All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
food store that had been there for years.
But now, confronted by the agonizing absence of the Twin Towers from our field of vision, I am thrown back into thinking of architecture as an element of citizenship. Must it now be subsumed in the rhetoric of defiance and victory? Will we continue to look at architecture as the answer?
There has been a brave and understandable clamor for rebuilding. After all, this was the city’s preeminent icon, and we must not hand a symbolic victory to terror by allowing it to disfigure our legendary skyline. Those terrorists—who obviously understood the World Trade Center’s structure and construction—used architecture as a means of mass murder. Architecture became an accessory to the crime. The economic and narcissistic logic behind the form of the Twin Towers put people at risk.
Risk assessment—like “threat” assessment for the military—is always a component of architecture. Among the risks the designers of the World Trade Center deemed acceptable was a one-hour climb downstairs for people attempting to flee the upper stories of the building, a climb impossible for the disabled. One of the tradeoffs they made against this risk was the elimination of asbestos fireproofing around the structural steel. There has been much discussion about whether the building—which sits along a primary approach route to La Guardia airport—was designed to survive the strike of a plane. The answer circulated in the media was that yes, indeed it had been, but only from the smaller type of aircraft in use when the structure was built. The question remains, though, about which harm’s ways a building should be in.
For now, I’m uncertain about what should be done to heal the site. Perhaps this is the moment for a decisive break from the machismo of scale that foregrounds values of size and cost above all other signifiers of success and power. Perhaps this is an opportunity to reimagine architecture, not from a position of either power or paranoia but from one of compassion. Maybe this site shouldn’t even be rebuilt. I shudder at the trivial objects of memorial that will ultimately be offered, the ornamented island of calm amidst the gigantic new construction.
Perhaps this is a scar that should simply be left. Perhaps the billions should be spent improving transportation and building in neglected parts of the city, neglected parts of the world.
As the endless loop of planes crashing into buildings plays over and over in our heads, it has joined our image bank of disasters, morphed into special effect. It’s depressing how many of those interviewed have referred to Bruce Willis, Independence Day, The Towering Inferno, the earthquake ride at Universal Studios.
But already the tragedy has invented its own memorial. On every lamppost and mailbox, fence and facade, thousands of images have been posted—photographs of the missing, advertising the ineradicable despair of their loved ones. All over the city people stop to stare at these pictures, taken when things were normal, formal portraits and tourist snaps, family photos, graduation shots. We all look to see if we recognize these faces—and though we breathe with quiet relief whenever we don’t, every picture still feels familiar, every photograph could have been our own or that of someone we love. I am not chronically paranoid but I’m good and worried. Not so much about the next attack (though I am still afraid to fly) but about the reconstruction of our city and of our culture. The victory for terror lies in our own frightened willingness to give up on the values that are under attack, values that lie at the core of what makes good architecture and urbanism: facilitating the face-to-face creation of places of privacy and personal sanctuary, setting the pleasures of community, foregrounding the beautiful.
Asked for an ID every morning by a guardsman in combat dress, listening to the president blustering about “smokin’ them out of their holes, getting them running, and whipping them”—with the “them” as yet unknown—I fear for us all, for where we’ll have to live from now on.
2001
6
First Response
As the recovery operation progressed and clearing Ground Zero became the focus of energy, we were approached by a local builder to suggest a form of temporary enclosure for the site. This was to physically protect the public from the perilous process underway, to cordon the workplace from intrusion, and to accommodate the large numbers of people pressing to visit. Our initial proposal was for a large earthen berm surrounding the site. Since we felt it was important both to secure and to mark the place, this enclosure took the form of a circular crater. It had an obvious symbolism while still being substantial enough to remain in place for as long as it took to agree on a future for the site. Concerned about acting in haste, we wanted to mark a place of reverence and deliberation, not solve the “problem” of Ground Zero. With that in mind, we contemplated more durable materials for the project, including stone and brick. We wanted to create views from the rim of the crater down into the void that would be left. We felt a discussion of what should be done to recover the place had to exceed the limits of the site and extend, not just to the rest of downtown, but to the city as a whole. We also imagined that the temporary enclosure could have effects beyond Ground Zero. The initial notion was for it to become a point of origin for greening and pedestrianization, for the healing ministrations of nature, and for a network of human connections, leading both to and from the place of tragedy.
2001
7
The Center Cannot Hold
In his farewell to office, Rudy Giuliani—standing in St. Paul’s Chapel, adjacent to the World Trade Center site—declared: “I really believe we shouldn’t think about this site out there, right behind us, right here, as a site for economic development. We should think about a soaring, monumental, beautiful memorial that draws millions of people here who just want to see it. We have to be able to create something here that enshrines this forever and that allows people to build on it and grow from it. And it’s not going to happen if we just think about it in a very narrow way.”
Giuliani’s speech reminded me of Eisenhower’s leave-taking from the presidency, in which he warned the nation against the growing anti-democratic power of the “military-industrial complex.” In both cases, the cautionary appeals resonated because of their sources, one a military man and architect of the Cold War, the other a mayor whose leadership favored planning by the “market.” Giuliani’s heartfelt call for restraint ran counter to the back-to-business approach that has dominated official thinking since the tragedy. This has included obscene job-grubbing on the part of the architectural community and robust talk about responding to the terror by rapid rebuilding, bigger than ever. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), empowered to decide the future of the site, is headed up by a patriarchal ex-director of Goldman Sachs whose credibility seems untainted by the spectacle of his own firm abandoning Manhattan for New Jersey. With the exception of a single community representative, the board is composed of the usual business crowd. Their initial consensus seems to favor the construction of a vast amount of office space on the cleared site of the fallen towers with the memorial simply a modest component. Meanwhile rumors grind on about the working drawings, apparently already on the computers at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
Fortunately, the competition for authority over the site is both structural and complex. The Port Authority, Larry Silverstein (the ninety-nine-year leaseholder), the LMDC, the federal, state, and city governments, survivor groups, the local community, the business improvement district, the Battery Park City Authority, the Transit Authority, and myriad other civic and private interests are jostling to be heard and influential. If nothing else, this fog buys time for contention and for the serious consideration of alternatives.
What is clear is that, despite the currently soft market, some of the 15 million square feet of lost space needs to be replaced sooner rather than later, and downtown’s dysfunctions repaired to allow the city’s economy to re-establish jobs and networks lost in the attack. The eventual need is not simply for replacement space: The “Group of 35”—a business-heavy organization chaired by Charles Schumer and Robert Rubin—predicts that an additional 60 million square feet of office space will be required by 2020.
The question is where to put it, and some will clearly go to lower Manhattan.