View from manhattan: An architectural response to the events and aftermath of 11 September 2001 - Column

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 2001 by Paula Deitz

In the aftermath of the atrocity visited upon the 110-story twin towers of New York's World Trade Center, the battle cry most frequently heard among politicians, television commentators, and, yes, even reputable architects is 'to rebuild bigger and better', as if this were the only way to combat the evil forces that perpetuated an attack costing over 6000 lives. Though reduced to a mountain of steaming, twisted steel rubble, the towers have suddenly emerged in the public imagination as symbols of liberty and their rebuilding an ultimate victory, never mind that the Statue of Liberty, unharmed, still holds her torch high in the harbor just beyond.

Truth be told, though its architect Minoru Yamasaki proved his point about mesh-cage, load-bearing walls when the towers were constructed in 1976, inside the buildings never felt either hospitable or humane. And, in fact, the engineering that made their height and maximum floor space possible also contributed to their rapid demise. Even on a good day, the cavernous elevators rattled through windy shafts like freight trains crossing the prairies, and most workers had to change elevators at different levels to commute to their designated offices. In addition, the view from the much-touted Windows on the World restaurant at the top was a disappointment, being a dull horizontal bird's eye view over a vast but minuscule-appearing landscape rather than the steep vertical view in a forest of city lights that makes the 102-story Empire State Building's observation deck an enchanting place to be.

From the beginning, though, more urgent consideration should have been given to simple concepts of safety. In a country that insists on fire drills in schools and other public buildings, no one gauged the endurance required of the average person to walk down, say, 95 flights of stairs to escape. It takes over an hour. Many who survived this attack had done it once before in 1993, when terrorists planted a bomb in the underground garage. This time, those who did not begin immediately did not make it. Office workers need not have been agoraphobic to be sensitive to the World Trade Center's possible dangers, but the routine of daily life has a way of creating a false sense of security. In the larger arena, the country and the government itself had been lulled into an illusion of well being even as a secret army was being assembled openly in its midst.

The future of the site, one hopes, lies not in rebuilding inhumane trophy towers from the past in the kind of windswept plaza that has destroyed the streetscapes of American cities. While the practical solution will require revolutionary vision and invention by architects and planners, clues to an inspired outcome can be found in Battery Park City, the financial center and residential area built on landfill across the street. It was originally conceived as an elevated space-age city on ramps; instead the planners wisely extended the existing lower-Manhattan street grid onto the site bestowing on the area and its buildings the quintessential character of a New York neighborhood.

As another example, one need only walk through Rockefeller Center in midtown with its interior squares and gardens to appreciate how a building complex can achieve mass and grandeur without losing the intimacy of the street patterns. Even the Empire State building succeeds because it is contained within the grid. The place to begin is to reestablish the historic eastwest streets running south of St Paul's Chapel, the eighteenth-century church modeled on St Martin's-in-the-Fields just east of ground zero that was miraculously spared.

After the 1993 bombing, many of the World Trade Center's financial institutions established secondary offices for computer back-up in jersey City across the Hudson River to which they retreated after the recent attack. But the present emergency and subsequent lack of quality office space in the tight precincts surrounding Wall Street and the former World Trade Center presents New York with an opportunity to develop satellite financial communities. The city had already proposed a viable alternative by designating new technology districts in Manhattan and other boroughs to cultivate new high-tech business zones. One of these is the 125th Street corridor, the main thoroughfare that bisects Harlem from Second Avenue on the East Side to Columbia University on the West Side, Former President Bill Clinton has become a major attraction in the area since he opened his new offices there at 55 W. 125th Street.

Unlike other cities that must provide new services to develop outlying areas and inner city districts, the beauty of the Harlem Internet Way 125 (HIWay 125) for New York is that it already has in place an excellent mass transit system (a newly-renovated Metro-North railroad station linked to upstate suburban areas and express subway lines a few stops from 42nd Street) as well as commercial and industrial buildings with relatively inexpensive rental space.