Mohamed Atta
Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta ( ; ""  ; September 1, 1968 – September 11, 2001) was an Egyptian hijacker and one of the ringleaders of the September 11 attacks in which four United States commercial aircraft were commandeered with the intention of destroying specific civilian targets. He served as the hijacker-pilot of American Airlines Flight 11 and crashed the plane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center as part of the coordinated attacks. At 33 years of age, he was the oldest of the 19 hijackers who took part in the attacks.
Mohamed Atta
At the Hamburg University of Technology, Atta studied under the guidance of the department chair, Dittmar Machule, who specialized in the Middle East. Atta was concerned about modern development and the construction of high-rise buildings in Cairo and other ancient cities in the Middle East. He believed that the large, impersonal, and often ugly apartment blocks built in the 1960s and 1970s had ruined old neighborhoods, and took away privacy and dignity from people. Atta's own family moved into such an apartment block in 1990, which to him was "a shabby symbol of Egypt's haphazard attempts to modernize and its shameless embrace of the West." For his thesis, Atta focused his studies on the ancient city of Aleppo in Syria. He explored the history of Aleppo's urban landscapes and the general themes of the conflict between Arab civilization and modernity. Atta criticized how the modern skyscrapers and development projects in Aleppo were disrupting the fabric of that city by blocking community streets and altering the skyline.