The Two Towers

The Two Towers may refer to the 2nd book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which Tolkien actually wrote as one book but the publishers made him divide it into 3 just because they didn’t believe the readers had a long enough attention span.  Maybe they were right and maybe they

We see things in other things. It's no big thing.

were wrong, we’ll never know, but what do publishers know, anyway?  Think about it.  Their job is to guess which books will be popular, print them up and get them into the book stores.  Of course, those books which are in the book stores are the only ones which get sold, so they’ve got a closed system, an absolute guarantee of success.  There might be loads of works of literary genius, real crowd pleasers, sitting and rotting unknown in their sad writer’s drawers, and no one would ever know, because a self-appointed group of experts didn’t think they would sell.  That may be changing as on-line self publishing becomes easier, but I digress.

The two towers, of course, could also refer to the World Trade Center in New York which was erased from the map of the planet, some say by Arab terrorists and others (like me) say that forces within the U.S. government did it, but that’s not the central contention of tonight’s blog.

The two towers could also refer to a pair of buildings (proposed) in Seoul, South Korea, which have some over sensitive Americans bent out of shape because of their resemblance to the World Trade Center.  Actually, because of a “cloud,” a multi-storey bridge between the two buildings, allowing for a lot of restaurants and such with really nice views and making it easy to get from one building to the other without going all the way back down to ground level.  The cloud makes it resemble the World Trade Center as it was collapsing.

First of all, I’d like to say that I like the design and I like the idea.  Des Moines, Iowa, where I’m from, has a skywalk system linking a lot of the buildings downtown, and it is a godsend on a freezing winter’s day.  When they first built that, my immediate thought was “Manhattan is made for this.  They could seriously expand the available square footage of office space, reduce traffic and create a space free of graffiti and winos.”  As far as I know, they still haven’t done it.

Secondly, instead of looking at this building as a gaffe, an insensitive reminder of a horrible incident, it could be viewed as a memorial.  If the Americans had had their shit together at all, something looking very much like this building would be on the old site now, as opposed to a work of construction still in progress, more than 10 years later.

Basically, though, I think it’s a pretty cool looking building, the resemblance is coincidental, and some people are just way too sensitive.