Dr. Brian Goldstein, UNM
September 11, 2016

Fifteen years after the destruction of New York City’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the structures known as the “twin towers” still loom large in public memory. Indeed, the World Trade Center, a project completed in 1973 according to the plans of modernist Minoru Yamasaki, stood for nearly three decades as a work much more notable as a global icon than as an architectural design. The identical towers became synonymous with New York’s skyline, the city’s emergence as one of the world’s leading metropolises, and the era’s accelerating globalization. The World Trade Center developed into a celebrated global symbol, but so too did that symbolic status contribute to its eventual demise. Yet recent efforts to rebuild the center’s site have not denied this status amidst a changing geopolitical context. Dr. Goldstein’s talk will trace the history of this most iconic global symbol.

Dr. Brian D. Goldstein is an urban and architectural historian, and Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of New Mexico. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and was an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching examine the intersection of politics, social movements, and the built environment, especially in the United States in the twentieth century. His book, The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle Over Harlem, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in February 2017.

Supported by Sandia National Labs and Haverland Carter Lifestyle Group