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 Memorializing the wreckage of the World Trade Center would mourn only the architecture. December 2001
The architectural pronouncements were made against this backdrop, sometimes literally as politicians flocked to the scene of the crime. Mayor Giuliani said that the skyline would be repaired, and--such was his power at that moment--the future of the site was sealed. George Bush made rebuilding a national policy in his speech the next week. Little was heard from those who thought that architecture had had its day on that site, that the prospect of thousands of unrecovered bodies might somehow hinder development. At first the talk of new buildings was tastefully vague. But soon--too soon--specific ideas were floated, confirming the sick rumors that some architects had been angling for the commission almost from the moment the second plane hit. The leaseholder for the World Trade Center offered a quickie vision of four 50-story buildings. Donald Trump, among others, hoped that any new towers would be just as tall as the old ones--but not quite so boxy, please. Ed Koch called for the construction of exact replicas: "We have the plans," he said. Meanwhile, in more rarefied circles, Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio told the New York Times that "what's most poignant now is that the identity of the skyline has been lost...it would be tragic to erase the erasure." Forget the cold language--they couldn't muster a warmer thought? All this time, throughout those first paralyzed weeks of New York City's spectacular new vulnerability, the site--can we stop calling it "ground zero"?--continued to burn. A film studio donated white floodlights, and at night the plume from the long smolder, lit from within, was a halo around the blacked-out buildings of lower Broadway. From very far away, or for someone who had missed the news, it might have been just the kind of vital, accidentally exhilarating visual event this city usually produces in such easy abundance. I could find nothing to like in that glow. I just wanted those big dumb buildings right back where they were. If the timing of the rebuilding discussion was dubious, it was justifiable. Pride seemed to demand it, and considering Manhattan had lost ten percent of its prime office space in a morning, it was a civic necessity. What was shocking in those early weeks, among so much else, was the way some were finding aesthetic release in what could only be described as a mass grave. "God help whoever comes along and fetishizes this thing." That was one of the first organized thoughts I had after seeing the buildings fall. There was no doubt in my mind that eyes tuned to fragmentation and minds trained to question order would at some point rally and call for the preservation of whatever scenic tangle revealed itself from under that terrible cloud. The next day a local radio reporter said that parts of the ruined buildings looked like modern art. When I got down to the site myself--on the day the financial district reopened, the day the markets logged their record crash--it was actually a comfort, the first in a week, to see how limited the devastation was. Life was indeed carrying on in buildings sooty but intact, only two blocks from that place where so much had been lost. More ominous was the attention being paid by amateur and pro photographers to that six- or seven-story wisp of the south tower--stripped, bent, and seared but still standing in the middle distance. It was only a few days before the inevitable noise came, from Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In a Times op-ed, he called that corner of the ruins "a masterpiece" and argued that only it could serve as a proper memorial. Let's take it from there: to find beauty in the ruins makes of those uninvited visitors conceptual artists as well as high-concept killers. And it mourns only the architecture, which needs no memorial. They were buildings, remember, and their image already exists in so many places in so many forms that they have attained the distributive immortality that Victor Hugo once credited only to books. The victims are not so lucky. No memorial should be considered, after what dead that can be are found, except one that is dedicated specifically to people--not architecture, not events. Healing that site very well would be another way to respect the lives that were destroyed. Celebrating the wreckage would only record the act of their destruction. |
