建筑专业英语文章.docx

C I T Y CULTURES Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crest of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. A gigantic mass is immobilized before our eyes. (de Certeau 1988: 91) Who built it? Anon, thats who. Nobody built the New York skyline. Nobody by the thousands. (Helene Hanff, Apple of My Eye, 1984: 35) Introduction: a city imagined On 11 September 2001, graphic images of the destruction of two of the worlds tallest buildings - the north and south towers of the World Trade Center in New York City - unfolded on television sets around the world. The enormity and complexity of this tragedy, while manifest, were, nevertheless, compounded by the fact that most people witnessed it as a media spectacle. Thus, it was within established media interpretative frames (including the plots and images of countless Hollywood movies) that their initial reactions were formed. But then in many respects New York is a media construction - the skyline of Manhattan is instantly and globally familiar even though the majority of the worlds population has never been there and will never go. Indeed, Manhattan emerged as a landscape of towers at the same time as film technology and the movie industry were developing in the United States. It was largely as a result of this coincidence that the Manhattan backdrop became one of the most significant and defining images not just of architectural modernism, but also of the values and achievements of the twentieth century. Manhattan equals Neiy York and New York is perhaps the worlds greatest city. It was within this set of imaginings that in the early 1970s the twin towers assumed their place both as potent symb