22 December 2001
Source: Hardcopy of the New York Times, December 23, 2001, Section
2, pp. 1, 42.
By HERBERT MUSCHAMP
Herbert Muschamp is architecture critic of the New York Times.
We are looking for substance or, failing that, for traction against the natural
desire to seize on the meaning of things too soon. New York is far from absorbing
the piece of world history that crashed into it in September. But the pressures
to make sense of Ground Zero are great. Some of the pressure arises from
the desire to help survivors of the terrorist attacks deal with the burden
of grief. Some of it also arises from the tendency of bureaucracies to take
on momentum with a logic all their own. This pressure can easily result in
the burial of meaning rather than the discovery of it.
A bureaucracy is now in place for the rebuilding of New York's financial district. The Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Authority, as the organization is called, is a division of the Empire State Development Corporation led by Charles A. Gargano, an appointee of Gov. George E. Pataki. With one exception the directors is a line-up of captains of industry, including top executives from financial services and communications companies and from public agencies for construction and economic development. Madelyn Willis, the authority's sole female director, represents Community Board 1, the local planning unit for lower Manhattan.
John C. Whitehead, a former Goldman, Sachs president who heads the new Redevelopment Authority, has said that the group's top priority is the design and construction of a memorial to the terrorists' victims. Ideas for this project have been taking shape since September. Pressure to proceed swiftly toward a design have been escalating, with the rationale that the design process is also a healing process. This thinking is sound.
There is a serious danger, however, that the scope of the design process will be too narrowly defined. The wounds in need of healing go deeper than Ground Zero and spread wider than the suffering of victims and survivors. The attack was an assault on a great city and its relationship to the rest of the world. It was an assault on history and on the American withdrawal from history in the post-cold war era. We should be skeptical of the desire for closure, one of our nation's pet chimeras, until we have faced its opposite: opening the civic imagination to the accelerating globalization of the urban realm. This opening, too, should be part of the design development.
The formation of the redevelopment authority signified the end of a process as well as the beginning of one. Actions taken and not taken between mid-September and late November are now part of the permanent record of 21st-century New York architecture. Historians will be analyzing them for decades. Meanwhile, this phase of recovery clarified some useful information for planners now working toward short-term and medium-range goals.
There are immediate needs to repair the transportation system into and out of Lower Manhattan. These should be linked to long-range planning for regional transportation. Such plans are contingent on the effectiveness of our Congressional delegation in securing federal support.
There are plans to construct public viewing platforms around the perimeter
of the World Trade Center site. Two towers of high-beam light, depicted on
the cover of The New York Times Magazine on Sept. 23, should be piercing
the night sky by the end of the month. Many of us who live downtown never
knew or admitted how attached we had become to the retail infrastructure,
including stores like Century 21, Borders, Staples, Lenscrafters, Brooks
Brothers and the Gap.
There is, however, no current need for office space, and hence no rationale for granting developers emergency concessions, like the suspension of zoning and environmental regulations. Questions that initially seemed pressing -- taller towers versus lower ones; modernist plazas versus Ye Olde Towne Squares -- are moot. Even if Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder on the twin towers, feels compelled to produce designs to satisfy his insurers, no one else need think about new buildings yet.
In general, however, this phase was notable for the lack of substantial ideas it produced. Efforts to rally the city's architects resulted in rounds of meetings, organizational strategies, motivational pep talks and general scurrying. Eventually, those efforts could be pivotal in reframing architectural discourse in this country around issues of cultural weight. If so, it will be because of the monumental vacuum that this hyperactivity exposed.
What we face now, in fact, are twin voids, one local, the other global. The first arises from the abdication of the public sector in the area of city planning. The second comes from New York's isolation from the rest of the urbanizing globe. Both stem from the collapse of historical perspective under the pressures of privatization.
The aggressive response of corporate architecture firms and their developer clients to the terrorist attacks was not New York architecture's finest hour. Nonetheless, much of this behavior can be diagnosed as a symptom of the privatization of city planning over the last two decades. Never has this surrender of civic responsibility been more starkly illustrated than in recent weeks.
