Tale of Two Towers

"This is a book about towers. It is a book about monumental architecture erect with symbolism; it is a book about the data flows that keep our lives afloat in the early twenty-first century. It is a book about the Eiffel Tower (1889); it is a book about the One World Trade Tower on the Ground Zero site in New York City (2014); but it is also a book about the Twin Towers (1970/1) that no longer exist. It is a tale of two cities, Paris and New York, haunted by recent terror attacks, but it is also a story of how the rest of the world remains latent in these urban topographies, not least because of the digital technology that pervades them. A Tale of Two Towers investigates the relationship between, on the one hand, prodigious architecture imbued with heavy power symbolism, and on the other hand, the digital communication, which is invisibly transmitted via the tips of these towers and through wires and cables in the ground beneath them yet which often have more direct impact on our lives than the physical symbolic edifices themselves. This is a book that takes its starting point in the apparent disproportionality between the architectural language of power, which towers above us in the urban landscape, and their often symbolically understated function as transmitters of wireless information. It is thus a book about attempts to take solace in potent architectural form. Yet as we move from the birth of the Eiffel Tower up until the present day, we expose these efforts as being increasingly emptied of cultural content and indicative of new and arguably unarticulated, calm, and latent regimes of cultural signification"--