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Donald Maurice Kreis
"No building should rise to twice the height
of the rest," writes Gail Osherenko Wolcott, in a letter to
her teenage daughter about the tragic destruction of the World Trade
Center. "How can builders be so arrogant as to create such
symbols of inequality – and expect not to be a target of envy
and hate? Let’s not rebuild those towers of arrogance and ignorance."
Across rural New England, people seem captivated by
the question of what to do with 16 smoldering acres in a distant
urban center. The massive human suffering caused by the attack,
and the outpouring of help and concern it has inspired, does not
entirely account for the fascination. Architects are talking about
it, but everyone seems to have an opinion about it. New York, we
have rediscovered, is the quintessential other, that for many of
us helps give our place and our lives a sense of identity. The Upper
Valley has outgrown its agrarian roots and even the Industrial Revolution;
for the most part, we make our living in ways very similar to those
who perished on September 11. But we do it while gazing out upon
hills and trees instead of buildings and pavement.
A decade ago, reporter Joel Garreau pointed out an
interesting paradox in his "Edge City." Downtowns of historic
cities like New York have experienced a renaissance even as automobile-induced
growth has caused a diaspora that, at its best, allows us to live
well in the Upper Valley and that, at its worst, creates the sprawling
nowhere-land of malls and suburbs. Manhattan’s waterfront was
once a gloomy district of docks and warehouses; now it is a playground
and, until September 11, the World Trade Center was its beacon and
giant jungle gym. We visited there, even as we were proud of our
ability to live less frantically and, literally, closer to the earth
than Manhattanites.
Now we have something to say about the fate of this
spot, both because we have found it so attractive and because we
know something about living well without building towers that, at
least to some, are symbols of hubris and inequality. From our distance,
history seems like the right place to begin the search for the future
of the site. The Port of New York Authority unveiled Minoru Yamasaki’s
design for the World Trade Center in January 1964 to a New York
still very much healing from the assassination of President Kennedy
just weeks earlier. The project’s great champion was Governor
Nelson Rockefeller, a man who did not think small. The same edifice
complex that drove Rockefeller not simply to build what was then
the world’s tallest skyscraper, but an identical pair of them,
is arguably the same impulse that led him to establish the Hopkins
Center at his alma mater in Hanover.
Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architecture critic
of The New York Times, called Yamasaki a breakthrough in terms of
New York’s architectural trademark skyscraper design. But she
learned her lesson, which is never to get too enraptured by the
model of a planned building. In 1973, upon the project’s completion,
Huxtable would write that the Twin Towers were not beautiful, complaining
that "Port Authority has built the ultimate Disneyland fairytale
blockbuster." Other critics shared Huxtable’s disappointment.
New York writer and architect Michael Sorkin wrote that the Twin
Towers were "styled to approximately the same degree (and with
comparable finesse) as a toaster or microwave oven."
Nobody liked the small windows - Yamasaki was reportedly
afraid of heights - or the barren plaza that most people simply
avoided because the shops and the transportation hub (three subway
lines and the PATH trains to New Jersey stopped there) were below
ground. Earlier this year, the National Arts Journalism Program
at Columbia University asked 45 daily newspaper architecture critics
to rate 29 famous buildings. The World Trade Center came in dead
last.
Now, funereal tributes abound; the cover of the October
issue of Architectural Record features a beautiful photograph of
Yamasaki’s creation, shot from ground level at an angle that
makes the towers seem like golden and vibrant sculpture. They were
none of these things and, while some New Yorkers are calling for
the reconstruction of the original World Trade Center, from our
distance in the Upper Valley it is obvious this should not happen.
"My first thought was of Christopher Wrenn,"
reports New London architect Eric Palson of the firm Sheerr, McCrystal
Palson, taking himself back to London’s Great Fire of 1666.
