Sultan Knish
In the days and weeks after September 11 hardly a day would go by
without another homemade design for the World Trade Center showing up in
my inbox. Some were crude, some were obscene, some were impossible to
construct and some were genuinely visionary. Even those most familiar
with the crusted workings of New York state and city government, not to
mention the bi-state beast of the Port Authority, could hardly have
imagined that eleven years later one far smaller tower would still be
under construction.
One World Trade Center, formerly the Freedom Tower before that name was
deemed too showy and patriotic, is a faintly shiny presence on the
skyline, glass slowly sliding over stories of naked steel, overshadowed
by Frank Gehry's strikingly surreal Beekman Tower with its rippling
lines. If you didn't know what you were looking at, you would hardly
notice it was there.
Now One World Trade Center will lose a radome enclosure due to budget
cuts, which means very little except that the building's ridiculous 400
foot spire risks being classified as an antenna and OWTC will no longer
be recognized as the tallest building in the country. The death of the
radome is one of the many redesigns to the building that have made it
the forgettable structure that it is today. And the difference in those
400 feet is the difference between a 1,368 foot skyscraper and a 1,776
foot skyscraper. Having lost the Freedom Tower designation, losing the symbolic 1,776
height seems almost an afterthought. The 1,776 number was an artifact of
Daniel Libeskind, the original architect, and his vision for the site.
That vision was mostly discarded, along with its "sky gardens" and
windmills. The "1,776" height is about all that remains of the
German-Jewish architect's proposal. And regardless of whether we count
the antenna as a spire or not, it will not be the tallest building in
the world. Those can be found in the places that funded the terrorists,
Saudi Arabia and Dubai, which have used slave labor to build glass and
steel pyramids to the glory of their own pharaohs.
The Empire State Building, the Grande Dame of New York skyscrapers, has a
roof height of around a 100 feet or 30 meters lower. The difference
between a skyscraper built during the Great Depression and one built
during the 21st Century Depression is around 100 feet and about a
century of aesthetics. Where the spire of the Empire State Building is
an organic extension of it, the one atop OWTC is awkwardly placed, it's
just there making time and filling up the space.
In its defense, One World Trade Center is graceful enough compared to
the Sears Tower or the Dubai Burj, which pile blocks and needles
together in a cluster of alien geometry. It will be better looking than
the New York Times Building and the Bank of America Tower, which both
have that made- by-IKEA look. It will also be completely unremarkable
and that is a feature, not a bug.
Its blandness of name and design convey that it is an apolitical
structure. Its only ambition is to embody a post-American bigness made
possible by a large antenna. Its unexceptional nature is an antidote to
the American exceptionalism sparked after the September 11 massacre.
Much like welcoming in a mosque near Ground Zero or incorporating
Islamic elements into the Flight 93 Memorial, it says that there is
nothing especially American here.
One World Trade Center will need to fill all that office space, and many
international renters may do business in America, but they don't like
us very much. And ever since September 11, American political and
business leaders have tried to be as inoffensive as possible, to avoid
stepping on anyone's toes with our jingoism and our flags so that next
time we don't get bombed.
The former Freedom Tower will be a properly post-American building. It
will be large, but vague. It will be big, but not too big. It will be
smaller than the towers put up by our enemies so that they will have no
reason to feel jealous. It will not stand for anything in particular. It
will just be office space, like the city and the country, a place that
people can come to do business without making any commitment to it.
"A skyscraper rises above its predecessors, restoring the spiritual peak
of the city, creating an icon that speaks to our vitality in the face
of danger and our optimism in the aftermath of tragedy," Libeskind had
said of his design. One World Trade Center cannot be accused of doing
any of that. There is no spiritual peak, not even the one at the top of
its no-longer-1,776-foot height.
The rapid construction of the Empire State Building in a year's time
during the Great Depression made a statement about the ability of a
nation to do great things even in its darkest hour. The slow pace, the
perpetual redesigns and the bland final product of One World Trade
Center make the opposite statement. A reminder that inept and timid
leadership can rob a nation of its exceptionalism.
