cities, which, with their development over the centuries, have left urban traces as different sources of inspiration and finally, they are stories of architecture that became the symbols of a civilization.