All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
enjoyment, if only the shopworn sublime of aestheticized horror. At the grocery store an hour later, I cringed at choosing between a peach and a plum, at picking pleasures in a time of grief.
And the culture slogs on.
In a letter to the editor, Philipe de Monetebello calls the twisted remains a masterpiece.
Karlheinz Stockhuasuen 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 post-disaster 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, our reporter visits a barbershop with a hidden camera. He has come to photograph an adolescent boy getting a “Titanic” haircut, like Leonardo DiCaprio’s. Later, interviewing a turbaned member of the Taliban, the correspondent replays this scene, rubbing the boy’s act of resistance in his bearded face. “Such things are not possible in Afghanistan,” the mullah replies.
And what about for us? Clearly some familiar way of facing the world must die now. The Times has already suggested postmodernity as a likely casualty. This is not a moment for slippery relativism and ethical agnosticism, for the aestheticization of everything, for any obtrusive visuality. But how can we absorb the images presented to us day and night 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 we could have helped produce. But the terrorists 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 Qaeda—“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. Heir to a construction dynasty, with a client list to make the most jaded architect jealous, bin Laden studied civil engineering and frequented the bars of Beirut, betraying an early penchant for structure and modernity.
Radicalized out of his gilded youth by the war in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden became the extreme instance 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 and illicit private banking arrangements and high-tech forgeries—with incredible discipline and facility. The operatives who destroyed the World Trade Center were well educated and able to quickly grasp the most sophisticated technology. These are not hopped up savages, dreaming of black-eyed virgins: these are our children.
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 advisor was quoted yesterday speaking admiringly about Atta’s diploma research on the historic planning of Aleppo, Syria. The professor had not suspected that Atta would be implicated in the most violent act of urbanism America has ever seen.
One of the most widely retailed images of the downfall of modernism was the implosion of the Pruitt Igoe towers in St. Louis, designed, like the Trade Center, by Minoru Yamasaki. This image has been absorbed into both architectural discourse and popular culture as a totem of corrective violence. September 11 was 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 unbelieveable crash. The unbelievable collapse. The unbelievable aftermath. Concluding that it’s too good not to broadcast, the media moguls have cleaned it up nicely for mass consumption, given it a PG rating by expunging shots of bodies falling, washing out the sight of blood, branding the event for easy, uncritical, consumption, to play over and over like Challenger or the Hindenberg or Kamikazes striking carrier decks.
The global network that destroyed the towers was neural, enabled by the infrastructure of 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.
The most in-your-face image here downtown is on Canal Street, a billboard for the latest Schwarzenegger film with a huge Arnold in the foreground, the usual mayhem behind him. The name of the film—the release of which has been delicately delayed by its producers—is “Collateral Damage.”
Perhaps it is time for architects to cease their celebration of branding and “pure” communication to try to 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.
2001
5
What Remains
Traffic returned to the streets of my neighborhood today after the cordon was moved south to Canal Street. It was the day of Bush’s tardy visit and the sky was filled with the futile darting of fighter jets, commanding anxious looks upward with every pass. I made my way through the police lines to my studio—only a few blocks from the World Trade Center—and sat around numbly for most of the day. Outgoing communication was down and I couldn’t respond to the dozens of email and phone messages wondering if we were all alive.
In the evening, I returned home and switched on the television to learn the latest and to watch the riveting pornography of planes smashing over and over into buildings, the eruptions of flame, the horrific collapse, ashamed at my own fascination. Like the restored traffic in the streets, the traffic of commerce had also returned to the airwaves and the dour talk was again interrupted by commercials, happy faces commanding us to buy SUVs and stock up on useless commodities.
Solidarity and civility had bloomed in the days following the attack as barriers of diffidence fell and comfort and information flowed freely between strangers. Acts of kindness and friendship multiplied and the public’s demeanor became somber and respectful. We comforted each other with small exchanges of information and feeling, and by the powerful egalitarianism of disaster. The city’s official response was magnificent, astonishing. The streets below 14th Street were closed to traffic and nobody but local residents was allowed in. The result was an eerie calm as people, quiet and restrained, took possession of the empty streets as after heavy snowfall. The weather was mockingly beautiful and the city was, in this way, at its very best: quiet, free of cars, crisp, cooperative. Only when the wind shifted and the dreadful smell of incineration permeated the air was there a sensory reminder of the hell nearby, belying the cool. And everywhere, the ash fell.
Before Tuesday, I’d been thinking about what to write for this column. I had been asked to conform to the theme of preservation and planned to focus on Frank Gehry’s new boutique for Issey Miyake down the street. I was going to discuss the narrow focus among architects and critics in which “preservation” has been reduced to a battle of styles; the endless debate over the virtues of modern building versus historicism—the official default when building in old neighborhoods like mine. I was going to argue that we’ve lost sight of the ecology of place and that it’s not enough only to preserve the visually familiar in beloved environments—we must also be sensitive to established ways of living, to daily habits, to the need for home.
Gehry’s boutique would have been exhibit A in all of this because it would surely have been beautiful, the work of our most artistically accomplished architect. I would probably have mentioned