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Title: The Mosque to Commerce [WTC Architect and Bin Laden Company connection]
Source:
Slate
URL Source: http://www.slate.com/id/2060207
Published: Dec 28, 2001
Author: Laurie Kerr
Post Date: 2007-04-29 10:52:58 by honway
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Keywords: None
Views: 190
Comments: 15
We all know the basic reasons why Osama Bin Laden chose to attack the World Trade Center, out of all the buildings in New York. Its towers were the two tallest in the city, synonymous with its skyline. They were richly stocked with potential victims. And as the complex's name declared, it was designed to be a center of American and global commerce. But Bin Laden may have had another, more personal motivation. The World Trade Center's architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was a favorite designer of the Binladin family's patrons—the Saudi royal family—and a leading practitioner of an architectural style that merged modernism with Islamic influences. View of the King Fahd Dhahran Air TerminalView of the King Fahd Dhahran Air Terminal The story starts in the late 1950s, when Yamasaki, a second-generation Japanese-American, won the commission to design the King Fahd Dhahran Air Terminal in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. His design had a rectilinear, modular plan with pointed arches, interweaving tracery of prefabricated concrete, and even a minaret of a flight tower. In other words, it was an impressive melding of modern technology and traditional Islamic form. The Saudis admired it so much that they put a picture of it on one of their banknotes. For Yamasaki, an architect with a keen mathematical mind and a taste for ornamental pattern-work, this brush with the intricate geometries of Islamic architecture was inspiring, and he began to incorporate arabesques and arches into his work. For the next 12 to 15 years he played with Islamic forms in projects as diverse as the Federal Science Pavilion at the Seattle World's Fair, the Eastern Airlines Terminal at Logan Airport, and even the North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, Ill. View of the World Trade Center PlazaView of the World Trade Center plaza Yamasaki received the World Trade Center commission the year after the Dhahran Airport was completed. Yamasaki described its plaza as "a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area." True to his word, Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca's courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city's bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really. Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites—the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca's. View of a World Trade Center TowerView of a World Trade Center tower At the base of the towers, Yamasaki used implied pointed arches—derived from the characteristically pointed arches of Islam—as a transition between the wide column spacing below and the dense structural mesh above. (Europe imported pointed arches from Islam during the Middle Ages, and so non-Muslims have come to think of them as innovations of the Gothic period.) Above soared the pure geometry of the towers, swathed in a shimmering skin, which doubled as a structural web—a giant truss. Here Yamasaki was following the Islamic tradition of wrapping a powerful geometric form in a dense filigree, as in the inlaid marble pattern work of the Taj Mahal or the ornate carvings of the courtyard and domes of the Alhambra. The shimmering filigree is the mark of the holy. According to Oleg Grabar, the great American scholar of Islamic art and architecture, the dense filigree of complex geometries alludes to a higher spiritual reality in Islam, and the shimmering quality of Islamic patterning relates to the veil that wraps the Qa'ba at Mecca. After the attack, Grabar spoke of how these towers related to the architecture of Islam, where "the entire surface is meaningful" and "every part is both construction and ornament." A number of designers from the Middle East agreed, describing the entire façade as a giant "mashrabiya," the tracery that fills the windows of mosques. In the early '70s, as the trade towers were nearing completion, Saudi Arabia was awash in oil revenues, and the state embarked on a massive modernization and building campaign. Yamasaki was premier among the many foreign architects hired during this period. Unwilling to take on too much work, Yamasaki decided to accept just three choice projects in Saudi Arabia: the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency head office, the Eastern Province International Airport, and the King Fahd Royal Reception Pavilion at Jeddah Airport. In all three projects he continued his explorations in melding traditional Islamic form with modern materials, methods, and functions. As a scion of the Binladin contracting firm, destined to inherit some portion of its vast operations, Osama Bin Laden would certainly have been aware of Yamasaki's Saudi Arabian projects. Indeed, his family may have built them. (Minoru Yamasaki Associates won't say, but the Binladens were involved with almost all royal construction.) While Osama was in college in the mid-'70s, Yamasaki was designing his second generation of Saudi work, and the World Trade Center—then the tallest building in the world times two—came to completion in New York. This period was the high-water mark both for Yamasaki's world reputation and for the Saudis' national construction plan—which in Saudi Arabia must have brought a heightened sense of importance to the World Trade Center. Having rejected modernism and the Saudi royal family, it's no surprise that Bin Laden would turn against Yamasaki's work in particular. He must have seen how Yamasaki had clothed the World Trade Center, a monument of Western capitalism, in the raiment of Islamic spirituality. Such mixing of the sacred and the profane is old hat to us—after all, Cass Gilbert's classic Woolworth Building, dubbed the Cathedral to Commerce, is decked out in extravagant Gothic regalia. But to someone who wants to purify Islam from commercialism, Yamasaki's implicit Mosque to Commerce would be anathema. To Bin Laden, the World Trade Center was probably not only an international landmark but also a false idol.
