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International News • June 1, 2004
Vive la Stupidité. The punishment fits the crime. The collapse (punishment) is a direct result of the egomania (crime) of its architect-designer Paul Andreu. Egomania is not uncommon among architects. Roger Thibert, the French architect who brought Canada the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, (a similar building disaster) suffered from it also.
General De Gaulle also suffered from egomania. Je me souviens: “Vive le Québec libre”—while he was a guest in Canada! The “genius” architect/engineer Paul Andreu had this oxymoron to proffer after the collapse: “The design of this terminal was adventurous (“audaceuse” is his word in French), but there was nothing revolutionary in the building methods used. I can’t explain what happened. I just don’t understand it.”
This is not true. The design and construction of this terminal brought a whole new dimension to building design with the use of composite carbonfibre, adapted from aircraft design. These concepts have never been used on a major civil engineering project. They were used in the rudder design of the Airbus that crashed in New York City on Nov. 12, 2001, killing 260 people. It is obvious to anyone who looks at this collapsed structure that it cannot support its own weight. It would be prudent to tear the whole terminal down, all $1 billion of it.
— Michael Hogan, Hogan & Greenfield (e-mail: hogangrn@passport.ca), Toronto, Canada.