When Mohammed Atta flew a Boeing 767 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center he knew, perhaps more clearly than most of Manhattan's inhabitants, the power of architecture to define a city. A student of town planning at Hamburg, Atta also had a degree in architecture from Cairo University.
The hole that he and his cohorts left in both the skyline and the psyche of New York prompted one of the most extraordinary shifts in the city's culture of building: the arrival en masse of the omnipresent band of globe-trotting, multi-award-winning international architects who have been shaping and reshaping the skylines of the world's cities. Foster, Rogers, Piano, Nouvel, Herzog & de Meuron, Koolhaas: every big figure from contemporary architecture is building there now, and building big.
