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A year after her escape from the WTC, architect Laurie Balbo argues for
safety in design.
By Wendy Talarico
The Metropolis Observed
October 2002
On September 11 Laurie Balbo was at her desk on the 82nd floor of the
World Trade Center's north tower. She is an architect in the engineering
department of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Balbo's heart-rending
account of her escape from the building, written on the recommendation of
a trauma counselor, was e-mailed to Metropolis shortly after the
attacks on something of a whim. She was tired of telling her story to everyone
from her former college roommates to her husband's family in England. By
publishing it on the Metropolis Web site (www.metropolismag.com),
Balbo thought she could point friends and relatives to the magazine for
a full explanation--and save herself the anguish of telling the story again
and again.
Balbo's story drew more praise and commentary than anything ever posted
on our site. One respondent said it "left me holding my breath."
Another wrote, "I'm adding her to my list of heroes."
Metropolis caught up with Balbo almost a year after the attacks.
Still with the Port Authority, she is now working in downtown Newark, after
eight months in a temporary office at the Port of Newark. She is on
the 15th floor of her new building. "It's a nice place,"
Balbo says, "but I keep asking myself, 'How do I get out of here?'"
She compares her heightened safety awareness to suddenly being confined
to a wheelchair and realizing how hard it is to get around. "After
being in something like this," Balbo says, "you realize that the
most important thing about a building is how to get out of it."
"It was not the buildings that killed people, it was the terrorists,"
she emphasizes. "People died, yes. But an astounding number of us walked
out." Designers and engineers cannot prevent another attack, Balbo
says, but they can better equip the occupants to escape. She feels strongly
that architects need to think beyond meeting safety codes. "It's teaching
people how to survive," Balbo says. "How do you break out of a
stopped elevator? How do you kick through the drywall and get out of a sealed
conference room? We have to give the people inside as much information as
we can. It's a role we never thought of architects as having." And
it's a change, she says, that has to happen: "How do you lure people
back into those tall buildings? You can't unless you can make them feel
safe."
Balbo is angered that instead of taking up this role some architects are
rushing to get a share of the Lower Manhattan action. "Architects were
publicly vocal about what ought to be built in the void," she says,
"yet there was general silence regarding how to protect the future
occupants of those designs."
Regarding a memorial at the site, Balbo likes the idea of leaving the footprints
of the towers undeveloped, as park space. "What amazes me is the amount
of light there now, without the towers," she says. "It's surprisingly
bright. It makes you realize what a shadow they cast over the entire area.
The skyline looks like it used to, in the sixties. There is something good
about that."
Laurie Balbo's original post to the Metropolis Web site can be
read at
http://www.metropolismag.com/html/wtc/wtc_lauriebalbo_1102.html.
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