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4

After the Fall

Buildings have caused the death of 6,000 people. What can architects do? Surely, this horror should force us to examine fundamental assumptions—about the integrity of structure, about the logic of such concentrations of people, about height. What else?

We are, to be sure, embarrassed by our ambulance-chasing brethren who urge that we rebuild exactly as before. Or higher still. Or prettier. Or more robust. Or all four. The owner has pledged to reconstruct immediately and has laid on a distinguished high corporate architect, ready to get back to business.

But something has shifted and we embarrass ourselves by rushing out to spend again, by fantasizing about 150-story towers that will take an additional hour to evacuate when the next disaster strikes, by thinking about the next thing, by having no second thoughts about anything we might have done.

Visiting the site of the disaster in its immediate aftermath, I struggled to take in the somber beauty of twisted steel, the pulverized rubble that seemed too small to contain all of what was there before. I worried that something in me also had to die, some capacity for enjoyment, if only the shopworn sublime of aestheticized horror. At the grocery store an hour later, I cringed at choosing between a peach and a plum, at picking pleasures in a time of grief.

And the culture slogs on.

In a letter to the editor, Philipe de Monetebello calls the twisted remains a masterpiece.

Karlheinz Stockhuasuen declares the attack to be “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.” Broadway reopens with self-congratulatory bravado and unconscious irony. After the first post-disaster performance of The Producers the cast takes the stage—dressed in their Nazi uniforms—to lead the audience in singing “God Bless America.”

Dan Rather weeps on Letterman.

In Kabul, our reporter visits a barbershop with a hidden camera. He has come to photograph an adolescent boy getting a “Titanic” haircut, like Leonardo DiCaprio’s. Later, interviewing a turbaned member of the Taliban, the correspondent replays this scene, rubbing the boy’s act of resistance in his bearded face. “Such things are not possible in Afghanistan,” the mullah replies.

And what about for us? Clearly some familiar way of facing the world must die now. The Times has already suggested postmodernity as a likely casualty. This is not a moment for slippery relativism and ethical agnosticism, for the aestheticization of everything, for any obtrusive visuality. But how can we absorb the images presented to us day and night without simple recourse to old routines and strategies? How must we judge ourselves, judging?

The official demonization of the terrorists paints them as implacably other, pure evil—agents of nothing we could have helped produce. But the terrorists fascinate us, in part because they are the dark side of something we have not simply predicted, but advanced. This extends beyond the initial arming of and collaboration with bin Laden during the Soviet Afghan war to deeper, more conceptual connections. Al Qaeda—“the global network”—is just one tick away from our own global business as usual.

Osama bin Laden is one of us, the Patty Hearst of radical Islam, a trust fund revolutionary ready to go the extra mile. Heir to a construction dynasty, with a client list to make the most jaded architect jealous, bin Laden studied civil engineering and frequented the bars of Beirut, betraying an early penchant for structure and modernity.

Radicalized out of his gilded youth by the war in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden became the extreme instance of globalization. His network of autonomous franchises, regulated by infrequent signals from headquarters, delivers its product with just-in-time precision, deploying the full spectrum of media—from cell phones to satellite links to complex and illicit private banking arrangements and high-tech forgeries—with incredible discipline and facility. The operatives who destroyed the World Trade Center were well educated and able to quickly grasp the most sophisticated technology. These are not hopped up savages, dreaming of black-eyed virgins: these are our children.

Mohammed Atta, the apparent operational ringleader of the plot, received a master’s degree in city planning from a university in Hamburg, which also housed the nucleus of a radical Islamic cell. His thesis advisor was quoted yesterday speaking admiringly about Atta’s diploma research on the historic planning of Aleppo, Syria. The professor had not suspected that Atta would be implicated in the most violent act of urbanism America has ever seen.

One of the most widely retailed images of the downfall of modernism was the implosion of the Pruitt Igoe towers in St. Louis, designed, like the Trade Center, by Minoru Yamasaki. This image has been absorbed into both architectural discourse and popular culture as a totem of corrective violence. September 11 was the biggest implosion ever, staged in the most media-saturated environment on the planet and captured from every angle, stamping out every other image. The unbelieveable crash. The unbelievable collapse. The unbelievable aftermath. Concluding that it’s too good not to broadcast, the media moguls have cleaned it up nicely for mass consumption, given it a PG rating by expunging shots of bodies falling, washing out the sight of blood, branding the event for easy, uncritical, consumption, to play over and over like Challenger or the Hindenberg or Kamikazes striking carrier decks.

The global network that destroyed the towers was neural, enabled by the infrastructure of empire. Without the internet, no terror: these monsters are the dark side of the creature we have ourselves designed, operating in its unregulated space and driving its assumptions to their furthest conclusions. The killers visited a mad act of urban renewal on behalf of their own idea of one world. Down went not simply the leading architectural icon of global capital but the most concentrated symbol of human density, of the coming together that has, in one form or another, guided urbanism from its beginnings.

The most in-your-face image here downtown is on Canal Street, a billboard for the latest Schwarzenegger film with a huge Arnold in the foreground, the usual mayhem behind him. The name of the film—the release of which has been delicately delayed by its producers—is “Collateral Damage.”

Perhaps it is time for architects to cease their celebration of branding and “pure” communication to try to be of some real service to the planet.

Architectural theory has been talking for some years of building as the pure space of events.

Here is an event.

What shall we build now?

And who will decide?

The only answer to terror is an excess of democracy.

2001