"Wrenn saw the fire as a great opportunity to remake London
on a grander and more orderly plan. He also saw it as an opportunity
for the commission of a lifetime - opportunism on an even greater
scale than what I am hearing about now."
Wrenn designed St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, but his vision
of a rebuilt city was thwarted. Palson sees similar forces at work
at the World Trade Center. "The feeling is that an answer will
emerge with time. I just wouldn’t expect to see the answer
emerge full blown from the mind of some heroic architect working
in a vacuum."
Architect Gregg Gossens of the Montpelier firm Gossens
Bachman worries that most proposals for the future of the site will
be burdened with how to express a patriotic pathos so loaded down
with jingoistic fervor for America, freedom and liberty, that only
one monumental statement, and a vague one at that, will be presented.
This architecture tastes like milk. "My tendency would be to
look at the project from a simple social dynamic point of view,"
Gossens says.
Our lesson here is that the content and programmatic
goals of a memorial, for instance, need not be governed solely by
the fickle demands of architectural style but also by the subtle
spatial experiences that control social interaction.
What does this mean in practical, brick and mortar
terms? A clue lies in both Palsen and Gossens having mentioned Maya
Lin’s Vietnam Veterans memorial in Washington, hailed for its
subtlety and grace. Two walls of polished black granite, bearing
the names of the thousands of war dead, cut into the earth; it is
the opposite of pomposity, grandeur and, for that matter, the gigantism
of Rockefeller and Yamasaki. Being at this memorial almost compels
the visitor to pause and reflect.
There is, however, a third way - neither Christopher
Wren nor Maya Lin. As has already been pointed out in this space,
the resurrection of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz offers an inspiring
and dynamic model for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center.
Once the cultural crossroads of a great European city, Potsdamer
Platz suffered not one but two disasters. Allied bombing during
World War II reduced it to rubble, and the Berlin Wall then left
it a bisected wasteland for 40 years. The reunification of Germany
engendered the will to reestablish this crossroads, as an example
of how the restored German republic could transcend its horrible
past.
Italian architect Renzo Piano won the competition
to design a master plan along with several buildings. "The
scale of the project is really that of a small city, and that is
how we have treated it, trying to re-create the mix of functions
that a city needs to work. Above all, we have sought to satisfy
a key requirement of social life by defining a center of aggregation:
a square," Piano has written of his work. He could have been
writing about the World Trade Center.
Piano is a winner of the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s
highest honor. He is famous for having co-designed the Pompidou
Center in Paris, and recently he won the commission to design the
new headquarters of The New York Times. Wisely, he did not design
every building at Potsdamer Platz; commissions also went to an equally
distinguished band of practitioners that includes Spain’s Jose
Rafael Moneo, Japan’s Arata Isozaki, American Helmut Jahn and
Britain’s Richard Rodgers.
In other words, what is missing in Berlin is the single,
egotistical vision of a Rockefeller or a Wrenn. Instead, Piano’s
wise vision offers a sense of unity, but many artistic visions have
contributed to an energetic collage of buildings that serve retail,
office, residential and cultural needs. In place of Yamasaki’s
1960s starkness there is life – street life that can give pleasure
at close range and sculpturally beautiful forms that offer delight
from a distance.
The sites of the World Trade Center and Potsdamer
Platz have much in common. Both are transportation centers –
Berlin’s subway and suburban rail systems meet beneath Potsdamer
- and both are immediately adjacent to the very center of their
respective cities. The World Trade Center is smaller and will demand
more vertical solutions if it is to be something more vibrant than
just a memorial; that’s what makes this such a challenge.
