Death and the city: in a traveling exhibition, more than 60 architects and designers present their proposals for the World Trade Center site. While some would allow mourning and recollection their place in the city, others reject any reference at all to the events of Sept. 11 - On Site

Art in America, Sept, 2002 by Tom McDonough

In one of his late autobiographical narratives, Walter Benjamin inquired into "what kind of regimen cities keep over imagination," asking how the city--"where people make the most ruthless demands on one another, where appointments and telephone calls, sessions and visits, flirtations and the struggle for existence grant the individual not a single moment of contemplation"--nevertheless indemnifies itself in our memories? The answer, for Benjamin, lay in the peculiar relationship between memory, death and place. Superficially, the modern city, "the city of work and the metropolis of business," would seem to have left little space for such singularly unproductive concerns as remembrance or thanatos, yet to the attentive observer it might reveal another side, those places where it, in Benjamin's words, "bears witness to the dead, shows itself full of dead." (1)

Noisy, pragmatic New York has seldom concerned itself with its dead or their memory; the lure of money has typically overcome the genius loci that might otherwise have protected the city's sites of catastrophe and loss. However, in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the realm of the dead impinged upon that of the living, as hundreds of spontaneous memorials were created throughout the city, solemnly recalling the victims in a public acknowledgment of grief both personal and collective.

Struck by this virtually unprecedented willingness to accord death and memory their place in the city, Chelsea art dealer Max Protetch began consulting with his friend Aaron Betsky (curator at the Netherlands Architecture Institute) and the staffs of Architectural Record and Architecture magazines about mounting an exhibition which would allow architects to explore possibilities for the World Trade Center site without being subject to the pressures of an "official" competition. With over a quarter century of experience in collaborating with contemporary architects, Protetch was in the singular position of being able to call on both established and emerging designers to respond promptly to this request. The result, titled "A New World Trade Center," is a diverse selection of sketches, renderings and multimedia projects by over 60 contributors. Launched late in the winter, the traveling show provides a snapshot look at the architecture world's answer to this desire to commemorate, to secure this tragedy in memory, as we approached its six-month anniversary.

What the exhibition most vividly revealed was a great split in that world, a division between those who were willing to face the intrusion of death into the city and those who remained inalterably attached to the matter-of-fact metropolis. Many architects simply understood their brief as entailing the design of new office space, and so submitted typical examples of their work, refusing any commemorative function. Such was the case with representatives of so-called "deconstructivist" architecture, like Zaha Hadid, and the numerous disciples of the "blob" school, from Coop Himmelblau to Hani Rashid of Asymptote and Lars Spuybroek of NOX Architekten. Whatever the formal merits of their projects, each revealed so striking an unwillingness to engage architecture's symbolic function that one was compelled to wonder whether these designs were any less dismissive of their intended human inhabitants. Do these fashionable concepts here reveal their limits? Before responding too hastily in the affirmative, perhaps it would be useful to consider as a counter-argument the submission by Thom Mayne of Morphosis. He presented a small model, two slabs sliced through by knifelike forms, with obvious metaphorical weight. Deconstruction is rhymed with destruction in this design, but the latter is transfigured from negation to what he called "generative matter," the source for new forms for the living.

"The real question," Daniel Libeskind commented in a statement accompanying his design, "is about memory and the future of that memory." He and several other contributors to "A New World Trade Center" acknowledged the implicit challenge to make a place for the dead within the city, to find a form to accommodate memory. For Libeskind, that form seemed to be emptiness, air; his proposal consists of a tall, four-part structure, comprising a scalpel-like work tower, a thin tower for living, a hanging memorial and a vertical garden which would run between living and work spaces. The overall impression suggested a George Rickey kinetic sculpture, with the voids between elements becoming activated and assuming a significance as great as the positive forms themselves.

That symbolic void or emptiness is explored by others as well, with William Alsop proposing the construction of two towers, similar in form but twice the height of the original WTC, the north tower dedicated to office space, the south tower transformed into a vast, transparent aviary. Chicago-based Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, one of a small number of artists invited to participate, evokes the void through sound. In the weeks following the attacks, he ascended Chicago's Sears Tower to a floor corresponding to the WTC's 1,350-foot height, where he recorded the wind high above the city. Presented as an aural backdrop to the Protetch show, this beautiful and haunting work was perhaps the most successful attempt to make poetically present the absence of those hulking behemoths that once dominated the Lower Manhattan skyline. Of course the most spectacular of these ethereal monuments was Towers of Light (later renamed Tribute in Light), also represented here, and visible in the night sky between Mar. 11 and Apr. 13 [see A.i.A., Nov. '01]. (2)