After the cataclysm - View

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 2002 by Edward Robbins

Edward Robbins looks at how architects have responded to 11 September.

The immediate aftermath of the attack of 11 September on the World Trade Center in New York brought out the best in so many people: unfortunately not architects. Fireman, policemen, and rescue workers risked and even lost their lives while responding to the catastrophic events of the day. Restaurateurs in the area, in the face of significant financial losses, provided free meals to those working on the site. Many people, asking for no financial compensation, volunteered for jobs associated with the clean up and support for victims families. And, I will always remember the way hard-edged, loud and often socially insensitive residents of this great city were transformed almost magically into softer, quieter and more considerate citizens of a wounded and shocked city and country. There was an unusual hush to this boisterous and energetic place as people turned to each other on the sweets, in bars and cafes, at work, on the subway, really just about anywhere and tried to make sense of what had just happened. Ther e were no answers, only questions.

Architects, with a few exceptions, rather than ask questions or undertake good works, began before the ashes of the World Trade Center were even cold to provide answers and to seek work. In contrast to so many others, they began a loud campaign in the media to insert themselves as central players in the discussion about the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site and of Lower Manhattan in general. Suggestions about the design of buildings to replace the collapsed towers, demands that there needed to be a dramatic architectural response to the tragedy and a sense that architecture was the anodyne to the tragedy dominated the public comments of architects immediately after the events of 11 September (and they still do). The media were filled with encomiums about this or that suggestion from one or another architect about what was best for the site. And almost always what was best was architectural. Of all the architects who responded publicly to the events of 11 September, I recall only one expressing a n eed for a pause for the wounds of the tragedy to begin to heal and for people to have time to make sense of what had happened.

Indeed like vultures fighting over a dead carcass, architects and architectural critics began a still raging debate about which architects and what designs would best serve the World Trade Center site and lower Manhattan. The issue, as the architecture critic of the New York Times put it a year later, is ultimately architectural. Architects, it could be argued were right to see it this way. It was clear that there would need to be some kind of architectural response in the process of renewing the site. The response of architects also was probably not surprising given the declining architectural economy in New York (and nationally). Yet, in the aftermath of the tragedy, the city was still in mourning, and it was still unclear just what the city and its politicians, planners and developers would do in response to the tragic events that it had just experienced.

Architects though seemed blithely unconcerned with the larger issues and focused entirely on the issue of architecture itself. Even though the area had begun to experience a loss of jobs and firms before 11 September as a result of both an economic downturn and the decision, ironically, of a number of firms to disperse both services and employees throughout the region, architectural responses (with a few notable exceptions) assumed that jobs and firms would return. If, as The Wall Street Journal argued, Wall Street was still the spiritual heart of the financial district, it was no longer its physical centre, it suggested the possibility of new programmes and new building types for the area. Architects were not listening. For some architects, it was just another day of serving the needs and wishes of the developers and planners -- themselves seeking physical fixes to the tragedy -- looking to find a design response to their programmatic suggestions for the area. For other architects, the destruction of the Wor ld Trade Center offered an opportunity to rebuild in the grand tradition of the Wall Street of the past: grandeur, conceptual bravado and bigness were the operative bases for their responses.

The debate between what might be described as banal and big, corporate and conceptual, might best be understood by looking at the response to the six plans provided by the architects under the auspices of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. When unveiled, the six plans were met with what one journalist called 'spontaneous booing'; the plans were seen as pedestrian.

In response, a number of architects, mostly world famous celebrity architects, under the auspices of the New York Times provided a series of design suggestions. In a correction of what these architects saw as real estate planning where plots are designed for particular developers, they suggested a plan whereby plots would be divided and designed by different important architects (usually architects well known for their conceptual and ground-breaking designs). Although the difference here might escape many of us, a series of designs was produced each on its own plot with little or no relation to the buildings that bordered it -- why each building is located where it is goes unexplained. Images ran from twisted towers that would suggest partly collapsed structures to inverted Art Deco skyscrapers, from formalist exercises to more conventional designs of large buildings (AR March 2002). Designs ranged from what one friend called 'the offensive to the rhetorically clever' although most were just more images of st ylish buildings with no more to add to the discussion than the earlier more banal designs they were supposed to replace. Or, as another critic suggested about another set of architectural suggestions for the World Trade Center site but apropos of most of the architectural responses, the majority of the proposals were merely 'egoistic exercises and have little to do with how to repair the existing rent in the urban fabric'. (1)