The Title Goes Here The subtitle goes here The Author goes here Body text Architecture, Al-Qaeda, and the World Trade Center Rethinking Relations Between War, Modernity, and City Spaces After 9/11 Julian Reid University of Sussex The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center has been widely interpreted as representing a new form of terrorism born of anti-Western political sentiment. This article challenges such interpretations by contextualizing the attack not as an original act in creating a new form of terrorism born out- side the West but as the culminating act in the perpetration of a relatively long-standing tradition of waging war on modern architectural forms that originates in the West itself. The argument is that we can understand Al-Qaeda not as a force born outside Western control and civilization but, in opposition to that reading, as very much a product of the development of Western modernity. The weight of symbolic value that Al-Qaeda derived from its attack on the World Trade Center was, this article argues, a product of the extent to which the vertical and orthogonal form of that particular building had become incongruous with the newfound fluidity and dynamism of more contemporary Western forms. Keywords: Al-Qaeda; terrorism; war; architecture; World Trade Center; modernity; Virilio; tech- nology; city; politics; cybernetics Author’s Note: Many thanks to Claudia Aradau for suggestions on secondary literatures while revising this work. Thank you also to Matteo Mandarini for pushing me on the question of the molarity of Virilio’s conception of war—a problem too large to resolve here. And special thanks to Laura Junka for encouraging me to write the piece in the first place. space & culture vol. 7 no. 4, november 2004 396-408 DOI: 10.1177/1206331204268915 ©2004 Sage Publications 396 at Lancaster University Library on February 17, 2015 sac.sagepub.com Downloaded from