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"The Trade Center is an architectural martyr, our only skyscraper martyr, and a martyr to democracy. Penn Station was a martyr to preservation, and its loss galvanized us into realizing how critical great buildings are and led to a resolve not to let that happen again. The Trade Center was a martyr in the broadest sense to the values of our society, and also a modern symbol. Although we like to think of ourselves as technologically very advanced, our architectural symbols are things like the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol. So a modern piece of architecture symbolizing the national ideals is quite a remarkable moment. The replanning of the Trade Center connects to preservation. One of the things for which there was broad consensus after the Trade Center fell was the need to put the streets back on that 16-acre block and restore a more traditional urban framework. There again we see the value shift. Nobody would have ever wanted [the attack] to happen, but people are viewing it as an opportunity to correct some things in that area. It's being used in a positive way."
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"But the new generation of house designs takes a different view of the role of rooms, space and usage. The idea that a house was more than a shelter led the influential Swiss designer and thinker Le Corbusier to describe the house as a "machine for living in" in 1923. From his philosophy of architecture flowed the idea that we can improve our lives by standardising and rationalising the design of our houses. But by 1969, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard was writing: "If I were asked to name the chief benefits of the house, I should say the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace."
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