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5

What Remains

Traffic returned to the streets of my neighborhood today after the cordon was moved south to Canal Street. It was the day of Bush’s tardy visit and the sky was filled with the futile darting of fighter jets, commanding anxious looks upward with every pass. I made my way through the police lines to my studio—only a few blocks from the World Trade Center—and sat around numbly for most of the day. Outgoing communication was down and I couldn’t respond to the dozens of email and phone messages wondering if we were all alive.

In the evening, I returned home and switched on the television to learn the latest and to watch the riveting pornography of planes smashing over and over into buildings, the eruptions of flame, the horrific collapse, ashamed at my own fascination. Like the restored traffic in the streets, the traffic of commerce had also returned to the airwaves and the dour talk was again interrupted by commercials, happy faces commanding us to buy SUVs and stock up on useless commodities.

Solidarity and civility had bloomed in the days following the attack as barriers of diffidence fell and comfort and information flowed freely between strangers. Acts of kindness and friendship multiplied and the public’s demeanor became somber and respectful. We comforted each other with small exchanges of information and feeling, and by the powerful egalitarianism of disaster. The city’s official response was magnificent, astonishing. The streets below 14th Street were closed to traffic and nobody but local residents was allowed in. The result was an eerie calm as people, quiet and restrained, took possession of the empty streets as after heavy snowfall. The weather was mockingly beautiful and the city was, in this way, at its very best: quiet, free of cars, crisp, cooperative. Only when the wind shifted and the dreadful smell of incineration permeated the air was there a sensory reminder of the hell nearby, belying the cool. And everywhere, the ash fell.

Before Tuesday, I’d been thinking about what to write for this column. I had been asked to conform to the theme of preservation and planned to focus on Frank Gehry’s new boutique for Issey Miyake down the street. I was going to discuss the narrow focus among architects and critics in which “preservation” has been reduced to a battle of styles; the endless debate over the virtues of modern building versus historicism—the official default when building in old neighborhoods like mine. I was going to argue that we’ve lost sight of the ecology of place and that it’s not enough only to preserve the visually familiar in beloved environments—we must also be sensitive to established ways of living, to daily habits, to the need for home.

Gehry’s boutique would have been exhibit A in all of this because it would surely have been beautiful, the work of our most artistically accomplished architect. I would probably have mentioned too my annoyance at the trendy boutique having replaced something actually useful: an organic food store that had been there for years.

But now, confronted by the agonizing absence of the Twin Towers from our field of vision, I am thrown back into thinking of architecture as an element of citizenship. Must it now be subsumed in the rhetoric of defiance and victory? Will we continue to look at architecture as the answer?

There has been a brave and understandable clamor for rebuilding. After all, this was the city’s preeminent icon, and we must not hand a symbolic victory to terror by allowing it to disfigure our legendary skyline. Those terrorists—who obviously understood the World Trade Center’s structure and construction—used architecture as a means of mass murder. Architecture became an accessory to the crime. The economic and narcissistic logic behind the form of the Twin Towers put people at risk.

Risk assessment—like “threat” assessment for the military—is always a component of architecture. Among the risks the designers of the World Trade Center deemed acceptable was a one-hour climb downstairs for people attempting to flee the upper stories of the building, a climb impossible for the disabled. One of the tradeoffs they made against this risk was the elimination of asbestos fireproofing around the structural steel. There has been much discussion about whether the building—which sits along a primary approach route to La Guardia airport—was designed to survive the strike of a plane. The answer circulated in the media was that yes, indeed it had been, but only from the smaller type of aircraft in use when the structure was built. The question remains, though, about which harm’s ways a building should be in.

For now, I’m uncertain about what should be done to heal the site. Perhaps this is the moment for a decisive break from the machismo of scale that foregrounds values of size and cost above all other signifiers of success and power. Perhaps this is an opportunity to reimagine architecture, not from a position of either power or paranoia but from one of compassion. Maybe this site shouldn’t even be rebuilt. I shudder at the trivial objects of memorial that will ultimately be offered, the ornamented island of calm amidst the gigantic new construction.

Perhaps this is a scar that should simply be left. Perhaps the billions should be spent improving transportation and building in neglected parts of the city, neglected parts of the world.

As the endless loop of planes crashing into buildings plays over and over in our heads, it has joined our image bank of disasters, morphed into special effect. It’s depressing how many of those interviewed have referred to Bruce Willis, Independence Day, The Towering Inferno, the earthquake ride at Universal Studios.

But already the tragedy has invented its own memorial. On every lamppost and mailbox, fence and facade, thousands of images have been posted—photographs of the missing, advertising the ineradicable despair of their loved ones. All over the city people stop to stare at these pictures, taken when things were normal, formal portraits and tourist snaps, family photos, graduation shots. We all look to see if we recognize these faces—and though we breathe with quiet relief whenever we don’t, every picture still feels familiar, every photograph could have been our own or that of someone we love. I am not chronically paranoid but I’m good and worried. Not so much about the next attack (though I am still afraid to fly) but about the reconstruction of our city and of our culture. The victory for terror lies in our own frightened willingness to give up on the values that are under attack, values that lie at the core of what makes good architecture and urbanism: facilitating the face-to-face creation of places of privacy and personal sanctuary, setting the pleasures of community, foregrounding the beautiful.

Asked for an ID every morning by a guardsman in combat dress, listening to the president blustering about “smokin’ them out of their holes, getting them running, and whipping them”—with the “them” as yet unknown—I fear for us all, for where we’ll have to live from now on.

2001