THE World Trade Center was an “ugly box” whose loss did no architectural damage to New York, one of the world’s most outspoken art critics has said.

“It was a large, scaleless lump, which completely dominated that end of Manhattan,” said Robert Hughes, best known in Britain for The Shock of the New, his 1980s BBC television series and book. “It only became iconic when it was knocked over by a bunch of Arabs.”

Hughes, an Australian who has lived in New York for many years, was appalled by the attacks, but he also expressed relief that Osama Bin Laden’s terrorists did not fly their planes into towers of greater aesthetic merit.

“It would have been terrible if those Al-Qaeda guys had knocked down either the Chrysler Building or the Rockefeller Center,” said Hughes last week. “These two buildings are the architectural gems of New York. Suppose a bunch of turbaned terrorists had tried to do that?”

Hughes, who saw the destruction of the north tower from his apartment on the morning of September 11, 2001, added that “nobody praised the design when the World Trade Center was put up”. The twin towers were built between 1966 and 1972.

His comments follow the recent unveiling of designs for new tower blocks to replace the World Trade Center. They include towers by Lords Foster and Rogers, the renowned British architects.

The critic, who nearly died in a car crash in 1999, expressed his annoyance at what he called the “endless dickering” over what to erect at ground zero and how to commemorate 9/11.

“This is in part because we face here in New York a poverty of ideas for commemorative art and architecture,” he said. “The whole thing has also been colonised by power politics and real estate people.”

Hughes added that New York was now “too monumentconscious. I don’t think we need monuments for 9/11, though you can’t say that to the relatives of those who died. What I’d prefer is for an empty space to be left or perhaps some smaller memorial like the wall in Washington with the names of those killed in Vietnam”.

Hughes, whose memoirs, Things I Didn’t Know, are published at the end of this month, said he had little time for the whole idea of creating monumental-scale buildings.

“The 1990s Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris is just one example. It’s horrible, as were all those other grand projects put up by [President François] Mitterrand,” he said.

Despite his lack of regret at the loss of the twin towers, Hughes will never forget the day itself. After seeing the north tower struck by a hijacked airliner, he went down onto the street.

“I then saw the plane hit the south tower. I thought, ‘Christ, I’m going to die.’ It had been such a beautiful, clear day, and then I saw these white and dark things falling from the sky. The white things turned out to be documents and bits of paper, and the dark things were people.”

Hughes is in no rush to make peace with his Australian critics, who seem to regard him as a treacherous exile. “When Australia was commemorating its bicentenary, I suggested a memorial with the names of the first convicts on it,” he said. “That hardly went down well.”

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