Saudi banknote, 1966Saudi banknote, 1966
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#1. To: All (#0)
http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=50655 "Paul Laffoley, one of the architects who worked for Emery Roth & Sons, one of the architectual firms that designed the WTC, dropped a bombshell during an interview on February 21, 2007 with Mike Hagan on Radio Orbit. Evidently, very few heard the sound of the bomb going off, and so I offer it here so that it may blow away your minds. About 40 minutes into the interview, he says that, when he started working with Roth on the design of floors 15-45 of WTC2, Saudi Arabian engineers were there who had been brought over by the chief architect of WTC to New York from the Bin Laden Construction Company in order to collaborate with his firm. Some of them asked him where he would put demolition devices."
http://www.nickdenton.org/archives/2002_01_01_archive.htm Minoru Yamasaki, architect of the World Trade Center, introduced Islamic gracenotes into his functional modernism after working for Bin Laden's construction magnate father. Bin Laden himself said his family background in construction helped him understand how the towers might, at least partially, collapse.
http://physics911.net/gallery/ The evidence is mind-numbingly overwhelming that it was an inside job.
#5. To: lodwick (#3)
"Yamasaki … won the commission to design the King Fahd Dhahran Air Terminal in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. His design had a rectilinear, modular plan with pointed arches. … it was an impressive melding of modern technology and traditional Islamic form…. Yamasaki received the World Trade Center commission the year after the Dhahran Airport was completed."
From that source: That's not what the experts say. They say it appears to be molten aluminum. That's not what state of the art fire codes indicate. And many things can in structures can burn very hot ... such as plastics. This is not true. The Chief was trapped in a stairway by fire and couldn't even get to where the fires were hottest. Most likely? Given the fact that not one real expert in materials, fire or demolition supports this notion ... anywhere in the world? ROTFLOL! Why allegedly? Don't they know? And now the theory also involves some sort of missile, cannon or beam weapon mounted on a commercial jet which is fired just before the impact (for some unclear reason) with the perps waiting another hour before setting off the hundreds (or is it thousands) of thermite bombs they have scattered throughout the building. ROTFLOL! If you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you. This is false. http://www.911myths.com/html/explosive_force.html FALSE. FALSE. Pulling isn't even the term demolition experts use to describe taking down a structure with explosives. Yeah. It's so "obvious" that just ONE demolition expert in the world has come forward to say that. And he only said it after being shown a video hand picked by a member of the conspiracy computer, and before he was informed the structure came down on 9/11, before being told the structure burned for about 7 hours before the collapse, and without being told that firemen said the structure was leaning and going to collapse long before the actual collapse. ROTFLOL! At least they are closer the truth. The hole is actually closer to 80-90 feet wide with damage to the face beyond that. And curiously enough, that width corresponds to the portions of a 757 containing fuel bladders. Only the very tips of the wings ... and the windows had been recently hardened to withstand a nearby car bomb loading.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestIndeed, his family may have built them. (Minoru Yamasaki Associates won't say, but the Binladens were involved with almost all royal construction.)
#2. To: All (#1)
#3. To: honway. all (#2)
Another 9/11 truth site -
Replies to Comment # 3.
#15. To: lodwick, all (#3)
http://physics911.net/gallery/
The evidence is mind-numbingly overwhelming that it was an inside job.
What appears to be molten steel pours from a fracture in the wall of WTC south tower.
The only other known sources of heat on that day were jet fuel, (which burns at 1500 F) and office fires (which burn at an even lower temperature, owing to oxygen starvation).
The NYFD Fire Director was on the impacted floors and reported an orderly evacuation, i.e., no extraordinary heat.
The most likely source of heat sufficient to melt steel support columns is thermite, an incendiary premixture of powdered iron oxide and granular aluminum.
This frame, allegedly from a news video shown on the PBS program NOVA, shows the incoming aircraft a few microseconds before impacting the office tower wall. There is a bright flash just ahead of the nose, as if that part of the wall had become red-hot rather suddenly. Moreover, a row of explosions appear along the building’s corner wall, on a level with the aircraft’s line of flight.
Outer support columns for the World Trade Center north tower are hurled outward 70 meters or more by the force of explosives going off sequentially inside the tower. Such force could not be produced by the compressed air of “pancaking.”
The World Trade Center Building 7 had a few small office fires burning on a few floors,
Indeed, the building’s leaseholder, Larry Silverstein, has admitted on videotape to having the building brought down by controlled demolition or “pulled.”
The explosives used in this case were probably the ones normally employed in “pulling” buildings, there being no massive interior support columns to retard the collapse.
Obviously, the building was pre-wired for demolition well before 9/11
This scene of the Pentagon shows a series of rather small holes on the ground floor where a Boeing 757 is alleged to have struck the building. The largest hole in the ground floor is about 15 meters wide, only a fraction of the wingspan of a Boeing 757.
Indeed, windows are still intact in many place where the wings should have gone through.
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