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

Cross Currents, Fall, 2002 by Jean Gardner

To sustain life in cities, humans negotiate with three different but interrelated systems: the nature of human beings, the nature of the material world, and the forces of nature. For instance, with regard to human nature, in a particular city, can women walk the streets alone as we see them doing in the nineteenth-century Impressionist paintings of Baron Haussmann's wide, straight Parisian boulevards? Or, as in nineteenth-century Istanbul, do we see streets that twist and turn, taking us to courtyard cul-de-sacs where women are often cloistered, as we see in paintings by Jean-Leon Gerome? Each of these urban forms-- straight boulevards or twisting streets--represents different perceptions of human nature that manifest as distinctive urban designs.

People living in cities also negotiate with the material world of nature, the world of trees, rocks, and other animals that provide materials to build with. If we looked into a city's garbage heaps, what would we find? Years and years of discarded building materials? Heaps of inflammable synthetic materials whose smoke is so toxic it kills? Or do we see efforts to reuse and adapt "waste" for new purposes?

The third negotiation is with the forces of nature, such as fire, gravity, wind, and water. In the days following the catastrophic attack, when air travel was dramatically reduced, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, which create the greenhouse effect, dropped by 25 percent. When New York's mayor Rudolph Giuliani restricted auto traffic in certain parts of Manhattan, again carbon dioxide levels dropped. These facts give us critical information about our relationship to the forces of nature. Through our routine activities, we are disrupting the climate, which distributes the energy of the sun around the earth, in unintended, disruptive ways.

The obliteration of the World Trade Center challenges modern architecture's negotiations with all three of the interrelated systems mentioned above: the nature of human beings, the nature of the material world, and the forces of nature. The destruction illumines the consequences of our actions: our cities are becoming uninhabitable.

Enflaming Human Nature by Aesthetizing Religious Forms

Commentators on the bombing of the World Trade Center argue that both Osama bin Laden and the lead suicide pilot Mohammed Atta believed that the World Trade Center represented an affront to Islam, particularly believers in fundamentalist Wahhabism. (1)

Thirty-three-year-old Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian architectural engineer and urban planner, flew the first plane into the World Trade Center. According to Fouad Ajami, professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Atta personally experienced the impact of modernity on traditional Egyptian culture:

Atta...was born of his country's struggle to reconcile modernity with tradition....There had come to Egypt great ruptures in the years when the younger Atta came into his own. A drab, austere society had suddenly been plunged into a more competitive, glamorized world in the 1970s and 1980s. The old pieties of Egypt were at war with new temptations...Atta's generation...were placed perilously close to modernity, but they could not partake of it. (2)