"We should think like capitalists, not like Communists," Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said in his budget address earlier this year. The implied equation of the commonweal with the Cominterm sums up a role reversal that began during the Koch administration and is now nearly complete. City officials scurry about like Mickey Mouse entrepreneurs, plotting their next career moves. Corporate architects, despite clear conflicts of interest, try to act like public servants, with evident sincerity in a few cases. Nobody, meanwhile, bothers to look to the City Planning Commission for leadership. That demoralized, dysfunctional agency represents the power void in which all were operating before the state's redevelopment agency was set up.
Will the public sector reclaim it? For an extended period or for emergency use only? These questions deserve protracted debate. There will be efforts to neutralize the discussion, however. Municipal politics and real estate development have become, in effect, two divisions of the same industry: the City Hall-Development Complex, we might call it.
Politicians depend on real estate developers to finance their campaigns. Developers need politicians to help keep things all in the family when private contracts are awarded or special permits are sought. Architects may or may not like this status quo, but few of them are suicidal enough or courageous enough to demand reform. Our mayor-elect, Michael R. Bloomberg, is less beholden to the Complex. He is better placed to encourage developers to aim higher. But he is also taking office at a time when budgets for public services must be drastically curtailed. Privatization is likely to accelerate.
If faith in the City Planning Commission can't be restored, why bother keeping this agency around? We already have the city's Economic Development Corporation to expedite private development. In my scheme of things, City Planning would be retained, but recast within a more cultural, less legalistic framework. The agency should operate as a cosmopolitan think tank. Its primary mission should be to coordinate local growth with broader developments in global urbanization. Mayor Bloomberg can run it from his private jet.
A planning agency for contemporary New York should be guided by an overarching set of ideas that looks beyond municipal boundaries: great cities always have more in common with one another than with the nations in which they are located. Technology has drawn into close proximity great cities from the past as well as today's urban centers. Urban policy is now inseparable from foreign policy, at least on the cultural plane. The city is global.
Such an agency could create something substantial out of Void 2. In the last 14 weeks, we have witnessed the shocking culmination of a crisis that has been building for more than a decade. The war on terrorism illuminates, among other things, the widening gap between our advanced technology and the world that technology has enabled us to dominate.
This "culture gap" began with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989. For 28 years, that structure symbolized the polarization of history into a global binary structure reinforced by nuclear arms. A new phase of world history began with the wall's collapse. The United States has yet to work itself free from the wreckage. It hasn't calculated the degree to which its place in the postwar era depends on historical awareness.
In October I was persuaded to cancel a trip to Syria. I had thought of the trip as an act of personal healing. My perspective on the contemporary city was shattered by the attack on the twin towers, and I didn't feel I could regain it without making a pilgrimage to the part of the world where cities were first imagined.
Aleppo, my destination, has been a cosmopolitan center for more than 4,000 years Over the millennia, Aleppo has been destroyed and rebuilt often. They have a saying there: every civilized person has two homes, his own and Syria. New York could benefit now from the knowledge that civilization includes the destruction as well as the creation and re-creation of great things. Aleppo was in the news again recently. Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian who studied engineering and city planning and is believed to have led the Sept. 11 attack, wrote his thesis on the destruction of Aleppo's historic fabric by modern design.
On its Web site, the Aleppo hotel I was booked into appears to be a plain modern slab, floating in the usual modern void. It has a trio of penthouse restaurants, serving Chinese, Italian and American cuisine. There are good mountain views from the upper floors, along with the attraction of not being able to see the hotel when you are inside it. But Aleppo has survived Hittites, Mongols, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Crusaders, Venetians and Ottomans. It may even survive modern technology, and tourists like me.
But could our technology survive without Aleppo? Possibly not. Our machines are too dependent on the fragile network of relationships within the Near and Middle East that protects our access to oil. Those machines include the planes that enable us to fly around the world for peaceful or military purposes. They have been under-used for peaceful purposes, if by that we mean not only activities undertaken without arms, but also actions that explicitly promote peace by enlarging our cultural awareness of the world that our machines control.
