NEW YORK: Leslie Robertson needs to catch up with his writing, a task that he would usually approach with enthusiasm. He might even have pursued a career crafting sentences, had he been able to find the right job.

Instead he became a structural engineer, a builder and designer of such diverse projects as the Bank of China tower in Hong Kong, a library in Latvia, a supermarket in Florida, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Ohio, a museum in Berlin and numerous corporate headquarters.

Along the way, Robertson and his firm have worked on three of the six tallest buildings in the world. The remains of one of them are being pushed around: the World Trade Centre. “It’s a huge chore I have in front of me. My responsibility was to conceive and direct the various research activities. The robustness and stamina of the buildings is my responsibility. All the drawings have my name on them.”

After the World Trade Centre was bombed in 1993, Robertson and others in his firm went public. It was necessary, he says, to persuade people that it was safe to return to work in the buildings. Then, he had something useful to say immediately; after Sept 11, and perhaps in the light of his previous reassurance, he did not.

“I know more about the project and more than anyone ever will about the design. There’s no one alive today who’s even close to what’s stored away in my head and I’ve got a memory like a sieve. It’s true that, following the event, a lot of people - architects and engineers - stepped up to the interview platform and had their say and, by and large, most of them spoke much too quickly and without a lot of knowledge. There’s a need to understand what should be said before saying things.”

Robertson was astonished later to see a report of the meeting in the Wall Street Journal. Robertson was asked: “Is there anything you wish you had done differently in the design of the building?” Instead of answering, he wept. “I guess I thought I was a sturdier person than I am,” he says now.

“The thing that keeps you awake at night is the people in the building. Pretty much every night.” One thing that does not keep Robertson awake at nights is the thought that the 1,350-feet-tall World Trade Centre should have been built to absorb the impact of a jet airliner: it was.

The team had in mind the B-25 bomber that hit the Empire State Building in the fog in 1945, killing 14 people. But that aircraft was nothing compared to the Boeing 707 that really concerned Robertson when he was working on the twin towers in the 1960s, and the 707, in turn, had nothing on the 767s that struck on Sept 11.

“And if these people had chosen 747s instead of 767s, it definitely could have been worse. Does that give people comfort? I don’t know. It’s clear that it is necessary to keep aeroplanes away from buildings. The World Trade Centre was stalwart. Very, very few buildings would have done any better, or as well, under the circumstances.

“This is a 40-year-old project. If I didn’t learn anything in 40 years I should be hung by my thumbs. You should have done this, you should have done that. Every time I say that, I see something different on the teeter-totter. I would be thinking about much bigger aircraft. If we were designing now we would start with the question of the 747 or the new airbus. You might even come away with a less robust building because you might think there’s nothing you can do about it. Making them sturdier doesn’t mean that they would have stood up because the failure was the result of removal of the structure by the plane and degradation by the fires.” —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.