september 11: pruitt-igoe

Possibly you've seen this ad by the World Wildlife Fund (who'd have guessed?) kicking around the net recently. Possibly you haven't, because you are not yet incapable of unplugging from the digital world and have been off having 'face time' somewhere with someone. Lucky you. In any case, the ad sent people tropo (here, here, and here – 'oh no you di-unt'). The WWF's message is simple: the Boxing Day Tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. Fair point. Well made. But even 8 years later people are still not really sure whether we can say those sorts of things. Apparently it takes 12.

I am fascinated by the Twin Towers – I don’t mind admitting that.

September 11, by contrast, is not a subject I indulge in, and for that reason I have decided to not make this a post about the towers (opening image excluded).

Of course I have my own ideas about the meaning, the causes and the results of those terrorist attacks, but that’s not for here. Buy me a beer and we’ll talk it all over.

Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the Twins, is the real subject here. I'm going to start with his personal life: he is the only man I have ever heard of who married a woman, divorced her, married two more, and then re-married the first again. Weird. As far as his architectural skills go, he was clearly a man of great talent. However, his theories of urban planning were whack. To the question "why did you make two 110 storey buildings when you could have made one 220 tower?" he is quoted as reflecting a moment and responding (apparently sincerely) "I didn't want to lose the human scale".

The most extreme conspiracy theorists will tell you it was the government that destroyed the Twin Towers. If this is the case, then that makes 9/11 the second time the state has intervened to demolish Yamasaki's projects: the other famous one being the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in St. Louis.

Infamous amongst public and architects alike, Pruitt and Igoe were segregated projects (named after Pruitt– a black WW2 pilot, and Igoe– a white congressman) built in '55. Essentially, all his theories about how people would use the blocks were wrong. Apartments were purposely built small in order to encourage tenants to use the large public corridors and rooms, found on every second floor. Needless to say, these spaces became occupied by muggers, and the buildings became renowned for their violence and vandalism. The architect's drawings of smiling children rolling down the halls on tricycles never materialised. Like a lot of Modernists, Yamasaki was extremely naive about how the people actually lived, he said "I never thought people could be that destructive." Jencks famoulsy gloated that the projects' destruction marked the end of Modernism. Their demolition, less than 20 years after their construction, was captured in the film Koyaanisqatsi (music by Philip Glass). If you can spare 8 minutes of your life, watch the video below, its truly amazing.

Shifting Shorelines #2: NY

Under the pavement the beach: mid-70's, just after the completion of the extension of Manhattan, an era of NY beach parties.

In a fit of delirium, Rem Koolhaas praised the urban democracy of the New York Commissioners' Plan of 1811. With a fixed number of blocks (2,028) and (at least in theory) no single development surpassing the limits of its block, the equality of each 'urban island' was assured. That is, no block could claim to be anything more than a certain percentage of Manhattan. Rem goes on to explain that the power of the rules lay in the rigidity of the limitations they presented.

But the rules were not so fixed. The construction of the World Trade Center produced almost a million cubic metres of excavated fill – and rather than dump it or ship it elsewhere, New York used it to push the shoreline 210m to the west, and 2km to the north. The resulting strip (called Battery Park City) created six new blocks and 92 new acres. The shoreline was augmented, a parcel of land (of incalculable value) had been cut from the island itself.

The north tower was finished in 1970, the south in '72. For 4 years the Twins fronted the Hudson directly, until the backfilling was complete. But the first building on the new strip didn't open until 1981, and for several years the strip was the site of art exhibits, anti-nuclear demonstrations and beach parties. The Twins suddenly found themselves at the beach, like Yankies in Miami.

The impact of this enormous expansion on the feeling of Downtown must have been phenomenal – the people revelled in a sudden emptiness that had not been felt in Manhattan for almost two centuries. The landscape artist Agnes Denes celebrated the final days of the space, (new blocks already seen under construction in the distance) by planting an acre of wheat. The abstract world of global finance presented, if only so briefly, with the realities of basic agriculture: the foundation of civilisation brought to the etherial heights of the metropolis.

Coming soon... #3, the thrilling conclusion to the series.


To see the 9 images in Agnes Denes series click here.

nouvelle vague

I was fourteen when the Towers came down, and the long twin shadows of Iraq and Afghanistan essentially defined my development of global awareness. It is an event I refer to frequently when attempting to describe the nature of the new millennial zeitgeist, and while it is a subject that has gone out of vogue in recent years (perhaps as a result of the spectacular conspiracy theories that surround that tragedy, with varying degrees of plausability) it remains unequivocally the real marker of the new millennium. If epochs are less defined by periods of time than by events, then the bookend to the era that began with September 11 would be the sub-prime lending collapse, and the subsequent Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

The crash really signifies the end of the decade, and what we are experiencing now is the slack water between tides – the dead calm of reflection. Particularly within architecture there is a feeling of bitterness, a recognition that the good times are over, and they were largely squandered. There is a desire to seperate, in all senses, from the past. The scorned lover destroying correspondance, the defeated army burning bridges in its wake. There is a searching for a new architecture. But it is somehow more profound than this; it is not simply a search to redefine themselves, but above all to define a new zeitgeist. That is, the will is essentially positive.

I am not interested in the ungainly shapes and non-existent scales of the Digital Formalists – I feel the greatest failing of Modernism is that we do because we can, and not because we should (even this question is enough to brand one a Luddite, or at least retrospective). I am not interested in architecture as an activity of object-making. I am completely fascinated by architecture as a legitimate tool of social change.