Saintly or Sanctimonious? A Candid Critique Of WTC Reconstruction Proposals

The new round of World Trade Center reconstruction proposals are in and they are as ridiculous as the first bunch last summer. What stands out (no pun intended) is the neurotic insistence on putting back buildings as tall or taller than the twin towers that were destroyed on 9/11/01; a schoolyard mentality gesture to defy the bully terrorists by patriotically restoring what they took away.

But what about the feelings of people expected to work on the 86th floor? And what kind of sadistic company would subject their employees to that kind of anxiety? I'll tell you what kind: one run by extreme narcissists who insist on placing their self-importance ahead of all other considerations. (And the patriotic veneer—"we're number one"—is only an extension of that narcissism.) Anyway, it seems to me that putting up juicy targets is a certain invitation to a new round of terrorist attacks. Earth to architects: there is a new kind of asymmetrical warfare at large in this world.

The narcissism and grandiosity of some of the relatives of those who died on 9/11—shown on MSNBC—is also amazing, as seen in their angry insistence that a huge proportion of the site be dedicated to a memorial. They ought to take a trip to Fifth Avenue up in the 90s where the bas-relief memorial to World War One (in which more than 50,000 US soldiers died) occupies about 20 square feet.

The actual design quality of the individual proposals induces a sensation like salmonella poisoning, led by Daniel Libeskind's frightening ensemble of skewed, warped, and tortured glass boxes that looks like a rubble-field after a war (as though expressing the avant-garde wish that the twin towers had collapsed a little more artistically!). Since Libeskind designed a holocaust memorial in Berlin, a special cloak of sanctimony has descended around him and his work. But it's just more deconstructionist crap intended to confound our expectations about gravity, spatial orientation, and civic purpose.

The rendering of an atrium by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill looks like the main concourse of the Detroit airport blown up by two orders of magnitude, a monument to agoraphobia. The warped, torqued, crumpling and "kissing" towers by United Architects come straight out of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The people working inside would have to be drugged to stay in there. People standing on the ground nearby would feel as though the buildings were liable to fall on their heads at any moment—and given what has already happened, they would be justified in feeling that way. Norman Foster's triangulated twin towers manage to be even more ugly than the ones that Mohammad Atta & Co. took down. The proposal jointly by Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, and Steven Holl succeeds in being both frightening and boring. The dirtiest secret of all of these proposals is that they are little more than exercises in computer aided design, and what they demonstrate most strikingly are the diminishing returns of technology—the more easily you warp, torque, and distort a building, the less civic value and meaning it has.

The only proposal with any dignity is the one by Littenberg and Peterson, which has a traditional civic square fronted by unskewed, unwarped, untorqued, untortured building facades following the traditional Manhattan street grid. But it, too, suffers from the compulsion to maximize the floor-to-area ratio by putting up excessively tall buildings.

What also stands out about this process is how a tiny oligarchy of superstar architects dominate and usurp all other interests in this compelling matter of public interest. With a huge self-regarding fanfare at the ceremonies, they declared their proposals to be "innovative and creative," but the only thing they innovate are new ways to disappoint our expectations about city life, and all they create are new problems for our neurology. At public meetings for the previous round of proposals, a citizen uproar of disgust and objection caught city officials and their companion real estate promoters by surprise. These new proposals, if anything, are worse, and one can only hope that the response is equally vehement.

James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Geography of Nowhere, and Home from Nowhere. His latest book, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, provides a critical examination of the functioning and future trajectories of American cities. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York State.