As a contender for the title of world’s greatest
living architect, and one who is already intimately acquainted with
New York, Renzo Piano deserves an opportunity to create a master
plan and a lead skyscraper for a revived World Trade Center. But
imagine an appropriately New York mix of designers: It could include
Moneo, who contributed a hotel to Potsdamer Platz and whose art
museum at Wellesley College is one of New England’s great interiors,
a true cathedral of a space. But there should be a commission for
Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, New Yorkers whose sense of texture
and materials is making their American Museum of Folk Art on 53rd
Street more alluring than the Museum of Modern Art next door. The
award-winning Nomentana House of Atlanta’s Merrill Elam and
Mack Scogin, in Maine, reaches skyward in what one commentator has
called an ecstatic gesture toward nature, and yet their home and
public library designs reflect a commitment to a comfort and intimacy
that would be a welcome departure from Yamasaki’s sterility.
Perhaps this is even the right place for Robert Venturi
and Denise Scott Brown. Their Berry Library at Dartmouth is too
two-dimensional for rural New England but their unbuilt scheme for
the Staten Island Ferry terminal - one version involved a façade
consisting of a bedazzlingly illuminated version of a waving American
flag – had energy that a reborn World Trade Center district
needs.
"Whatever is built, I do think it should be 'alive,'"
opines Michael Gohl, president of the Vermont Chapter of the American
Institute of Architects. "That does not mean it cannot be constructed
of concrete and steel. It should evoke the many feelings of life."
To that end, a nomination of a Vermonter to join the redevelopment
ensemble: Michael Singer, who lives and works in the Brattleboro
area. Singer is one of those architects who comes to the profession
through work as an artist and sculptor, and his work seeks to erase
the distinction between the natural and man-made worlds. Singer
has done everything from design an indoor garden for one of the
terminals at the airport in Denver to make a gigantic garbage facility
in Phoenix look inviting.
Unlike urban designers of the 1960s, architects like
Piano, Williams/Tsien and Singer have demonstrated a profound commitment
to design - i.e., their buildings are energy efficient, make maximum
use of renewable materials and seek to harmonize with rather than
conquer their sites. This kind of design is in precisely the sense
Gohl means.
What should this team of World Trade Center collaborators
do? For symbolic as well as practical reasons, this is an occasion
for a development that brings people together in their diversity
of backgrounds and purposes. The Guggenheim Museum shoul consider
moving its proposed downtown branch here, abandoning its controversial
scheme to build a Frank Gehry blob on top of the East River. Piano
designed a gambling casino for Potsdamer; here there could be a
new stock exchange. People should live at the World Trade Center,
over the store - as they do in adjacent Battery Park City. And,
of course, there needs to be shopping, eating, promenading and,
thus, indoor and outdoor public spaces suffused with light and complexity
of a type that would be the opposite of the emptiness that surrounded
Yamasaki's towers.
But, with all respect to those who saw in those towers
a symbol of hubris and arrogance, the topography of the New York
skyline demands at least one very tall building here. Cesar designed
the towers of Battery Park City, in the foreground of the World
Trade Center, to build to the crescendo of the Twin Towers. The
effect is too essential to the look of New York to be lost forever.
Skeptics like Osherenko will hopefully be persuaded that skyscrapers,
if designed with humility and care, have an aspirational quality
to them - a sense of reaching upward for light and truth. For example,
Piano’s most recent skyscraper, in Sydney, has facades that
resemble giant sails, which transmit a message of unity with nature
rather than defiance of it.
Osherenko is right. What replaces Yamasaki’s
World Trade Center should be less about arrogance and more about
cooperation - among users, among purposes, and among designers.
"The skyscraper has become a sophisticated problem in environment,"
Huxtable wrote in 1973 of the original World Trade Center, but her
words could equally apply to whatever will replace it.
And that is how the World Trade Center will ultimately
have to be judged, rather than for its esthetic effect on the skyline,
or its status value or even its economics. Survival is the issue
now. We will survive - or, at least, the burst of enthusiasm for
rebuilding on the World Trade Center site is an expression of collective
hope that it shall be so. But survival remains the issue in a larger
sense, too, and here is an opportunity to create a life-affirming
and life-celebrating architecture that would be the most fitting
tribute of all to the people who died there.
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