|
September 16,
2001
Don't
Rebuild the Twin Towers
An Architecture
of Doom and Dread
By Jeffrey St. Clair
These are days of lamentation: for the
horrifying toll of the innocent dead, for the near certain prospect
of thousands more-American and Middle Eastern-slated to die in
the impending retaliatory strikes, and even for a weird kind
of innocence and naivete that seemed uniquely American, a naivete
that persisted in the heart of the nation's most cynical city.
But one loss that mustn't be
mourned are the Twin Towers themselves, those blinding prongs
that rose up like a tuning fork above the Battery. Under other
circumstances, thousands would have gathered to cheer the planned
demolition of these oppressive structures as lustily as they
have the implosions of the Kingdome in Seattle and other misbegotten
monstrosities of the 1970s. You could say the World Trade Center
was a singular atrocity--except there were two of them. As architectural
historian Francis Morrone wrote his 1998 Architectural Guidebook
to New York: "The best thing about the view from the indoor
and out observation decks of Two World Trade Centers that they
are the only high vantage points in New York city from which
the World Trade Center itself is not visible."
But now there's talk, serious
talk from people like Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani and the
building's new owner Larry Silverstein, of rebuilding both skyscrapers.
This impulse must be resisted. Those buildings terrorized the
skyline of Manhattan for too long. They combined ostentation
and austerity with all the chilling precision of an economic
package devised by the IMF.
The architect of the World
Trade Center complex, Minuro Yamasaki, was morbidly afraid of
heights. It shows in his work. Like the tycoon in Akira Kurosawa's
wonderful film High and Low, Yamasaki has projected his own nightmares
on all of us. His towers are more than blunt symbols of corporate
power. They are erections of dominion that inject a feeling of
powerlessness in those who must encounter their airy permanence.
His architecture does violence to the psyche as surely as those
planes did violence to the human body. Yamasaki said he wanted
enough space around the base of the towers so onlookers could
be "overwhelmed by their greatness."
Yamasaki, who died in 1986,
saw himself as a field marshal of space, a kind of Japanese-American
version of Philip Johnson, the avatar of the glass curtain skyscraper.
Johnson's neo-fascist erections made him the favorite architect
of Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, with whom he once debated the
finer points of Martin Heidegger in the salon of Ayn Rand. Yamasaki
is like Johnson only duller. He was more ruthless in his desire
to shave all aesthetic pleasure out of his cubes and tubes, to
make them monuments to functionality.
The towers were meant to be
impervious to the elements, as if they could not only defy space,
wind, and the colors of nature, but time as well. That was Yamasaki's
biggest lie, a conceit as big as the ever-expanding bull market
or the prospect of an impenetrable missile defense shield. But
the lie was shattered in a matter of minutes, as first the load-bearing
exo-skeleton quivered and buckled, then the joints melted in
the inferno of the burning jet fuel, and finally one floor after
another collapsed with all the finality of an Old Testament prophecy
fulfilled.
Compare Yamasaki's structure
to the great old spire just down the avenue and you can almost
read the arc of corporate America. The Woolworth Building, Cass
Gilbert's gothic confection, offers the city a kind of airy whimsy.
Illusory, yes, but self-consciously fun. It doesn't demand your
attention so much as it seduces it.
Yamasaki was a favorite of
the new corporate order because, unlike Frank Lloyd Wright or
the spendy Johnson, he built on the cheap. The WTC towers cost
only $350 million. The early price tag on rebuilding the structures
is put at $2.5 billion. Also recall that the towers were for
most of their life public buildings, owned by the city of New
York. But there was little truly civic about them: they were
cold, sterile, forbidding symbols of a government that had turned
inward, that had begun to co-inhabit with the very corporations
and financial houses it was charged with regulating.
It is instructive to note that
Frank Lloyd Wright, perhaps America's greatest architect, was
never awarded a commission by the federal government. Why? Because
he was a pacifist, whose work the government deemed subversive
if not seditious.
Of course, the WTC buildings
had their admirers, mainly a cadre of engineers and construction
magnates dazzled by the logistics of erecting such behemoths
in the bowels of one of the most gridlocked cities on Earth.
With this in mind, it may not be coincidence that the towers
became an obsession to Bin Laden, whose fortune derives from
a family construction conglomerate that made billions building
mega-projects for the Arab oil states.
It might be argued that the
Towers were an attractive nuisance, that they were, in a sense,
standing there asking for it, inviting all comers to take a shot.
Indeed, this very argument was made in an excellent book on the
towers by Eric Darton titled Divided We Stand. Darton argues
that the buildings were inextricably linked to the terrorists
who tried to bring in tumbling down in 1993.
"One kind of extremism,
unfortunately, begets another, and when you raise up an icon
like the WTC and fill it with vulnerable humanity- it's a pretty
sure bet that someone will try to bring it down if they can,"
said Darton in a 1998 interview. "What emerges when you
juxtapose mega-development with terrorism is a kind of unity
of opposites. Both master-builders and terrorists consider everyday
life at street level to be absolutely trivial. The former make
their plans the rarefied air of executive boardrooms, while the
latter carry out their schemes, quite literally, underground.
Both master-builders and bombers adhere to single-minded cataclysmic
visions - either the creation of a bright, corporate future;
or a return to the 'fundamental' values of the past. Both visions
are abstract projections of an ideal world which has nothing
to do with the here-and-now."
The construction of the World
Trade Center towers began with the destruction of a community,
a community that the rich rulers of the city of New York, such
as David Rockefeller and Robert Moses, considered a blight to
be obliterated. It was a program of forced eviction and relocation
that is not dissimilar to what is going on at the behest of American
corporations in the Third World every day. The New York City
Port Authority was used as the muscle to transform lower Manhattan
from a community of people to a blinding canyon of corporate
might. For an excellent documentation of the vicious history
behind the construction of the WTC complex, I highly recommend
The Destruction of Lower Manhattan by Danny Lyon.
Now the wreckage has a surreal
cast to it, a kind of macabre beauty, like the best abstract
expressionist paintings, or the smoldering end game of one of
those self-destructing sculptures by Jean Tinguely. A friend
of mine has spent much of the last week down in the ruins, helping
the workers, giving comfort to the families of the wounded, the
missing and the dead. "Of all the awful things about it,
one of the worst is that there's no dirt, no earth, underneath
a blown-up city, only more and more city" she told me. "I
kept looking, but there's only gray ash, everywhere, on everything,
but no dirt. The horrible illusion about skyscrapers is that
they make you think you're close to somebody's idea of nature
or God by being so high up in the sky but you're as far away
from that as you ever could be."
But the towers should not be
resurrected. Those blocks should be left as an open space, graced
by sunlight, so that, to paraphrase Yamasaki, people can appreciate
the "greatness" of what was lost. CP
CounterPunch's Complete Coverage
of the Attacks on the World Trade Center/Pentagon
|