Where does this leave Foster? He threw everything at this project. Within minutes of the live TV presentations starting in New York, the Foster office launched a complete high-tech website devoted solely to the scheme, complete with movies. Simultaneously the Foster publicity machine slid smoothly into electronic overdrive. Newsdesks around the world knew immediately what Foster had said, what his design meant, how it would all fit together. In terms of marketing he made his rivals, such as America's Richard Meier or Berlin-based Daniel Libeskind, look pedestrian. Given the way the gentle but determined Libeskind and the well-connected Vinoly soon started to make headway, you have to wonder: was Norman trying just a bit too hard, too soon?

He wanted this job so badly, it hurt. "I've never seen Norman so fired up," said one of his colleagues at the time "He is really, really, up for it." For him, this would be the crowning achievement of a career that had already been astonishingly successful by any standards. For a British architect to have redesigned the Reichstag for the German Parliament was extraordinary enough, but Foster, who studied with his fellow Lord, Richard Rogers, at Yale, has always wanted to make it big in America as well as his customary stamping grounds of Europe and the Far East. He had won a handful of Stateside buildings - a museum extension here, a university campus building there - but only recently landed his first New York commission. That is a 42-storey tower for the Hearst Corporation, soon to be built, that is essentially a prototype for his new 98-floor, 1,764-foot Twin Towers proposal.

Foster was in New York presenting his ideas for the Hearst Tower on September 11, 2001. When he got back home he immediately called a conference of experts to consider the implications of the terrorist attack on skyscraper design. From what came out of that, he is confident that his "twinned tower" design, with its beefy triangulated steel frame, is strong enough. Because it is joined to its twin, it becomes even stronger. And because of those connections, people can escape from one tower to the other in an emergency.