Byline: AMY ELLIS NUTT

There are buildings more elegant (the Chrysler), more powerful (the Empire State) and more majestic (St. Patrick's). But American architect Minoru Yamasaki had something else in mind 35 years ago when he rejected more than a hundred different schemes and settled on the idea of twin towers for his design of the World Trade Center.

"The World Trade Center should, because of its importance, become a living representation of man's belief in humanity . . . his belief in the cooperation of men and, through this cooperation, his ability to find greatness," he said.

If it was possible for a super skyscraper consisting of two towers more than 1,300 feet tall to feel human, then the World Trade Center did. Thrumming with life, the towers weren't monuments to an architect's imagination so much as a celebration of utilitarianism.

The towers had become familiar fixtures in our visual memory, a part of the personal geography of our daily lives. Like urban lighthouses, from the hills of Watchung to the Sourland Mountains, from the Palisades Parkway and the New Jersey Turnpike, from Routes 78 and 80, 22 and 24, the towers gave us a fix on where we were - and where we were going.

And so when they were obliterated Tuesday by terrorists in an apocalyptic crescendo of fire and ash, something more than our visual compass was shaken. Our understanding of humanity was too.

The history of European...