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Taking the architectural pulse following cultural shock.
By Christopher Hawthorne
February 2002
By now we've all heard a hundred and one proposals for rebuilding Lower
Manhattan, and a hundred and two analyses of what that rebuilding will mean.
But here's an idea I've yet to hear from a single pundit: reconstructing
the twin towers site is downright un-American. Not the way Joseph McCarthy
threw the term around--what I mean is that our culture is now being forced
to grapple with questions more often asked in ancient capitals like Rome
and Jerusalem, places where tyrants and messiahs walked and where important
architecture routinely goes up on the ruins of important architecture. New
York City is in the process of figuring out how to reconstruct an emotionally
charged place of great devastation and perhaps even greater meaning--the
closest this culture has ever had to a holy site.
Not surprisingly we're completely flummoxed about how to proceed. The
problem so far has been a surfeit of ideas--too many genius visions too hotly and immodestly pursued. Even before
the ruins stopped smoking the stale language crumbled forth: talk about
who deserves "a place at the table" and about who qualifies
as a "stakeholder" in the rebuilding discussion. Clearly cliché
was late for work on September 11 and survived unscathed. We've heard arguments
that we ought to do everything from reconstructing the towers exactly as
they were--right down to the salt and pepper shakers on the tables at Windows
on the World--to leaving the most visually striking ruins in place, propped
up and listing toward the Hudson.
A memorial will, of course, be the centerpiece of any reconstruction--and
thus the focus of the most closely watched and fiercely debated urban
design project in this country's history. The controversy that swirled around
young Maya Lin's plan for the Vietnam War Memorial in the early 1980s will
seem civilized by comparison. Although Americans should have plenty of confidence
that putting up another ten million square feet of office space will
not be difficult for this culture, coming up with a fitting memorial
is a different matter altogether.
This conclusion was supported by a recent exhibition at Washington's National
Building Museum called Monuments and Memory (sponsored jointly by the museum
and the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects). A collection
of memorial schemes by area firms, the show went up at the end of September,
but its planning predated the terror attacks by several months.
Commentators have suggested that the newspaper we ought to save for our
children is not that of September 12, featuring the World Trade Center ablaze,
but of September 11, which offers an eerie snapshot of a culture oblivious
to the changes about to blindside it. You could think about Monuments and
Memory with a similar logic: it offered a slice of the architectural culture
pre--September 11. The results weren't pretty--and demonstrated how
completely ill-prepared we are architectur-ally and urbanistically to deal
with commemorating the death and destruction in lower Manhattan.
The show was prompted in part by the unveiling last fall of a new Memorials
and Museums Master Plan for Washington. The National Capital Planning Commission
produced the plan in an effort to stem what it calls "memorial overload"
on the Mall, the psychic and physical heart of a city where an average of
one new monument or museum is built each year. Without such a plan, which
protects the Mall as a new memorial-free zone, its authors warned that the
area "could soon be covered in a mantle of marble and steel."
Of course, this means the exhibit struck precisely the wrong tone for the
new national mood, clashing with the feeling that we need to get our memorial-building
act in high gear.
On view was the winning proposal for the highly controversial World War
II monument--the blandly florid scheme by Friedrich St. Florian--but
most of the proposals were designed for sites nearer the outskirts of town.
Surprisingly slapdash, these made up a parade of identity-politics memorialism.
There was a plan to honor the Los Angeles riots of 1993; a monument to freedom
of the press; a peace garden; the design for the Ronald Reagan Burial Site,
in California; and even a "Garden of One Thousand Points of Light,"
honoring (or satirizing) the oratory of the president's father.
It would be unfair to go on at length about this modest exhibition, which
was not meant to be viewed through the prism of post--September 11 America.
To its great credit, the National Building Museum has made an effort to
change its programming on the fly to address the attacks, putting together
an ad hoc series called "Building in the Aftermath." In November,
as the opening event in that series, the museum convened "The Future
of the Skyscraper," a panel moderated by Robert Campbell of the Boston
Globe. It included Leslie Robertson, chief structural engineer for the World
Trade Center towers; writer and scholar Witold Rybczynski; and architects
Paul Katz, of Kohn Pedersen Fox, and Bruce Fowle, of Fox & Fowle, both
of whom have extensive experience designing skyscrapers.
The museum, which holds its panel discussions in a small auditorium, set
up chairs for the event in its famous hangarlike atrium. The turnout was
remarkable: 550 people paying $12 to $16 each for an architectural discussion
on a Friday evening. It showed the continuing thirst we have for public
gatherings these days and also--as the WTC's structural engineer was clearly
the star of the panel--for understanding exactly how and why the towers
fell.
Campbell made an attempt to set up two opposing views about the skyscraper's
value to society: on one end was architectural theorist Christopher Alexander's
suggestion that tall buildings make people crazy; on the other, Louis Sullivan's
loving description of the skyscraper as "a proud and soaring thing."
But the panel came to a quick and tidy consensus that the future of the
skyscraper was very bright indeed.
Rybczynski dismissed the race to build the tallest building in the world
as an "obsolete" notion, but also said, "Obviously I think
the skyscraper has a future." Katz went as far as to proclaim that
"the building type of the twenty-first century is the tall building."
The only concession to changed realities was Rybczynski's call for a return
to the skyscrapers of the 1920s and '30s, which respected human scale and
the city block and included modestly sized retail outlets on the ground
floor. Fowle, whose firm is working with Renzo Piano on the proposed
650-foot-tall headquarters for the New York Times, added that the goal in
erecting a skyscraper ought to be "creating a place rather than an
object."
Now, I am a fan of tall buildings; the new Times headquarters is one of
the four or five new pieces of architecture that I'm most looking forward
to seeing. But this was an illusory kind of consensus--five die-hard
East Coasters whose love for New York's simultaneously lyrical and oppressive
brand of urbanism has only been strengthened by the attacks of September
11. The skyscraper may be the building type in certain quickly modernizing
cities--Shanghai, for example--but in this country it has been under fierce
scrutiny for at least two decades. (As Campbell noted, every one of the
American skyscrapers that rank among the 20 tallest in the world is at least
20 years old.) The idea that we can achieve a more tolerable, humane, and
ecologically sensitive kind of urban density if we worry more about transportation
systems than the sheer height of buildings is finally sinking in. Paris
and Washington, cities that have no buildings higher than about a dozen
stories in the downtown area yet achieve a perfectly sophisticated and fully
urban streetscape, make that case clearly. This doesn't mean that we should
rule out skyscrapers at the World Trade Center site. It's just that it would
have been nice to hear from someone who lives a happily low-rise but fully
urban existence--in Washington or L.A., in Oakland or Brooklyn--to make
the obvious point that the skyscraper has a future most compellingly for
those who stand to profit from its increasingly outdated economies
of scale.
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