In 1910 the eleven tallest buildings in the world were in New York City.
Now the city doesn't even make it into the top eleven and barely makes
it into the top twenty. And the majority of today's top eleven buildings
went up after the World Trade Center was destroyed. When One World
Trade Center is completed, and, if its antenna is counted as part of its
height, it will qualify as the third-tallest building in the world,
until the latest monstrosities in Shanghai and Dubai topple it off that
list.
A building is not a nation, but there are certain parallels to the
diminution of national ambition, and there are undeniable parallels
between the stumbling makeshift design process of One World Trade Center
and the fumbling War on Terror. A great work can be done in a short
time if you know what it is you want to accomplish. The blueprints for
the Empire State Building were drawn up in two weeks and the structure
was completed in a year. One World Trade Center has suffered from
revisions and redesigns because it never had a clear purpose. Most
people agreed that something had to go up, but they no longer knew why
except that it was empty space and empty space has to be filled.
The Post-American America is a place unsure of its identity, whose new
conceptions of American values all too often serve only to negate the
old, creating an empty space in which nothing is forbidden and everyone
is welcome, but that has no structure, only emptiness.
The New York of 1910 was a unique place, but now most cities are smaller
scale versions of it, big, ambitious and empty. Full of skyscrapers
designed by the same international firms, stocked with chain stores that
are the same all over the world, and full of the same immigrants from
around the world. Everyone lives in New York now and no one lives there.
Everyone has vicariously walked its streets through a hundred movies
and television shows which use it because it is the city. It is the
Everycity where we all meant to live.
One World Trade Center is a building for that Everycity, that global
city of glassy office buildings and glassy consumers all shopping for
the same brands made in the same place. They all speak English, but it's
a rough English, except when it's a rough French or a rough German,
argot languages, argot designs and argot nations. Everything, politics,
movies, buildings and nations, is reduced to its simplest elements,
communicating its simplicity to everyone.
Obama came out of that Everycity, a vague blur on an atlas, eating dogs
and snakes, before settling in the States for some cocaine and community
activism and a run at the White House. A reminder that anyone can do
anything here, so long as it's environmentally friendly and not too
overtly American. It is a different notion of the American Dream, one
that has little in common with it except the grandiosity of its
opportunities.
America has lost most things but its bigness. Its buildings may no
longer be as big as they used to be, and the bigness is no longer a
national ambition, but it is the last thing that the Everycity has
retained. It is still the place where you can get rich, where you can
get famous, where a boy from Indonesia can make it to the highest office
in the land, where anyone with a good story or a good jump shot still
has a shot at the big time.
It's not a tower of freedom, because freedom implies too much individual
agency. The Every city has too many people, too much mass and too much
tension to have freedom. It has opportunities for those who pursue them
hard enough. It does not however have a future. Only the eternal present
of buildings that, for all their futurism, are hardly any taller than
they were a hundred years ago.
Futures arise from national destinies. In the post-destiny world, there
is no future and no past, only a slow decline and decay into a
nothingness without shape, substance or form. A nation unmoored from its
past has nowhere to go. It cannot make anything new, because there are
no new things. Its horizons are limited to its geometry, it experiments
with shapes and colors, it digs through the trash of earlier eras for
things it can use, reviving trends, dumpster diving through history
while feeling that other eras were more exciting and more interesting
than this.
During the days of the city's decline, there was a plan to replace Grand
Central Station with I.M. Pei's Hyperboloid, a skyscraper shaped like
an industrial part that would have towered over the Empire State
Building, for the ultimate Everycity monument. Though Penn Station was
destroyed and may see the rise of the Vornado Tower in its place and the
Singer Building was smashed to make way for 1 Liberty Plaza, Grand
Central survived. The Hyperboloid was reborn in China as the Canton
Tower, the tallest structure in China. A fitting place for the land
driven to become the new Everycity of the world.
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