"The World Trade Center's architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was a favorite designer of the Binladin family's patrons — the Saudi royal family — and a leading practitioner of an architectural style that merged modernism with Islamic influences. The story starts in the late 1950s, when Yamasaki, a second-generation Japanese-American, won the commission to design the King Fahd Dhahran Air Terminal in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. His design had a rectilinear, modular plan with pointed arches, interweaving tracery of prefabricated concrete, and even a minaret of a flight tower. In other words, it was an impressive melding of modern technology and traditional Islamic form. The Saudis admired it so much that they put a picture of it on one of their banknotes."
