an architecture critic remembers 9/11
Twenty years ago, on the morning of September 11, 2001, I was driving the Port Jefferson Line of the Long Island Rail Road to meet a senior architect named Andrew Geller, the designer of a number of imaginative beach houses in the post-war years. He lived with his wife Shirley in Northport, a small town on Long Island Sound.
When I arrived at the local station, completely unaware and after a pleasant ride on a crystal clear day, I was picked up by Geller’s grandson Jake, who asked me if I had heard the alarming news: a plane had just hit one of the worlds The Towers of the Trade Center – so it seemed like an accident. Of course not, which marks one of the differences between then and now: no ubiquitous social media. As we drove the short distance back to his grandparents’ house to hear information on the radio, the second plane struck.
I spent the rest of the day in the Gellers’ charming Victorian house, watching with fear and horror as the towers collapsed and the world suddenly changed.
At the time, I was the editor of architecture books and visited Geller to review materials for a monograph on his beach houses, humble works of great charm and whims, whose names suggested their shapes: The Milk Carton (because it looked like an overturned milk carton) , the cat (because it looked like a cat), the reclining Picasso (because it looked like a Picasso odalisque), the Square Brassiere (because it looked like a square one, well, you see.)
In their size, lightness, and play, Geller’s houses seemed the exact opposite of the towers of the World Trade Center, those giant, relentless monoliths that mocked the plight of humanity.
It was the physical power of these towers that attracted me as architectural works, although they were never critical favorites. “These are big buildings, but not great architecture,” wrote Ada Louise Huxtable in the Times. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki, they were considered too big, too fussy about their Gothic-style details, too claustrophobic with their thin windows, too anti-urban and un-New York in their superblock plan. They are being perceived as friendlier today, partly out of longing for what has been lost and partly because of a positive re-evaluation of Yamasaki’s work and career.
For me, however, they almost defied criticism. They had a threatening magnetic energy that was so pervasive that they reached the sublime. It was this quality that made the walk between the towers of the high wire artist Philippe Petit so extraordinary in 1974. It wasn’t just the boldness of the plot, the courage, the immense skill, or the cat-and-mouse drama that it took to make it happen. It was the fragile delicacy of Petit’s humanity in contrast to the formidable power of these buildings that made the performance more than just a spectacle.
Who could ever have imagined that he would outlast them?
This November 8, 1992 file photo shows the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, New York.(RONAN ROBERT / AFP via Getty Images)
As it turned out, my host Geller, devastated by the human tragedy of the day, had a surprising discovery. Much of his career was spent in the office of legendary designer Raymond Loewy – the beach houses were what we would call a sideline – and one of the projects he’d worked on was Windows on the World, the iconic restaurant at the top of the Trade north tower of the center.
As a boy, I’d had a family party at Windows, and I had strong memories of the plush and colorful modern design high up in the sky. For all the brutality of the building, the restaurant was full of optimism. Of course, Geller was involved in his invention.
We finally published the book on Geller’s beach houses, and today it has a special meaning for me because it is associated with that terrible day. The innocent, naturally optimistic work it illustrates is, in my opinion, the ideal response to nihilistic violence and the forces of destruction. I also think it’s a fitting tribute to Geller, who died on Christmas Day 2011.
I am fortunate to have my own personal 9/11 memorial. My feelings about the public monument at Ground Zero are more tense. The development process was co-opted from the beginning by ego, politics and real estate interests. The result – with the towers’ two footprints turned into cavities by spilled water – is undeniably powerful, but also a compromise of what was originally proposed by architect Michael Arad. For many of us who have been forced through this unholy process, it will always be fraught with the decades-long controversy surrounding its creation.
Visitors to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum orbit one of two reflective ponds in New York on November 21, 2011. (Mark Lennihan / AP)
Even then I understood that it was naive to think or even to hope that the reconstruction and commemoration process at Ground Zero would be a model of harmonious, civic community. That’s not how the real world works, and that’s not how real estate development in New York works.
In the past two decades, however, the strife inherent in bourgeois memory (and its architectural manifestation) has become even more difficult, bitter, and combative. The American pact was frayed by the turn of the millennium; the post-9/11 era has brought about war, economic and cultural unrest, political unrest and pandemics, all of which have deepened the rifts in our society. With this destabilization has come an understandable lack of certainty about our respective place in the nation and its future. Inevitably we looked to the past for answers, comfort and reassurance.
It was not always like this. In the post-war years, when the nation’s prospects were more pleasant – at least for the white majority – there was a desire to look forward, not backward, and much less emphasis on memorial building. The World War II Memorial on the Mall in Washington, DC didn’t open until 2004 – more than two decades after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Writer Isabel Wilkerson has compared the present state of America to the predicament faced by owners of an old home. “Our immediate ancestors might not have had anything to do with it, but here we are, the current residents of a property with stress cracks and arched walls and cracks built into the foundation. We are the heirs of what is right or wrong. We didn’t put up the uneven pillars or beams, but now we have to take care of them. And any further deterioration is indeed in our hands. “
These words from Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Dissatisfaction launched the report of a working group on civic memory in Los Angeles prepared earlier this year under the auspices of Mayor Eric Garcetti. Among the conclusions of this report, which was prepared by a range of historians, critics, writers, architects, cultural workers, community leaders, and public officials (Disclosure: I was one of them), was the need to widely share information and encourage widespread participation , recognize indigenous and minority history and rethink difficult stories and monuments.
Texas in general, and Dallas in particular, has a myriad of stories and they are not all or fairly recognized. The state legislature seems intent on maintaining this situation, as if the history of Texas could and should be limited to a single heroic narrative. But to borrow Wilkerson’s metaphor, if your house is in quicksand, you can insist it be built on solid ground all you want and it will still sink.
When asked to help produce the Los Angeles report on Civic Memory, I brought with me as an example a copy of Goals for Dallas, produced in 1966 under Mayor J. Erik Jonsson. So the city struggled with its own recent history and turned to experts inside and out to plan its future.
Perhaps it is time for another project in this direction, albeit one from the ground up rather than top-down. That would be a fitting memorial to 9/11 and something that could have as much power as these extraordinary buildings, albeit of a different and perhaps more permanent kind.
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