Architect Watched Twin Towers Go Up

John Rudolph was an aspiring architect in the early 1970s. Growing up in Jersey gave him access and a front-row seat for the construction of the world's tallest buildings, the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, in Lower Manhattan.

“I worked for an architect/model builder who had offices across the river from the towers. I'd brown bag it and sit on a park bench every lunch time over every vacation – summer and Christmas – and watch them build those towers. As an architectural student, it was thrilling,” said Rudolph, a principal with Nashua-based PMR Architects.

When Rudolph heard that the neighboring town of Hudson was going to be the recipient of a 23-foot beam from Tower 1, which would be incorporated into a memorial, he wanted to be part of the process.

“I have a lot of connections to 9/11 – my brother lost a colleague who worked in the financial ward in Jersey. My cousin had been at a meeting at the Pentagon and was just leaving the meeting when the plant hit. And a college classmate of mine from Penn State, her sister-in-law was a flight attendant on Flight 93,” said Rudolph.

On that day, Rudolph was in his office when the phone rang. It was his wife, Hudson Fire Lt. Michelle Rudolph.

“She told me a plane had hit a tower at the World Trade Center, so I turned on my radio. Then, my wife called back and said a second plan had hit. At that point, I knew something was up. I gave everyone the day off. I just told them to go home, and keep in touch,” Rudolph said.

He headed home himself, to Nashua, turned on the TV and watched the towers, which he'd watched incrementally rise above the New York City skyline, dissolve in an instant, into a pile of ashes, rubble and dust the size of 16 football fields.

“I was in shock as I watched the first tower fall. If anything, I would have thought it would keel over, not come straight down like it did,” Rudolph said.

As an architect he's considered all the theories that have swirled over how violently the towers collapsed – even theories of sabotage that have surfaced in the decade since.

“I'm not a structural engineer, and so I don't have a theory of my own. But the one that makes the most sense to me is that the intense heat made one level collapse on the next, and it just pancaked,” Rudolp said. “It wasn't designed for that weight and impact, floor to floor. Any other conspiracy theories are wacko.”

It wasn't until the 9/11 beam arrived in Hudson that Rudolph was struck by the true magnitude of the destruction.

“Just seeing the beam makes me wonder even more how the buildings came down.  That piece of steel we got for the monument is huge, it's so thick. Our initial hope was that the beam could be cut vertically to simulate two towers, but it can't be done – it would have taken us forever. That' how solid that one beam is, which makes it all that much harder to comprehend,” Rudolph said.

Instead, a plexiglass tower representing Tower II was constructed and planted in the ground, alongside the beam. In addition to the symbolic towers, there is a Pentagon-shaped stone wall and ample green space, symbolic of the other two 9/11 crash sites. Stone markers depicting a timeline of events create a memorial path.

Rudolph said 9/11 has also changed the construction industry, and the way high rises are designed and constructed.

“There's much more thought put into high rises now. As for impact, the World Trade Center was built in the 1970s to withstand the impact of a 707, so that it it had been hit by that, it would have survived. Today planes are twice as big with twice as much fuel, so modern buildings are built for impacts far greater than they used to be,” Rudolph said.

On a personal note, 9/11 has also changed the way Rudolph lives his life, impressing upon him the urgency of not putting off for the future what matters most today.

“I definitely live life more to the fullest since 9/11. I think I don't take anything for granted --  bought myself Corvette – I had always wanted one, but after 9/11 I said 'Screw it; I'm just going to do it.' Other than that, it took me four years to get back on an airplane," Rudolph said. "I couldn't fly again until, finally, in 2005, I took my family on a vacation to Europe to celebrate my daughter's high school graduation.”

Rudolph had submitted a design for the memorial, but it was never fully realized – the project ran out of time and money, as it was dependent on fund-raising and donations to make it a reality.

“We gathered a construction estimate for the original design of $138,000 – I believe they only raised $30,000 in the end, however a lot of in-kind donations have made the monument possible. We were given a big discount on everything from concrete to sod – and the volunteer efforts of garden clubs, citizens and fire fighters working on own time was tremendous,” Rudolph said. “And you can't measure the value of that.”