One year on: Building the future

There was a ghostly precursor to the destruction of the World Trade Centre, a collision between a state-of-the-art machine and a towering icon that electrified New York, on a densely foggy July morning in 1945. The machine had a nickname, Old John Feather Merchant. The icon was the Empire State Building. And what happened when the two came together at 9.55am that day prefigured with eerie precision the destructive dynamics unleashed in the same city last year.

Old John Feather Merchant was a B25 medium bomber returning from Europe. Its pilot, Colonel Smith, was highly experienced, but lost his way in the fog covering Manhattan. He flew straight up Fifth Avenue without realising it and the bomber crashed at about 200mph into the shoulder of the Empire State, nearly 1,000 feet up*.

The aircraft's two engines, weighing more than a ton each, punched through the art deco façade. One smashed into the hoist shaft of elevator No 7; the second severed all six hoist cables suspending elevator No 6, which fell all the way to the basement. The screams of its young attendant, Betty Lou Oliver, could be heard in the lobby. When the elevator finally smashed into the oil-filled buffer at the base of the shaft, she suffered a broken back – and survived.

The B25's landing carriages ripped through offices on the 79th floor, and the aviation fuel erupted in a fireball. Thirteen people died in the incident. The building, of course, survived and life went on. The "disaster" proved not that skyscrapers were potential deathtraps, but the reverse: that the steel, glass and reinforced concrete that formed the most imperious symbols of the American Dream were indestructible.

Today, Betty Lou Oliver lives in Arkansas, a grandmother who must have experienced the reportage of September 11 with particular potency. How many of us, though, are even aware of the potential dangers posed by tall buildings? Are Chicagoans aware of it, in a city with 1,348 high-rise buildings, including the world's greatest concentration of sublime skyscraper architecture? Do they fret about it much in Hong Kong, where there are more than 3,400 high-rises? And how about London: 826 high-rises, a couple of genuine biggies – Tower 42 (the old NatWest tower) and One Canada Square at Canary Wharf – and more "world city" skyscrapers on the way? Even after last year's cataclysm, are we nervous about being in, or near, tall buildings?

Not really. And that's partly because – special cases aside – the media prefer death and destruction on a news-manageable scale. We have a vicarious appetite for loss of life, but we get it in such a way that our initial horror regresses fairly quickly. A 30-second panning shot of an earthquake-buckled freeway in California's San Fernando valley – now you're talking. Lots of stuff busted up; twisted tarmac, bridges cut off in mid-air. Not too many killed.

Before ground zero, the buildings and body-count amalgam was a non-issue. Here's a little test with a predictable outcome. Do the following – the Garley Building; the President Tower; Mei Foo district; Jakarta's central bank complex; mass evacuation in Philadelphia; Immigration Tower; Moscow's Ostankino TV tower – signify anything to you?

They mean zip. Yet in each case they tag significant incidents in which high-rise or very tall buildings have been severely damaged by fire, the key destructive agent that brought the twin towers down. In some cases, such as the 32-storey office block in Philadelphia, there was no loss of life because there was time to evacuate hundreds of workers. In Jakarta, though, 14 people died when fire engulfed the top floors of a tower block. And in Moscow's TV tower – Europe's tallest structure, incidentally – three perished in a blaze two years ago.

It's death and destruction, but not as we know it. Buildings, even great and beautiful skyscrapers, seem ultimately to be unremarkable because there's a gremlin at work here, a duality of reaction. Example: those of a certain persuasion can stand at the base of the John Hancock Tower in Chicago's Pennsylvania Avenue, and look up at the compelling beauty of its tapering, cross-braced steel exoskeleton, and know that modern architecture can deliver an almost damascene hit. Standing there, peering upwards, you are in the unmistakable presence of something that's not just damn big, but as great as the Parthenon.

Five days after the twin towers were struck, and with only a few moments' consideration, I took the elevator to the summit of the John Hancock Tower with my partner and seven-month-old daughter. As far as we were concerned, the World Trade Centre had been the Western nexus for the world's fulminating smart-bomb karma. It wasn't going to happen again, and certainly not that afternoon. It wasn't going to happen because the prospect was beyond understanding, and beyond even the desire to understand.

A few days after the world's most horrifying fusion of terrorism and architectural disaster, the obvious, therapeutic thing to do was to seek out a big building and get into one of its express elevators. The therapy was implicitly an act of bogus bravado to kick-start an erasure that would ensure – as it surely has for most of us, and perhaps within days of September 11 – that we were not going to worry unduly about bad things happening to tall buildings, and thus to some of us.

Big buildings are normal and, normally, they stand mutely and do what they have to do: suck in and expel tidal flows of humanity and its aspirations and desperations. They will remain normal because – in Shanghai, Düsseldorf, Atlanta – that architectural wallpaper cannot be replaced with something else. We will not, however fascinating the prospect, enter a subterranean beehive age of vast, inverted pyramids just because aircraft might be flown deliberately into particularly upstanding buildings. No building, or arrangement of structures, can be immune to the endless variety of destructive methodologies that might be brought to bear on them.

It is comforting to know that the world's great architects and engineers – Lord Foster and Arup in London, for example – embarked on hugely detailed studies of tall-building performance in the event of catastrophic fire or impact. Yes, putting lifts at all four corners of tall buildings rather than in central lift-cores makes sense; so, too, does the widespread use of so-called "ductile" joints in steel building frames to minimise the house-of-cards effect that finally brought down those behemoth towers in just a few utterly dreadful seconds.

These and other structural bottom lines – none of them radically new, by the way – will be applied to more tall buildings in the future, but mainly because of the kind of post-damage litigation that might now be triggered. Not just by terrorist damage, but by infernos and failures in general.

What happened last September was no different, essentially, from what has occasionally happened to tall buildings since they began to appear in America in volume since the 1920s. But there was one freak difference in New York: what happened was inconceivable. Something symbolically and intentionally perfect had been destroyed by two other objects of symbolic and intentional perfection, directed by a force of vengeance that also possessed a hellishly symbolic and intentional perfection. And so, like Colonel Smith looking over the nose of Old John Feather Merchant in that fatal Yankee pea-souper, we remain in a peculiar fog composed simultaneously of absolute knowledge and pragmatically embraced ignorance.

Great, and ever taller, skyscrapers will continue to be built because they are the vertical icons that confirm our normality and progress. We need them because, in their collective shadow, we too can see ourselves as normal, progressive and aspirational – and as the obverse of the equally aspirational nemesis of the twin towers.

*The story of the bomber that struck the Empire State Building is told in 'The Sky is Falling' by Arthur Weingarten