Architecture as eternal delight: reflections on the attack of the World Trade Center

Cross Currents, Fall, 2002 by Jean Gardner

The airplanes that attacked the Twin Towers on September 11 unleashed forces of nature whose awesome magnitude is rarely experienced in modern cities. I am speaking about the natural energy of fire and gravity. The impact of the airplanes hitting the buildings ignited the firepower of fossil fuel. The intense flames quickly reached steel-melting temperatures. As the structural beams weakened, gravity overwhelmed the molten structures, pulling them down into the streets of New York City. Everybody and everything in their way pulverized.

Before the eyes of a shocked world, the Al-Qaeda strike used the natural forces of fire and gravity to transform into murderous weapons two of the proudest technological achievements of the United States--the skyscraper and the airplane. The first skyscrapers ever built rose from the ashes of the great Chicago fire of 1871. Just as each succeeding generation of skyscrapers has been extolled as impervious to fire, the creators of the first modern tall buildings in Chicago were convinced that they were fireproof. By 2002, tall buildings in the United States have grown to over 1,400 feet. The first power-driven craft to succeed in defying gravity took to the air in 1903 in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Today, planes are logging 40,000 flights a day within the United States. The forces of nature had seemingly been bent to human desire. We had controlled fire and gravity. Modern civilization had tamed the untamable.

The creators of the skyscraper and the airplane controlled natural forces in order to make life easier and better. The suicide bombers used these inventions to incinerate thousands of innocent people. Their act unleashed fear and aggression on a worldwide scale. Now the clearing of their destruction is finished. The unforgiving search for bodies is over. Many think we are ready to reconstruct both the site of the World Trade Center and ourselves.

But, given the magnitude of the blow to U.S. pride and security, thoughtful people are pausing to consider before we rebuild. Is there not something that we can learn from this horrific act of hatred--a hatred, which is itself a force of nature? The heat of such hatred is as fierce as the intense desert sun at noon, its coldness as numbing as a midwinter night in the high mountains. It is this hatred that reimagined our own creations as weapons.

Despite the rage directed at us, some insist we continue to do what we have always done--only bigger and better. After all that has happened is this really a time for business as usual, for blindly continuing to convert the forces of nature into capital? Fortunately, there are some people who see that the past has not led us to the more humane world we expected. Shrouded in the wisdom gained from crippling grief, they suggest that we have the chance for a different future--one in which the freedom we are defending is not synonymous with living without constraints. Instead, they see freedom as the responsibility to ask why this happened to the richest and strongest nation in the world. It is possible that the gravity of this historical moment itself can convert the destructive energy released on September 11 into the wisdom needed to build more life-supporting cities.

Cities as Sustainable Habitats

The first cities arose some six thousand years ago in the very part of the world where today we are concentrating our war efforts. Archaeology gives us a picture of the overall form of these settlements. Cities originally were walled, defensive settlements, as in the case of Sumerian city-states. Ancient texts describe specific benefits gained from living within these protective walls. There were wells for drawing clean water, markets for trading fresh foods and goods, shelters protecting from the vagaries of the local climate, and people with whom to mark sorrowful and joyous occasions.

In the West, cities also birthed democracy in which every citizen had a voice. According to the Greek planner Dioxiades, over the course of a year in fifth-century Athens its democratically elected leader Pericles could talk with all his constituents just by regularly walking the streets of his city. In Medieval Europe, when peasants were leaving the land to find work in urban settlements, there was an adage to the effect that "city air makes you free."

One of the fundamental purposes of cities throughout their long history is to sustain life--not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually. In order to sustain life, in order to create a sense of well-being among the citizens of a particular city, its inhabitants negotiate with nature on a continuous basis. Design translates these negotiations into urban forms, which in turn influences the behavior of city inhabitants, which in turn feeds into future design practices. These negotiations over time create a feedback loop between urban dwellers and the rest of nature. The result is the countless types of urban settlement patterns and the multiple possibilities for sustaining life that each type represents.