LONDON: Watching those monstrous television images of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre collapsing, a lot of architects speculated about the unknowable question of how this horrific event was unfolding unstoppably in front of them and what it would mean for them as professionals.

It is a response that could be seen as the ultimate in self-obsessed narcissism. Face an architect with an unwatchable tragedy and all he or she can think about is how the welding on the steel structure was done or what it is going to mean for city planning. But architects are people, too, and to focus on the technical is to find some sort of psychological comfort in the midst of seemingly limitless anxieties. At the same time, there was something particularly unsettling for architects about an attack on two of the most famous high-rise towers in the world .

The attacks on New York came precisely at a moment when, after decades of scepticism about building high, especially in Europe, the world was in the midst of particularly feverish bout of skyscraper building.

In London, Norman Foster had just finished another giant tower at Canary Wharf and was starting work on the unmistakable cone-shaped Swiss Re tower. Renzo Piano had got involved with a quixotic project to put the tallest tower in Europe on top of London Bridge station. The unasked question of: “How did they know what we were thinking?” seemed to float in the air.

There was a public inquiry pending over the Heron Tower and, along with a score of other architects planning a stream of new towers, both Richard Rogers and Nicholas Grimshaw had plans for towers more than 40 storeys high at Paddington, central London. It had all been so different just a couple of years ago.

After the revolt against the lumpish towers of the 1960s, it was taken for granted that nothing else would be allowed to break through a strict but unstated height limit. Then, suddenly, the received wisdom was turned on its head. It was the same in Barcelona, Vienna, Rotterdam and Berlin.

Building tall had become a preoccupation for architects not just in Asia and America, but in Europe, too. At their best, high-rise towers are elegant, technologically sophisticated and represent the future of the city.

Yet they get built as the byproduct of a primitive, unsubtle battle of egos. Politicians are fascinated by the image of the high-rise city, be it Shanghai or Ken Livingstone’s London.

As London mayor, Ken Livingstone has been doing his best to bring a crop of towers to London. This is ostensibly because that is what the multinationals want if they are not going to move to Frankfurt, but the reality owes more to the unsubtle symbolism of being the biggest or the tallest and so the most important.

It certainly seemed as if the terrorists had been listening to the debate and had got the message about the symbolic significance of high-rise architecture loud and clear.

Ken Livingstone’s description of Neil Cossons, and English Heritage, as a Taliban, on the basis of his opposition to office towers that threatened to swamp St Paul’s, sounded over the top at the time.

It is absurd now. But even after the outrages, the argument about towers is becoming ever shriller.

The Prince of Wales has started talking dirty about phallic symbols and monstrous egos, fatally mixing his metaphors about buildings ”with their heads in the clouds needing to keep their feet on the ground”, while presumably avoiding “the turds on the plazas”.—Dawn/The Observer News Service.