New York’s WTC: Ruins and Memories

The image of two planes crashing into the World Trade Center plays over and over in our minds. The gruesome images of WTC’s towers crumbling to the ground have been rapidly stored in the aestheticized image bank of disasters, along with the Challenger, the Hindenberg, the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, the burning ships at Pearl Harbor, the ash-preserved figures of Pompeii.

September 11, 2001 will be remembered as the Black Tuesday of architecture. Three steel stumps are all that remain of New York’s once glorious Twin Towers, their technological pride mortally wounded by a terrible and meaningless human sacrifice eerily reminiscent of the unreal destruction in medieval depictions of the Dies irae.

Reduced to an unwilling caricature of post-modern ruins – some might even say to a macabre and surreal metaphor of the site architects and more extreme forms of deconstruction – Yamasaki and Roth’s towers seem like a warning against abstract architectural ambition curbed only by the technological constraints of the moment. You can die of architecture, and from now on, city planners and mass-culture sociologists will have to take account of this fact.

I had an especially eerie feeling when I first came back to Manhattan this spring. Looking down the geometrically arranged grid of streets, towards the financial district, the absence of the Twin Towers from the landmark skyline is a surreal reminder of the terrible event that traumatized New York temporarily to an economic standstill. The rhetorical images of the disaster morphed the tragedy into its own memorial.

New Yorker Rafe Totengco described to me how the street scene was during the first few months after 9/11. On every lamppost, mailbox, fence and façade, thousands of images – photographs of the missing – were posted. All over the city, people stopped and stared at photographs taken when things were normal: Formal portraits and tourist snaps, family photos, graduation pictures. I was thinking that though I may not know any of them, it could have been anyone of us or someone we love.

Lost landmark

In memoriam, what should be said about the World Trade Center? First, it was certainly a landmark – the silvery twin towers had grandeur, rising through Lower Manhattan twice as high as anything around them. Second – alas, it had no other impressive architectural feature. Indeed, if the WTC had instead been demolished to make way for a more conspicuous mega-development, it would be noted mainly as the tallest pair of buildings yet to disappear. It would not be as ennobled as an earlier, more distinguished "world’s tallest" titleholder that vanished in 1966 the 47-story Singer Tower.

Architect Minoru Yamasaki designed the WTC complex, by far his most important commission, with Emery Roth & Sons as consulting architects. The slim rectangular prisms had to be girdled by so much structure that the exterior wall openings were articulated as narrow pointed Gothic windows, in the arbitrary manner of historical expressionism that was popular with many architects in the early 1960s.

Externally, the disliked windows were so narrow that from a distance the towers looked windowless, which rather grew on observers when the era of minimalism arrived. Viewed from afar, the buildings displayed geometrical restraint in contrast to others around them.

In addition, the view from the much-touted Windows on the World restaurant at the top was a disappointment, being a dull horizontal bird’s-eye view over a vast but minuscule-appearing landscape rather than the steep-vertical view in a forest of city lights that makes the 102-story Empire State Building’s observation deck an enchanting place to be.

That would be about it for major architectural interest. The WTC scored in other respects with the towers’ convenient siting at a transit node and the economical straightforwardness of their structural design. These haplessly contributed to the death toll when the inconceivable attack occurred.

Yamasaki once said, "As an architect, if I had no economic or social limitations, I’d solve all my problems with one-story buildings. Imagine how pleasant it would be to always work and plan spaces overlooking lovely gardens."

Yamasaki proved his point about mesh-cage, load-bearing walls when the towers were constructed in 1976. Inside, the buildings never felt either hospitable or humane. And, in fact, the engineering that made their height and maximum floor space possible also contributed to their rapid demise. Even on a good day, the cavernous elevators rattled through windy shafts like freight trains crossing the prairies, and most workers had to change elevators at different levels to commute to their designated offices. Labeled by many critics as a terrible place for office workers, at street level it was a nightmare of vacuous alienation.

Many who survived this attack had done it once before in 1993, when terrorists planted a bomb in the underground garage. This time, those who did not react immediately did not make it. Office workers need not have been agoraphobic to be sensitive to the World Trade Center’s possible dangers, but the routine of daily life has a way of creating a false sense of security. In the larger arena, the US and the government itself had been lulled into an illusion of well-being even as a secret army was being assembled openly in its midst.

