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Donald Maurice Kreis
"When you see a New England church steeple against
the blue sky, this is a very exciting kind of experience because
it somehow brings about an aspirational quality, a sense of reaching
for something which is terribly important." So said architect
Minoru Yamasaki in 1959.
Unfortunately, however much Yamasaki may have thought
of those New England spires as he sat at his drafting table in Detroit,
and however much his designs may have achieved the aspirational
quality that he sought, he will now be remembered chiefly as one
whose work was obliterated.
Among architects and students of architecture, Yamasaki's
Pruitt Igoe housing project in St. Louis has long served as the
paradigm example of a project that was deservedly wrecked. Demolished
in 1972, Pruitt Igoe reflected the hubris of postwar urban "renewal"
- the notion that whole working class neighborhoods should be bulldozed
and replaced by inhuman apartment towers situated in barren pseudoparks.
Photos of Pruitt Igoe's 33 numbingly identical apartment blocs being
imploded frequently adorn architecture volumes, where they evoke
nothing but pleasure.
It will not be so with images of the destruction of
Yamasaki's most famous project, the twin towers of the World Trade
Center in New York.
Critics never much cared for Yamasaki's distinctive
contribution to the New York skyline. It was deemed graceless and
monolithic, taller than the Empire State Building but lacking its
rival's beautiful art deco silhouette. The World Trade Center landed
Yamasaki on the cover of Time magazine, but his name never became
a household word like Frank Lloyd Wright and, perhaps today, like
Frank Gehry. If Pruitt Igoe was a 1950s design miscue, the World
Trade Center was a 1960s variant, not unrelated to the flawed thinking
that allowed the glorious Pennsylvania Station to be wrecked and
replaced by the supremely mediocre Madison Square Garden complex.
People really thought, back then, that cheap glass, steel and plastic
could somehow replace carefully chiseled stonework that was both
expensive and designed to mimic ancient civilizations. At close
range, and compared to Rome's Baths of Caracalla, Yamasaki's signature
creation was more than a little bleak.
And yet, Yamasaki deserves from us a commitment that
the World Trade Center be rebuilt - not necessarily to his design,
which was too rooted in outmoded notions of urbanism, but in a way
that communicates Yamasaki's "sense of reaching for something"
that was so viciously attacked by coldblooded terrorists on September
11, 2001.
What brings comfort, given the sight of New York's
savaged skyline and the knowledge that thousands of innocent people
have senselessly perished? For me, it's an architectural drawing
of a mile high skyscraper Frank Lloyd Wright had imagined in 1956
for the Lake Michigan shoreline in Chicago. It is lean and graceful,
all angles and jagged points, tapering upward and upward to a distant
spire - a fantasy, because a five thousand foot building isn't really
feasible. But to imagine, much less to build, something that looks
very much like Wright's tower as the new World Trade Center - there's
the ultimate rebuke to the forces of darkness and terror.
A building - particularly a skyscraper - is a revolt
against the forces of entropy, which seek to reduce everything in
the universe to chaos and rubble. To create a skyscraper requires
a staggering amount of organization and effort - designers must
design, engineers must engineer, capital must be invested, elected
officials must debate, legions of craftspeople must work the demanding
building trades. One is reminded of President Kennedy's observation
at his inaugural that "here on earth, God's work must truly
be our own." In a great building - one that communicates beauty
at all levels while serving its users well - there is surely that
of God. This is the "aspirational quality" of which Yamasaki
spoke, and it's the reason it would be less than fitting for New
York to do as Oklahoma City did and reduce a site of terrorism's
carnage to a memorial, evocative though it might be.
New Yorkers can look to Berlin for inspiration. Here
is a city that has managed to resurrect itself from a legacy of
unspeakable suffering. Today, in the German capital, thousands work
every day in great buildings that have risen on sites that, in their
own days of infamy, witnessed the cruelest of horrors. Berlin's
Potsdamer Platz - home to Europe's first traffic light - had a distinctive
look as a key crossroads of a great early 20th Century metropolis.
When the whole district was first obliterated and then bisected
by the Berlin Wall, the swath cut in Berliners' image of their city
must have seemed every bit as painful as the hole we now see in
the New York skyline. And yet, today, Potsdamer Platz is reborn
as a vibrant district of great works by some of the world's best
living architects - Italy's Renzo Piano, Spain's Jose Rafael Moneo,
Japan's Arata Isozaki, Chicago's Helmut Jahn.
"Architecture should be based on human experience,"
Minoru Yamasaki told his interviewer in 1959, "on the need
for delight, sometimes for excitement." He spoke of "an
environment in which people can find a delightful, wonderful way
of life." Conceding that "you don't accomplish it all
by architecture," he nevertheless argued that "through
architecture I think it becomes much easier if the architecture
is thoughtful." This is indeed a time for thoughtfulness and,
in the name of civilization, most certainly for architecture as
well.
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