Twin Towers: Why the World Keeps Building Targets—and Calling Them Icons

Twin Towers: A Global Obsession With Going Up in Smoke
By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent, currently chain-smoking on a balcony in Kuala Lumpur

KUALA LUMPUR—Type “twin towers” into any search engine and you’ll get two things: a solemn parade of 9/11 retrospectives and glossy vacation selfies from the Petronas Towers. Humanity’s emotional bandwidth, it seems, is just wide enough to accommodate grief and Instagram in the same breath—provided the Wi-Fi is complimentary.

From the Strait of Malacca to the Hudson Strait, the phrase “twin towers” has become the Swiss-army knife of symbolism: terrorism, capitalism, architectural hubris, post-colonial ambition, and—if you squint—urban air-conditioning ducts. The original New York pair lasted 28 years before becoming the world’s most profitable snuff film. Their Malaysian cousins, taller by a vanity-driven 33 ft, have survived flash floods, currency implosions, and a revolving door of prime ministers who treat corruption like a frequent-flyer program. Both pairs, however, remain rock-solid metaphors for what happens when governments and developers share the same dealer.

Globalization’s neat trick is that every city now needs its own matching phalluses to be taken seriously. London has the Shard and… well, the other shard. Dubai has so many identical spires that architects reportedly use a “copy-paste” key. Even Nairobi, bless its optimistic heart, is erecting “twin towers” above a railway station that occasionally works. The unspoken rule: if you can’t project military power, at least project shadow.

The economic calculus is elegantly stupid. Tourism boards calculate that two towers double the postcard potential, while insurers calculate that two towers double the plane-crash payout. In both cases, the bill is forwarded to the nearest taxpayer, who is too busy queueing for visas to complain. Meanwhile, sovereign-wealth funds from Norway to Abu Dhabi buy floors they will never set foot on, proving that capitalism has finally achieved astral projection.

Security consultants—an industry that basically monetizes paranoia—have profited handsomely from the fear multiplier twins provide. Install one extra turnstile, declare a “ring of steel,” and you can bill the government for a whole bracelet. The Global South imports these precautions like designer handbags, replicating them in cities where the most pressing security concern is still the traffic light that works on Tuesdays only. Nothing says “world-class city” quite like bomb-proof garbage bins that can’t accommodate a half-eaten mango.

Environmentalists, ever the life of the party, point out that dual skyscrapers are basically solar-powered frying pans. Air-conditioning the Petronas Towers requires the output of a small coal plant, which Malaysia helpfully keeps on standby next to a beach that’s disappearing at 3 mm per year. New York’s Freedom Tower, meanwhile, prides itself on recycled rainwater, most of which is used to rinse the blood off Wall Street sidewalks after bonus day. Progress, like a cat, always lands on its feet—on top of your carbon budget.

Yet the psychological appeal endures. Humans are pattern-seeking mammals; give us two of anything and we see eyes, breasts, or the promise of immortality. Dictators understand this. Turkmenistan’s Berdymukhamedov recently sketched (yes, personally, with a gold pen) twin towers for Ashgabat shaped like bull horns. They will house a “Center for Achievements,” achievements still TBD. Still, blueprints were rushed to Chinese contractors before the ink dried, because nothing legitimizes a regime like symmetrical silhouettes on the horizon.

And so we climb, floor by floor, toward whatever passes for transcendence this decade. The towers rise, the planes circle, the markets fluctuate, and the rest of us swipe past it all on glowing rectangles made in the same factories that forged the steel. Every skyline is a Rorschach test: some see progress, some see target practice. Either way, the elevators keep dinging, the coffee keeps brewing, and the rent keeps climbing—proof that gravity is negotiable, but greed is not.

In the end, twin towers are simply mirrors held up to our collective id: the compulsion to build two of everything in case one gets knocked down. We call it resilience; the insurance industry calls it a premium. The universe, indifferent, calls it Tuesday.