A New York Epic for our Time

The “competitive verticality” of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, wrote the philosopher Jean Baudrillard, was once “an architectural panorama reflecting the capitalist system itself.” That all changed, however, with the construction of the World Trade Center in 1973. “This architectural graphism,” Baudrillard went on, “is the embodiment of a system that is no longer competitive, but digital and countable, and from which competition has disappeared in favor of networks and monopoly.” The Twin Towers, those identical, bar graph-like temples to the American gods of artifice, decadence, and freedom jutting forth toward the heavens generated both “attraction and repulsion,” and, in some, “a secret desire to see them disappear.”