AOL News (Aug. 20) -- Lost in the cacophonous debate over plans to build an Islamic cultural center just blocks from ground zero is a seldom-discussed aspect of the former World Trade Center itself: It was a complex loaded with Islamic architectural references.
Having worked for the Saudi royal family on projects such as the Dhahran International Airport, Minoru Yamasaki, the Japanese-American architect who designed the World Trade Center, was deeply influenced by Islamic design, experts say. In fact, Yamasaki incorporated design aspects found in the Muslim holy city of Mecca into many of his projects, including the World Trade Center.
AP
This 1985 photo shows one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center from the ground up.
Whether it was his use of repeating, pointed arches, the solitary courtyard in the heart of lower Manhattan, or the exterior ornamentation that referenced other landmarks of Islamic design, Yamasaki, who died in 1986, was not shy about showing off his stylistic influences.
"Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca's courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city's bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers -- minarets, really," architect Laurie Kerr wrote in Slate in a 2001 article. "Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites."
The pointed arches at the base of each of the twin towers was seen as especially emblematic of Islamic design.
"The idea of a pointed, ribbed arch was beautifully replicated in the World Trade Center," Nezar AlSayyad, a University of California, Berkeley, architecture professor who worked with Yamasaki, told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004. "It's ironic it was used in the World Trade Center, which is then understood by the hijackers as a symbol of Western capitalism."