A professor learns to love the twin towers--and hate the void they left behind.

By Alec Appelbaum
December 2001

Architectural historian Vincent Scully on the roof of the Art & Architecture Building at Yale University, where he teaches.
When terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center on September 11, they made two controversial buildings into a national emblem of loss, disbelief, and memory. Vincent Scully, who has taught architectural history at Yale since 1947, was thinking about how architecture defines society long before that miserable day. He taught some of the world's most influential builders, including Robert A. M. Stern, and championed others, such as Robert Venturi. Scully has praised these architects for the warmth of their peaks and pillars and has vilified plain, unsympathetic boxes--like the World Trade Center. In his book American Architecture and Urbanism, Scully makes a hero of Cesar Pelli, who roped the twin towers into the romantic Gotham skyline by surrounding them with the shorter, more sculpted World Financial Center. But after watching real villains destroy the towers and seeing real heroes die trying to rescue victims from the rubble, Scully sees those massive shapes in a new light. He calls on architects to restore buildings very like the ones that fell that day. "We should spit in the terrorist's eye," he says.

If any critic can credibly prescribe such a warlike course, Scully can. In emotional lectures and various books, he has earned a reputation as a fighter for urban preservation, campaigning against the loneliness of superhighways and disconnected buildings.

Offsite:
You can find descriptions of Vincent Scully's books, including American Architecture and Urbanism and Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade, at the Metropolis bookstore.
But now that we face more horrible kinds of alienation, the professor has changed his tune--or has he? Scully has always urged architects to convey a civilization's memory, striving, and comity. And his shift reflects the shadow that the lost towers will cast on future buildings. In one of his most moving lectures, he describes how Maya Lin began writing her statement of intention for the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial while sitting in his classroom watching slides of a classicist World War I memorial by Sir Edwin Lutyens. That memorial, in a pasture in France, consists of a classicist arch facing nameless British and French graves. Lin's essay, Scully claims, began with a note that "the ground needs healing" after war. Lin's wall changed the way we mourn from an expression of horror to one of inclusion. Now that we face a new kind of loss, Scully is calling for an architecture of renewal. Six days after the attack, he spoke with Metropolis contributor Alec Appelbaum.

AA: How do we begin to think architecturally about mourning or memorializing the World Trade Center?
VS: As you know, very few of us really liked the World Trade towers. They seemed too big, dumb, and inarticulate. When they got hit, all the associations changed. All of a sudden, instead of looking inordinately tall, they looked heartbreaking. Now I love them. It's a little like how our associations changed regarding New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. I have never been a big fan of Giuliani, and now I love Giuliani.
The quality of the old skyscrapers and some of the best new ones is that they point [toward heaven]. They truly are spires. The World Trade Center didn't do that. It just went up, up, up, up, up, up, up. It seemed to move into the great scale of the airplane and the continent. And now the void is what we're left with.

So do you think that they can't be replaced--that a permanent absence would be more appropriate?
Not necessarily. I don't think that at all. If you look down there now, you see what a frame Pelli made--it's just heartrending. I don't think we should leave the void there. That's deadly.

I'd like the replacement to be as tall as the original buildings. Pelli did such a brilliant job pulling them into the skyline. After they were gone, the whole group seemed huddled. The great fact of those things was something you had to contend with. One would hate to see anybody improve that. You wouldn't want to see [Pelli's Petronas Towers in] Kuala Lumpur there--such a perfect building. The towers had a terrible plaza compared with, say, Rockefeller Plaza, but it looks now like one of their great qualities was their inactive, nonfigural quality of rising. They were not dealing with experience on the ground-- they were dealing with experience in the air. That, of course, is the horror of this: they rose to the scale of the airplane, and they died by the airplane. That is why they caught the eye of that hatred. [Whoever was behind the attack] hates that scale as much as he hates you and me.

So would you want to see a more universal design, or a humbler design, for a replacement? Perhaps a green design?
One might do all kinds of things to improve them. Green is certainly possible. However, I don't think what we're talking about here is a memorial, but rather an active, working affirmation of our presence.

I'm wondering how our society will deal with the memory of these destroyed buildings. Do you think the image of the twin towers will be part of children's consciousness, or that of future generations?
[They might not have stayed in our consciousness] if this attack hadn't happened. There have been buildings destroyed that enclosed more precious things; think of the libraries of Alexandria and of the last king of Assyria. The twin towers contained activity that was ongoing. In a way, nothing irreplaceable was taken away except the lives. And it is such a terrible, terrible loss of life.

Scully praised Cesar Pelli's World Financial Center for helping to integrate the World Trade Center into New York's skyline. Now he feels the remaining buildings are huddled around a void that must be reclaimed.
In the context of all the memorials that are already in Battery Park City, including a Holocaust museum and a planned memorial to the Irish hunger, what can we do to commemorate those lives?
There's nothing like the names. For the Vietnam wall, they are listed in the order in which they died. The bureaucrats fought [Maya Lin] to do it alphabetically, but she was so right. Now you want some way of capturing where the victims were and what they were doing. It's not about time, but about capturing where they were in space.

Did you see the attack?
While we were watching [the smoke from the first plane], we saw the other plane come in behind it. I had to go down and teach my modern architecture course. Curiously enough, absolutely by accident--believe me--I was going to talk about Battery Park City, and at the end I got to the World Trade Center towers. I said at the beginning and the end of the
lecture that it was hard to give a lecture but it was harder to listen, because you realize we're only the blink of an eye from eternity. But I said that's the way human beings always have been; we have to go on, because this is the stuff of civilization. When I got to the towers at the end, I choked up, but I can't say what anybody else did.

My feeling about this is really captured in the poem "The American Sublime" by Wallace Stevens, an insurance executive who worked in a high-rise. It says:

But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,

The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?

So the vacancy becomes a presence we must recognize. The vacancy becomes a presence. And the poem asks [in light of those losses], how does one live?


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