A Scenario for Disaster; an Opportunity for Rethinking

Sept. 25, 2001
I wrote the following a few days following the September 11 disaster. We have learned so much since then, and yet so little. Today they are discussing the preservation of a portion of the south wall of the World Trade Center as a memorial.

Sept. 14, 2001
A tragedy has occurred. As a result, two very tall buildings have crumpled. These buildings were a landmark on the skyline of an important city. They could not be anything else. They were one-half to one-third taller than any other building nearby.

Many lives were lost. They were lost in an incident that broke all of the rules of war. Innocent people, not individuals with military-preparedness, were killed. More people than have been killed in any other single day in the history of our country.

What is our response to this new site? It is the first battleground of what is being called a retaliation, or by some, The New War. We do not know now the scope of this response or when or if it will ever end. How do we treat this ground? How can we retain its old story and tell the new story that it reveals? How can it become a positive response to incredible feats of heroism?

How can it be such a powerful symbol that we make sure, as a country, that nothing like this can ever happen again? How can we not trivialize it and put it in the category of just another memorial that will be fought over and degraded to a political trade off?

This is property that is very valuable in a very dense city. The previous building response was to layer buildings and people upwards in a three dimensional way instead of stretching it out in the usual two dimensional manner, an urban sprawl solution in a different dimension. Author David Macaulay said, “The human response to walking in the area of these buildings was to make me feel even smaller.” Is this how we want our buildings, our communities to make us feel?

Have we learned anything in the last 100 years about buildings or about behavior? Was the “Ego Building” of the 80s and 90s just another way to once-again subvert the environment to our own needs? And what did this symbol of power and money say to those who are less fortunate, who have different beliefs, to those who will never enter such a building, to those who may not even live or work in any kind of a structure that most of us would regard as adequate.

How do others—less fortunate, impoverished, dis-empowered—react to this kind of a statement? Could this construction of out-size buildings be compared to the playground bully who acts in an “in your face” manner? “I’m bigger, I’m taller, I’m richer, I will win at this game.” In other times, we would not let this behavior “go by” on the playground. It is time for America to begin again to govern its own behavior. It is time for America to realize that as adults act, so do our children, and as we have learned the hard way, so do our global neighbors. We have “done” unto others, and it is being “done” to us.

We have built “in your face” buildings; our behavior in foreign lands has bestowed on us the name of “Ugly American”; we have acted as a “Me First” country for too long. And we are reaping the results of that behavior. This incident just magnified what has been happening every day in every way.

It is going to be a long time before we know exactly, and we may never know, why anyone could hate us so much that they would perform this irrational act. There are many components that will need to be addressed. However, there are parts of it that we can understand, and one is that when you are as lucky as Americans have been, then you need to act smaller, act in a more humble way, give more, and understand that always being the winner of the game, may not win the war. In fact, it has started The New War.

Let us not automatically go back and do exactly as we would have done on “The Day before Tuesday.” Can we think of a different way to address this site? Can we end the “Mine’s Bigger” mentality that has existed since the first building of skyscrapers: the contest that has led to the tall buildings of New York, Chicago, Hong Kong, and wherever money and power exist. Can we correct the behavior that has governed us since the first white man came to America? Can we say, “What can I learn here?” instead of “What can I force on this place?” Design is not the only answer, but it is one part of the answer.

It is too soon to use the old trite response, “From something bad will come something good.” It is too soon to begin to work with the children in our schools on an answer for this site. It is not too soon for the grown-ups (all of them, not just the design professions) to understand that what we build and how we build it speaks of who we are, how we treat people, and as we have learned this week, how people treat us. There has to be another way.

Sept. 14, 2001
From Dean and Ginny Graves, CUBE outreach
On Tuesday of this week, the worst incident in the history of espionage in the United States occurred. The World Trade Center (WTC) buildings (the tallest buildings in the United States and second tallest in the world) were hit intentionally by suicide-pilot planes. As I write this, the injury count is unknown, but so far, no one has been removed alive.

How one responds to a tragedy of this order can never be anticipated or even explained, but usually that response is in an area of one’s interest or expertise. Dean and I immediately discussed whether or not there would be more tall buildings built and how this monstrosity could be explained to children. Since the WTC buildings were constructed in the era of the “Ego” Building style—mine’s bigger, mine’s taller, mine can do more things—we had hoped that there would be another design response that would be appropriate for this time and place. By Thursday, the developer of the World Trade Center had announced that the buildings would be rebuilt.

On Friday morning I was fortunate enough to accidentally catch the National Public Radio commentary of David Macauley, author of Pyramid, Cathedral and many more books about architecture, and a national advisory board member of CUBE. David clarified our thinking even more by discussing the buildings as just another form of urban sprawl, a vertical form. He also commented that we had made the World Trade Center a monument, but that we can not mix up our monuments with places where people work and live. They are two different things.

Dean and I are responding to the incident, at least today, in the way that we have been able to explain the value of community to the thousands of teachers who have participated in the community-based education network, in a way that children might understand, in a way that will address the things that we have learned about our environment and the needs of the people who share it. It is simplistic, but it is one way to think about the events of this week and to put them in some kind of order. A rethinking of the site is a positive response to what until now has been too vast, too much, too awful to comprehend.

Background material:
This project is reminiscent of a design challenge that occurred around ten years ago, another wake-up call. People in the design professions were asked how they would designate a dangerous nuclear-contaminated site too toxic for anyone to approach thousands of years from now. However, it would be a “message or sign” that would have to work for the ages. People in a time and place very far from this time, people who no longer spoke this or any current language, would need to be able to identify that this was a site that was ruined forever and that they should not approach it.

References:
Cooper, Elisha. A Year in New York. 1995: City and Company. p,76. The illustration cited above is included in this delightful book. We will never look at this image and see it the same way again.

Graves, Dean and Ginny: How High is Too High?, Box City. Prairie Village, KS, 2001.

Lemonick, Michael D. Should They Be Rebuilt? Sept. 24, 2001. p. 66.

New York Times Magazine: To Rebuild or Not. Sept. 23, 2001. p. 18.

Vidler, Anthony. A City Transformed: Designing “Defensible Spac’. September 23,2001: New York times, p. 6WK.

We are happy to fax any of you the relevant articles if you are unable to locate within your own organizational resources. Email: ginny at cubekc.org.

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