Can't Believe Bryk Dissed the Towers; Attack on NYC About as Serious as a Broken Leg; Slamming the "Drawer"; Reader Reaction, Pt. 3; Oh, and Armond Sucks; More

I found your cover illustration of Sept. 26 judgmental and incendiary. An American born and raised in New Jersey, I studied Islam at Brown. Just as American society is made up of interactive components, so, too, does the Muslim world practice varying ways of living and thinking. Coca-Cola aims to take over the world as much as might the three-headed serpent on your cover. I strongly hold that now is the time to practice world peace.

K. Lepetic, Brooklyn

Not Just Two Big Buildings

Too bad William Bryk sees fit to trash-talk the esthetics of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center when neither they nor their architect, Minoru Yamasaki, is around to defend themselves any longer ("New York City," 9/19). He follows in the footsteps of The New York Times architecture critics and their ilk, including Ada Louise Huxtable, who unleashed a similar rant in The Wall Street Journal; their theories of art apparently do not let them proceed past the 19th century, or perhaps the Renaissance.

For a more openminded view of the WTC's architecture and cultural significance, I recommend historian Angus Kress Gillespie's book Twin Towers: The Life of New York City's World Trade Center. The narrow windows Bryk criticizes as inhumane were designed for the most humane of reasons: they were narrow so that even sufferers from acrophobia (of which Yamasaki was one) would feel secure, and they extended from floor to ceiling so that workers on the interior of every floor had panoramic views. Yamasaki purposely avoided the faceless all-glass facade of the International style. The two towers were a powerful piece of abstract sculpture, iconic in their shape, subject to a variety of interpretations. Some saw them as the prongs of a magnet drawing people to our shore; they could be seen as the pylons of a mighty doorway leading to boundless opportunity; to me, seeing them catch the varying hues of the sun, they were two shafts of sunlight reaching up to the heavens, symbolizing our aspirations. They were an image of our vision of the transcendent. No wonder they could be difficult to "comprehend;" the transcendent is always "incomprehensible."

Bryk should at least get his facts straight before he criticizes. The towers were built to withstand the impact not of a Boeing 747, but a 707, the largest airplane of its day; the jumbo 747 and the 757 and 767 used in the attack came later. His calculations, as he says meanspiritedly of the architect, "are a little off."

Cora A. Sowa, Manhattan

Time on Your Hands?

The usually thoughtful and fascinating William Bryk fell down on the job in his last column when he suggested that, somehow, the design of the World Trade Center's load-bearing walls contributed to the towers' collapse. No design could have saved them from the recent attack. A "traditional" skyscraper design, with the curtain walls hung from a load-bearing steel skeleton, would not have performed any better and might have been far worse.

I don't know if the architect, Minoru Yamasaki, really claimed the towers were "engineered to withstand the impact of a Boeing 747," but given the timing of the development of that model of airplane, which went into service around 1970, and the design of the Towers in the late 1960s, it's more likely he had in mind the much smaller 707. And while I'm no fan of Yamasaki or the towers, the fact is that they did withstand the impact of a 767 (an aircraft with a maximum take-off weight of about 350,000 pounds, or about 10 percent more than the maximum take-off weight of the 707, about 325,000 pounds). Mr. Bryk is simply wrong to suggest that the failure of the towers is attributable to the Port Authority's obsession with maximizing the rentable square footage and the resulting design that "discard[ed] the conventional interior support columns: the steel framework used in older buildings." The tens of thousands of pounds of burning jet fuel that spilled out of the 767s and melted the steel walls would have doomed a building with a conventional steel skeleton, too.

The comparison to the incident in which a B-25 struck the Empire State Bldg.?but did not undermine the building's structural integrity?is fatuous. Even if fully laden, a B-25's maximum take-off weight was only 34,000 pounds, less than 10 percent of the weight of the 767s. And, since the B-25 that struck the Empire carried no bombs, it probably weighed under 30,000 pounds.

Then there is the difference in their speeds at the time of collision. A B-25's maximum speed was 275 mph; when it struck the Empire State Bldg., that B-25 was probably going at about 200 mph or slower. I haven't read any estimates of the 767's speed at impact (surely far below its maximum of approximately 580 mph), but it's reasonable to estimate a speed in excess of 300 mph. In short, while the towers may have been ugly and soulless, they were well engineered and performed quite admirably under the brutal circumstances.

Pete Reiser, Manhattan

William Bryk replies: Two recent books on the WTC, Angus Kress Gillespie's Twin Towers and Eric Darton's Divided We Stand, both published in 1999, were my primary references in writing my article on the World Trade Center; I also relied upon The AIA Guide to New York City and online sources. On page 117 of Divided We Stand, Darton writes: "[World Trade Center architect Minoru] Yamasaki had engineered his towers to withstand the force of a 747 shearing into them..." His engineering didn't live up to his expectations on Sept. 11.

Sowa's attempted definition of the World Trade Center as the transcendent sculpture incarnating our aspirations (without bothering to define those aspirations) is empty rhetoric: a kind of esthetic three-card monte.

From the Capital of the Ilk

So one William Bryk Esq. concludes that in the WTC "ordinary people paid the price for their rulers' games." What games are those that justify the mass extermination of innocent ordinary people? Has everyone on the left been reduced to such brainless automatons that they can only mouth reflexive anti-American cliches? Or is that all they ever really had, and the WTC attack is simply exposing the rotten foundations of their lunatic view of the world?

We hear Michael Moore tell us that rejecting the Kyoto protocol was a factor in the "universal" hatred of America, as if fanatical Islamists attacking the Great Satan are worried about CO2 levels. Susan Sontag wails about our failure to understand legitimate grievances, as if that justifies indiscriminate slaughter. Remember, this is the Afghan cult that punishes women for leaving their homes without a male, where public hangings serve as sport and where possession of a radio can be a crime. Would it really make it okay if we understood them better? What else do we need to know? Should we feel their pain? Give them a hug? Perhaps the only positive result of this horrible event is that many of the American people who have mercifully avoided the rantings of the left are now seeing the truth about such as Bryk and his ilk: the almost lurid sel