All Intensive Purposes

Not the least odd thing about this entire episode [9/11] is that it marked the only time in its twenty-five-year history when the World Trade Center got reverential reviews. At the time it was built, you never heard a good word for it, from architects or anyone else. In general New Yorkers decried it as an out-of-scale, monotonous monster, a giant exercise in featherbedding imposed on lower Manhattan by the then governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, who filled it with floor after floor of government offices. Nobody loved the thing until two planes hijacked by Arab fanatics made it compulsory for Americans to do so.

Robert Hughes, "Master Builders," The New York Review Of Books 46, 48 (Sep. 27, 2007) (a review of Martin Filler's Makers of Modern Architecture). But nobody loved the thing after 9/11, either -- they just mourned its absence.