Vulnerability of Skyscrapers

"The most dominant architectural tendency of the time, institutional corporate modernism, tended to create buildings that went against the prescriptions of the civil defense planner - the glass-skinned Seagrams and Lever buildings in New York would be just two of the more conspicuous examples. Of course, after the Cold War and immediate nuclear threat subsided, the participants in the blast proof building discipline had to shift to new concerns like terrorism...continue."  --- Tom Vanderbilt

 Lever Building

Twin Towers in Ruins

"The Towers were built to withstand the stresses of hurricane-force winds, and to survive the heat of ordinary fires. After the 1993 Trade Center bombing, one of the engineers who worked on the towers' structural design in the 1960's even claimed that each one had been built to withstand the impact of a fully loaded, fully fueled Boeing 707, then the heaviest aircraft flying...continue." --- New York Times, September 12, 2001.