American Experience
The Center of the World: Interview Outtakes

Carol Willis:
video | transcript

The Public's Opinion of Skyscrapers 1 -- Opposition to the World Trade Center2 -- Tall Buildings3 -- The Public's Opinion of Skyscrapers4 -- On Rebuilding at Ground Zero

Mike Wallace Pete Hamill Carol Willis Guy Tozzoli
Leslie Robertson Camilo José Vergara Niall Ferguson Philippe Petit
William Langewiesche Ed Koch Mario Cuomo Ada Louise Huxtable

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I think that in the days before 9/11 in New York, from the 1990s or so on, there was a kind of psychology in the city that was against height, in favor of human scale and urban places, which are of course not antithetical to skyscraper development, but which had a kind of rejection of the hubris of the World Trade Center as a specific example, but in general of the kind of overbearing, shadowing presence of great towers in the human activity of the street and New York. And so skyscrapers had become, I think, a kind of victim to a grassroots community-based response to the kind of idea of neighborhood life and urban interaction that New Yorkers liked to think represented themselves. And this was illustrated and very much advocated by municipal regulation and new zoning laws. So in fact in New York it's very difficult to build a building of great height, of excessive height and of great showmanship, because the kinds of cultural and regulatory restrictions on that kind of ambition are a kind of community consensus.