John Zils watched the World Trade Center burn on a television on the ninth floor of the Santa Fe Building, where the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is headquartered. “I would have never ever dreamed those buildings would have collapsed in their entirety,” says Zils, a structural engineer who, in his 33 years at the firm, has worked on the John Hancock Center, the Sears Tower, the Haj Terminal at King Abdul Aziz International Airport in Saudi Arabia, and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. “When it became obvious what was happening I rolled up my drawings for the Sears Tower and the John Hancock building. We got out of here and went to the Union League Club and got a room there and then called the Sears Tower and the Hancock and told them where we were. If anything happened and they needed help, we stayed there for the day.”
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Besides clambering through the debris at Ground Zero, Zils and a colleague were assigned to inspect 7 of some 400 nearby buildings for structural damage. “One late afternoon the first week we were there, we stood on the roof of a building immediately adjacent to the towers site when the sun was just starting to go down,” he says. “It was the most gruesome, grotesque experience you can imagine, because the sun was being filtered through all the smoke and steam. If there was a description of hell on earth, this was it. We stood there for ten minutes and didn’t say anything.”
