Eric Darton

I have around a dozen books on the World Trade Center, both in its first incarnation and its post-9/11 rebuilding. Books on the original Twin Towers tend to focus on politics and architecture, the former about the Port Authority and the latter about Minoru Yamasaki's feat of designing and building two 110-story towers on landfill near the tip of Lower Manhattan. Although Eric Darton delves into those same realms, he takes a different approach in Divided We Stand, writing a "biography" that is more of a cultural history than political or architectural histories. Darton also has a knack for finding stories or facts that seem tangential but are integral to the making of the Twin Towers – or at least he has included information that has been left out of other histories. He looks to the 1811 grid of Manhattan, Le Corbusier, the blast outside JP Morgan's bank in 1920, and elsewhere for sources of the Twin Towers' realization but also their attempted destruction — "attempted" in 1999, at least, when the book first came out. But Darton's choice to start the book with a scenario for its destruction is prescient, as is his exploration of how the mind of an architect building the towers and that of a terrorist wanting to bring them down were aligned – through cold abstraction, that is.… (altro)