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Dr. Angus Kress Gillespie: I wonder, why so much effort and energy is poured into pure
research. I remember my own father used to say that research was simply learning more
and more about less and less. Well, that's a tough question to answer but I would say
that most of us professors are motivated by intense curiosity. It's curiosity that drives
us, and in the early 1990's, I became fascinated with the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
I was asking myself all kinds of questions, like why is this building so tall? I started
to look into it, and to my amazement, very few, really none, there were no books on the
subject written by serious art historical critics. I was puzzled by this disconnect
between highbrow culture and lowbrow culture. Why a man in the street thought it was the
most important building in New York, and architectural critics ignored it all together. To my way
of thinking, the World Trade Center was comparable to Big Ben in London, or the Eiffel Tower
in Paris. It was a symbol, a national symbol, an important icon, but then the question arose,
well a symbol of what exactly? Was it a symbol of Wall St (in which its close proximity)
? Was it a symbol of the skyline of Manhattan? The Port of New York and New Jersey? American
Capitalism? American exceptionalism? I came to the conclusion that the World Trade Center
was really a symbol for America itself, and in a strange way, the terrorists and I were
on the same wavelength. They too felt it was a symbol of America, that's why they attacked
it. Well, I started writing my book, and I had to come up with some sort of organizational
scheme. I wrote about the political background, about the tug of war between New York and
New Jersey, and all the controversies with the Port Authority and how they finally decided
that New York would get the Port Authority and New Jersey would get the Path Trains.
I went into the engineering of it, a very complicated building. If you're going to build
something that's 110 stories tall, it takes very special engineering adaptations, the
use, for example, a very lightweight steel trusses in construction. I talked about the
construction itself, which was tricky because remember it was built in downtown Manhattan,
and so you couldn't just bring all of the materials to build it and park it on the city
street, you had to bring the steel in one piece at a time as it was needed. It was a
very complicated process. I also discussed at some length the concept of the world trade
center. You have to remember that when it was designed, back in the 50's and 60's, there
weren't any fax machines, we didn't have the internet, and there were bicycle messengers
all over lower Manhattan to coordinate the world of international trade. Shipping agencies,
custom brokers, all kinds of people, ship suppliers, they had to deal with each other,
but the import-export business was scattered in small offices all over lower Manhattan.
The idea of the World Trade Center, originally was that it was to be a World Trade Center.
That all the steam ship companies, and the import export companies, all of them were
to be located under one roof, or perhaps we should say twin roof. In any event, this book
came out in late 1999, and it was published by Rutgers University Press, and they printed
up some 3000 copies, which is not a bad press run for a regular University press book. Time
went by and by the late summer of 2001, 2000 copies of the book had been sold. Most of
those were purchased by my mother, but suddenly, along came September 11th, 2001, there was
a tremendous demand from the public to find out more about the twin towers. Within an
hour of the attack, my book was number one on Amazon.com. It remained on the New York
Time's bestseller list for 6 weeks. One of the reviewers said I had captured the richness
and complexity of the Twin Towers. Naturally, I was very pleased with that complement. But
as it turns out, mine was perhaps the most complete record of the building. Now that
the building is gone, I donated all of my research notes and primary materials to the
Rutgers University Archive Library, and people have come from all over the world to access
my primary material, because of course the primary documents of the Port Authority were
lost in the attack. So, I would say when it comes to pure research, in advance, you're
never going to know the true value of a project before you start out on it.
Announcer: To learn more about Dr. Angus Gillespie and his research, please visit rci.rutgers.edu/~angusgi
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