Any recapitulation of the year will inevitably hinge around the tragedy of 11 September. The number 2001 evoked the metaphysical futurism of Kubrick, but from now on it will be undivorceable from the image of two passenger planes crashing into Manhattan’s tallest skyscrapers. When they were finished in 1976, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were the planet’s tallest, and a true ‘space odyssey’ in the technical feat of their implausible slenderness and double height record. A quarter-century later, the sizzling rubble in Ground Zero buried the vertical odyssey in the horizontal and smoking space of a ruin. Alongside several thousands of victims, here lie the confidence in the safety of technical culture, the cosmopolitan aplomb of economic globalization and the political innocence of a young empire.

This could well have been the year of European masters in America. It was the centenary of Louis Kahn, the Estonia-born architect who called the modern dogmas into question from his base in Philadelphia, and that of José Luis Sert, the Catalan disciple of Le Corbusier who after the Spanish Civil War went into exile in the United States: two eminent anniversaries joined in the summer by two major New York exhibitions on Mies, the German master who carried out the second half of his career in Chicago. In the end, the protagonist of the period would be neither of the three Americans-by-adoption, but an architect of Japanese origins born in Seattle and trained in New York, who set up his practice in Detroit: Minoru Yamasaki, the destruction of whose Twin Towers marked the year indelibly.