Aftermath

The plans to rebuild the World Trade Center as an assemblage of postmodernist buildings with a 1,776-foot glass tower as the centerpiece (not literally, it will be built on the northwest corner of Ground Zero, where the U.S. Customs House - World Trade Center Building 6 - used to stand) is a supremely asinine idea for rebuilding the site; all it does is reintroduce the grandiose, blustering architectural style of the Twin Towers, whose cold, sterile appearance inspired awe and wonder from a distance but was overpowering when viewed close-up. The original World Trade Center wasn't really built for people; it was built to monumentalize the egos of the business and political elites that built it. The new towering structures, along with the so-called "Freedom Tower," manage to look far uglier and even more foreboding than Minoru Yamasaki's design.

Not much has been said about the architecture of the Pentagon, which was damaged but not destroyed in the terrorist attacks two years ago, but in many ways, the Defense Department's main building is a horizontal World Trade Center. Just as the Twin Towers symbolized raw economic might, the Pentagon signifies military supremacy in its rawest and grandest form. This is a more unsettling symbolism than what the Twin Towers embodied. For the past fifty years, the United States has used its military power indiscriminately to bomb civilians and destroy towns all over the world, ranging in military operations from overthrowing governments in Latin America to forcing its will in Vietnam. It's hard to see how all of this helps "defend" America. With its sprawling swagger, its isolation from the rest of Washington, and its sheer bulk, the Pentagon represents the use of brute military force gone wrong.

I don't for a second condone the attacks on the Pentagon or the World Trade Center. But it makes me wonder whether the architecture of the buildings themselves played the most significant role in their choice by al Qaeda as targets. It was Winston Churchill, after all, who declared, "We shape our buildings; thereafter, our buildings shape us."

The enemy we are fighting in this war on terror has no great armies or missiles. They work with knives and box cutters. They send a dozen-odd commandos into our nation incognito to do their dirty work. The mere physical structure of the Pentagon is outmoded for such a war. All it's suited for is to run an empire. We are a republic , not an empire. It's time we downsize our military and rebuild the Pentagon as a smaller, leaner, and quite frankly, more aesthetically pleasing Defense (certainly not a War) Department building.