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Assessing the cultural and architectural aftermath of September 11th.
By Michael Sorkin
January 2002
Two weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center, hundreds of designers,
educators and students gathered in the Great Hall at Cooper Union. They
heard this controversial speech.
The World Trade Center tragedy has a particular significance for us
as architects: buildings were the immediate cause of the death of five thousand
people. This horror forces us to examine fundamental assumptions about the
integrity of structure, about the logic of such concentrations of people,
about height. What exactly is our responsibility here?
We are embarrassed by our ambulance-chasing brethren who immediately urged
that we rebuild exactly as before. Or higher still. Or prettier. Or more
robust. Or four of them. The leaseholder has pledged to reconstruct and
has laid on a distinguished high corporate architect, ready to get back
to business.
But something has shifted: We debase ourselves by rushing out to spend again,
by fantasizing about 150-story towers that will take an additional hour
to evacuate when the next disaster strikes, by thinking about the next thing,
by having no second thoughts about anything we might have done.
Visiting the site of the disaster in its immediate aftermath, I struggled
to take in the somber beauty of twisted steel surrounded by the smell of
death--the pulverized rubble that seemed too small to contain all of what
was there before. I worried that something in me also had to die, some capacity
for enjoyment, if only that shopworn sublime. At the grocery store an hour
later, I cringed at choosing between a peach and a plum, at choosing pleasures
in a time of grief.
And the culture slogs on. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times,
Philippe de Montebello calls the remains a "masterpiece." Karlheinz
Stockhausen declares the attack to be "the greatest work of art imaginable
for the whole cosmos." Broadway reopens with self-congratulatory bravado
and unconscious irony. After the first postdisaster performance of
The Producers, the cast takes the stage--dressed in their Nazi uniforms--to
lead the audience in singing "God Bless America." Dan Rather weeps
on Letterman.
In Kabul a reporter visits a barbershop with a hidden camera. He has come
to photograph an adolescent boy getting a haircut "like Leonardo DiCaprio's
in Titanic." Later, interviewing a turbaned member of the Taliban,
the correspondent reports what he has seen, rubbing the act of resistance
in his bearded face. "Such things are not possible in Afghanistan,"
the mullah replies.
And for us? Clearly some familiar way of facing the world must now die.
The New York Times has already suggested postmodernity as a likely
casualty. Certainly this is not a moment for slippery relativism or ethical
agnosticism, for the aestheticization of everything or any obtrusive visuality.
But how can we absorb the images presented to us without simple recourse
to old routines and strategies? How must we judge ourselves, judging?
The official demonization of the terrorists paints them as implacably
other--pure evil--agents of nothing that we could have had any hand in producing.
But they fascinate us in part because they are the dark side of something
we have not simply predicted, but advanced. This extends beyond the initial
arming of and collaboration with bin Laden during the Soviet Afghan war
to deeper, more conceptual, connections. Al-Qaida--"the global network"--is
just one tick away from our own global business as usual.
Osama bin Laden is one of us: the Patty Hearst of radical Islam, a trust-fund
revolutionary ready to go the extra mile. Scion of a family construction
business with a client list to make the most jaded architect jealous, bin
Laden studied civil en-gineering while frequenting the bars of Beirut, betraying
an early penchant for structure and modernity--his own architecture.
Radicalized out of his gilded youth by the war in Afghanistan, bin Laden
became an extreme example of globalization. His network of autonomous franchises,
regulated by infrequent signals from headquarters, delivers its product
with just-in-time precision, deploying the full spectrum of media--from
cell phones to satellite links to complex illicit private-banking arrangements
to high-tech forgeries--with incredible discipline and facility. The operatives
who destroyed the World Trade Center were well educated and able to grasp
the most sophisticated technology. These are not hopped-up savages dreaming
of black-eyed virgins: they are our children.
The neural network that destroyed the towers was enabled by the global infrastructure
of our empire. Without the Internet, no terror: these monsters are the dark
side of the creature we have ourselves designed, operating in its unregulated
space and driving its assumptions to their furthest conclusions. The killers
visited a mad act of urban renewal on behalf of their own idea of one world.
Down went not simply the leading architectural icon of global capital but
the most concentrated symbol of human density--of the coming together that
has, in one form or another, guided urbanism from its beginnings.
Mohammed Atta, the apparent operational ringleader of the plot, received
a master's degree in city planning from a university in Hamburg, which also
housed the nucleus of a radical Islamic cell. His thesis adviser was quoted
recently speaking admiringly about Atta's diploma research on the historic
planning of Aleppo, Syria. The professor had not suspected that Atta was
to be implicated in the most violent act of urbanism the world had ever
seen.
One of the most widely retailed images of the downfall of Modernism was
the 1972 implosion of the Pruitt Igoe towers, in St. Louis--designed by
Minoru Yamasaki, architect of the World Trade Center. This event has been
absorbed into both architectural discourse and popular culture as a totem
of corrective violence. But September 11 witnessed the biggest implosion
ever, staged in the most media-saturated environment on the planet and captured
from every angle, stamping out every other image. The unbelievable crash.
The unbelievable collapse. The unbelievable aftermath. Too good not to broadcast,
the media moguls have cleaned the footage up nicely for mass consumption
and a PG rating by expunging shots of falling bodies and washing out any
sight of blood. They've branded the event for easy, uncritical consumption,
to play over and over like the Challenger explosion, the Hindenburg disaster,
or WWII kamikazes striking carrier decks.
The most in-your-face image down here is a billboard on Canal Street for
the latest Schwarzenegger film, with a huge Arnold in the foreground
of the usual mayhem. The name of the film--the release of which has
been delicately delayed by its producers--is Collateral Damage. Perhaps
it is time for us to address the collateral damage of our own enthusiasms.
Perhaps it is time for architects (and Hollywood, and the fashion industry,
and the news media) to curb their pandering to the culture of distress that
is at the heart of so-called "deconstructivism," to reconsider
the infantile celebration of wounding, to stop uncritically indulging the
soft pornographic fascination with the human or the architectural body rent
and torn.
It is not too soon for us New Yorkers to question whether or not the forty
or hundred or thousand billion dollars to be invested to make the city "whole"
again belong on that small site downtown and not at the impoverished and
suffering fringes of the city. And might we begin to adjust our expectations
and habits of consumption to acknowledge and act upon the fact that a billion
of us command and usurp the resources and livelihoods of the four billion
whose misery we tolerate and extend with the blithe neoliberalism of the
global economy? Indeed with the economy headquartered at the World Trade
Center.
Perhaps it is time for architects to cease their celebration of branding
and "pure" communication and be of some real service to the planet.
Architectural theory has been talking for some years of building as the
pure space of events. Here is an event. What shall we build now?
And who will decide?
The only answer to terror is an excess of democracy.
»
More World Trade Center coverage
Michael Sorkin is the author of Some Assembly Required (University
of Minnesota Press), which was released last November. To purchase
books by Michael Sorkin and other Metropolis contributors,
please consult our online bookstore.
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