George Bush Sr. described the Persian Gulf War of 1991 as a defense of the American way of life. His son has defined the current conflict as a defense of civilization itself. We would like to think that those two objectives are compatible. But the increasing divergence between them has been the overarching story of the post-cold war period.
This gap has expanded even further since Sept. 11. Hot war is not the ideal way to build bridges. The appearance on best-seller lists of books on Islam is one sign that the gap may eventually be narrowed. It may take more than a generation before this cultural perspective penetrates foreign policy. But the work we do now at Ground Zero could help move the process forward.
Television. Skyscrapers. Jet planes. Mr. Atta took three examples of modern technology and combined them into a single weapon of mass destruction and terror. The result was a cultural statement as well as an act of murderous aggression. One can't unpack the meaning of Ground Zero without understanding its historical dimensions. We might start by recognizing that one third of the world's population embraces Islam. We could also recall the number of nations convinced of their destiny to lead.
Anyone can create his or her own authority for the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan. Mine includes two thinkers who have expanded my framework for historical awareness: the neuroscientist Gerald Edelman and the historian Fernand Braudel. Braudel, author of the recent posthumously published "Memory and the Mediterranean" (Knopf), used "la longue durée" to describe the framework I am looking for. The term is imperfectly translated as "the long perspective."
Perspective involves more than placing ourselves in illuminating relationships with historical artifacts. It also requires the process of illumination itself: perspectival adjustments in our interior landscapes, our private worlds of memories, learning and concepts. Mr. Edelman has described this process as "building a bridge toward consciousness."
The first task of my redevelopment authority would be to build a bridge toward a more complex consciousness of the urbanizing world. If you enjoy traveling -- around the globe and within the mind -- you have much to contribute to this work. You're carrying around a superior technology, a bunch of neurons in your head ideally suited to mapping modernity and your place within it.
My postponed Syrian trip was motivated by impulse. I wanted to touch some old stones, and memorize the experience in relationship to other stones I have stroked on the road. For example, I was looking forward to visiting one building, completed in 1325, that originally housed the Venetian Embassy. The word embassy is euphemistic: in those days the Near Eastern region lay within the Venetian maritime empire. I've spent many hours looking at contemporary art in the Arsenale, the shipyard from which the Venetian fleet set forth, and not enough time walking around the navy's far-flung destinations.
Stones are dots. Minds connect them. It is hard to understand Venice if you approach it from the West. But when you look back at Europe from the Asian side of the Bosporus, the pieces start falling into place. By pieces I mean stones: the actual materials from which Venice is made. In 1023 a law was passed compelling Venetian merchants to return from their Eastern voyages with treasures suitable for adorning the basilica of St. Mark. More than 500 of these precious objects, including marble columns from Syria, now decorate the church's facade.
Venetians saw themselves as "the third Rome," after Constantinople. That is one reason that Venetian Gothic, with its heavy reliance on perforated screens, resembles an Oriental style. For Ruskin, the Doge's Palace was "the central building of the world" because its design fused Romanesque, Byzantine and northern Gothic motifs. Through Ruskin and the 19th-century Venetian Gothic Revival, the stone trail leads to Great Britain and the United States. its most recent incarnation is the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.
Touch enough stones, and you are on your way to developing your own longue durée. Think of it as a cultural radar system. Its antennas must be periodically readjusted, not only in response to current events, but also to receive memories of past adjustments. When the system is down, the causes and effects of events cannot be detected. Those linkages go the way of old radio waves, out into the ether.
The system is down. There is little coherent relationship between foreign policy and historical awareness. Our foreign policy is for machines. We have not found ways to integrate into policy the global civilization that technology is creating. This task should be performed by cities, starting with New York.
One feature great cities have in common is the capacity to recreate themselves after an assault. Under traumatic circumstances, New York has joined an ancient and illustrious roster. The dialogue about cities is synonymous with history. This discussion is now global. Young as we are, history is calling on New York to lead it.