The Future of the Site

In the aftermath of atrocity visited upon the 110-story Twin Towers, the battle cry most frequently heard among politicians, television commentators, and even reputable architects is "to rebuild bigger and better" (as if this were the only way to combat the evil forces that perpetuated an attack costing over a thousand lives). While some believe that nothing should be built over the site to create a serene monument to the victims, others believe in a more modest affirmative gesture such as building a museum of world culture or an anti-terrorism center.

Several groups even suggested that the actual footprints of the towers be treated as a sacred place in the new development, perhaps preserving remnants of the tower as a backdrop to make a showpiece of something that was turned into an instrument of death. It collectivizes deaths in a time and place. The Metropolitan Museum of Art director Philippe de Montebello called the ruins "a masterpiece." They even compared the ruins to the work of Frank Gehry and clothing designer Issey Miyake. (I wonder, does that make the murderers conceptual artists?)

In the 20th century, ruins have sparked sensations far beyond the poetic melancholy. The A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, a battered shell of an exhibition hall that somehow stood though the bomb exploded directly above it, is the centerpiece of Kenzo Tange’s memorial park devoted to the horrors of atomic warfare. In contrast, Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin suggests the idea of how ruins can be powerfully conveyed without a literal ruins’ presence. The building does not sentimentalize violence moldering away wreathed in ivy, instead it is conceived directly from the destruction.

The site is now clear, a testament to the selfless energy of those who labored there round the clock. While no plans have been finalized, there cannot be a basis for deciding on the superiority of one solution over another. It would be a shame if the process were to proceed deductively as if the solution could simply be programmed by consensus.

With the formation of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), planning responsibility has finally been defined. One of the most broad-based coalitions – New York, New Visions – most crucially call for a look beyond the immediate site of the towers and consider the planning of downtown Manhattan as a whole.

The future of the site, I hope, lies not in rebuilding inhumane trophy towers from the past in the kind of windswept plaza that has destroyed the streetscapes of American cities. While the practical solution will require revolutionary vision and invention by architects and planners, clues to an inspired outcome can be found in Battery Park City, the financial center and residential area built on a landfill across the street. It was originally conceived as an elevated space-age city on ramps. Instead, the planners wisely extended the existing lower-Manhattan street grid onto the site, bestowing on the area and its buildings the quintessential character of a New York neighborhood.

As another example, one need only walk through Rockefeller Center in midtown with its interior squares and gardens to appreciate how a building complex can achieve mass and grandeur without losing the intimacy of the street patterns. Even the Empire State building succeeds because it is contained within the grid. The place to begin is to re-establish the historic east-west streets running south of St. Paul’s Chapel, the 18th church modeled on St Martin’s-in-the-Fields just east of ground zero that was miraculously spared.

Towering Concerns

Should skyscrapers change? For the near future, until the dust has settled, we can temper our pride with an acute civic consciousness, continuing to build big but rethinking the patter. Perhaps we will design high-rises in aggregate, remembering lower Manhattan prior to the Twin Towers, avoiding the overweening gesture, focusing on differentiation and detail rather than bravado or extreme height.

In professional circles, we should debate the safety of mega-structures, since buildings above 50 stories raise unique questions of egress and safety. We hope that the fire safety of tall buildings will become more effective. Designs with redundant structural elements may reappear. Evacuation elevators may become compulsory, with heavily reinforced shafts with protected high-strength cables. Finally, we should improve the security of very tall buildings.

What then should be built on the site of the former WTC? I believe the replacement should neither be a small monument nor mere real estate but a truly monumental and memorializing structure. It should be committed to a mixture of human uses, including commercial offices because there is nothing profane about workplaces. Its form might evoke the WTC’s transfigurative history.

Despite all our momentary fears, low-rise buildings and dispersal to the suburbs are not the best answers. While others may offer political or military solutions to the challenges of terrorism, architects and other design professionals can hatch their own courageous plans, offering collaborative visions to lead us up.

Great architecture or not, the violent sacrifice – exacted from the buildings and people of Lower Manhattan – transfigured the towers and exalted them. If we value everything according to our feelings, it seems certain that the destruction of the WTC will stand in memory and sorrow alongside the bombing of Dresden and the explosion of the Parthenon.