Minoru Yamasaki the American architect of the World Trace Center designed Fahd Dhahran Air Terminal in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia before he was commissioned to design the WTC. There is this article going around published in 2001 in Slate:
“For Yamasaki, an architect with a keen mathematical mind and a taste for ornamental pattern-work, this brush with the intricate geometries of Islamic architecture was inspiring, and he began to incorporate arabesques and arches into his work. For the next 12 to 15 years he played with Islamic forms in projects as diverse as the Federal Science Pavilion at the Seattle World’s Fair, the Eastern Airlines Terminal at Logan Airport, and even the North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, Ill.
Yamasaki received the World Trade Center commission the year after the Dhahran Airport was completed. Yamasaki described its plaza as “a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area.” True to his word, Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca’s courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city’s bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really. Yamasaki’s courtyard mimicked Mecca’s assemblage of holy sites—the Qa’ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca’s.
At the base of the towers, Yamasaki used implied pointed arches—derived from the characteristically pointed arches of Islam—as a transition between the wide column spacing below and the dense structural mesh above. (Europe imported pointed arches from Islam during the Middle Ages, and so non-Muslims have come to think of them as innovations of the Gothic period.) Above soared the pure geometry of the towers, swathed in a shimmering skin, which doubled as a structural web—a giant truss. Here Yamasaki was following the Islamic tradition of wrapping a powerful geometric form in a dense filigree, as in the inlaid marble pattern work of the Taj Mahal or the ornate carvings of the courtyard and domes of the Alhambra.”
This makes a lot of sense (except the idiotic assumption in the article that Bin Ladin was aware of the design symbolism). I have a photo of the courtyard I took from the Millennium hotel in 1999, I don’t feel like publishing it again now. It really does look like the black stone on an axis. In general there is a lot of cross-pollination in Architecture, for example as I wrote about the Leaked Proposal for the Masjid al-Haram Mosque in Mecca, the pointed arches that appear in the WTC and even in the new Mecca design and being touted as “Islamic” in fact have Roman or even Byzantine roots. Never mind the cultural symbols of the Hagar and Ishmael (boy that’s a schlep…)
Further reading: