Correspondent to LA:

“Are you out of your mind? That eternally horrible International Style grid! Those rings of international flags like it’s the g****mn UN!”

LA to correspondent:

“Details are open to discussion. I don’t like the flags either. But the overall thing worked. Seeing the model in person was different from seeing a photo in the newspaper.

“I will never be simply a fan, as many letter writers to the New York Post are, of those 1100 foot high deodorant boxes. But this design solves numerous problems that had been unsolved. It ‘clicked’ for me, as it did for several other people present.

“As I said at the meeting, the irony is that if the people in charge of the project had come up with an acceptable design, Belton and Gardner probably wouldn’t have thought of bringing back the WTC. It is the awful emptiness of the Liebeskind and other designs that gave them the idea of bringing back the WTC.

“In other words, the WTC towers were sterile, oversized, modernist boxes. But the post-modernist architecture that has succeeded them is so horrible and worthless, that the original WTC seems far superior in comparison. Back to the future!”

I worked in the shadow of the WTC towers and watched them fall from about 1,000’ away, but I do not agree. I thought the World Trade Center was ugly, intrusive and grossly out of scale with the rest of downtown (or with any human-scaled setting). The way the towers completely obscured the magnificent Woolworth Building was an aesthetic crime in itself. The WTC’s catastrophic end does not endow its ugly design with any transcendent significance. Simply replacing the towers, even with new skins, is a way of saying that we arrogant, secular humanist moderns have learned nothing. Granted rebuilding the towers would be better than Libeskind’s bizarre confection, but that is beside the point.

What I would like to see, although vested interests that want to pack as much office space into the area as possible make it very unlikely, is a restoration of the old street pattern (which went back to Colonial days) that the Port Authority wiped out to build the WTC. Along those revived streets I would like to see a mix of small businesses and office buildings, but not more skyscrapers. New York has too many as it is. The change I would make to the restored grid is that I would have the footprints of the twin towers be green squares, with decent memorials to those who died in them. Rebuilding on a human scale, and in a way that has some link to the older New York that existed before Robert Moses and the Port Authority went on their demolition derby, would be a better way to say that Moslem terrorists have not stopped us than basically copying what they knocked down, which wasn’t good for much anyway. HRS

I agree to some extent with Mr. Sutherland. They should restore the old street pattern and declare the new streets the “9/11 Memorial Street.”
If they can still build a skyscraper there, or if they refuse to restore the old street pattern, I say rebuild, but make it taller than the old WTC. And add some design to the top. Why rebuild them as they were when we can rebuild ‘em better?

The new design is marginally better than the old, but doesn’t solve the WTC’s major problem: It mocked God.

I hate to say it but, the Arabs’ look at the WTC as occupied ground, their ground. They will be back, and they will take down any thing that goes up there, that is just the nature of the beast we are dealing with. Until The U.S. gets serious about immigration, and homeland defense, there is no real way to stop an attack.

I said the same at the luncheon where Gardner spoke, that if these new buildings are to be reasonably safe, we must remove all fundamentalist Moslems from America and the West.

When I read Mr. Auster’s post, I said to myself, “Haven’t we learned our lesson?” When I saw the artist’s conception, I said, “Haven’t we learned anything from the past?”

Then I read the Comments and was happy to see that VFR readers understand.

Howard Southerland sums it up wonderfully when he says, “Simply replacing the towers, even with new skins, is a way of saying that we arrogant, secular humanist moderns have learned nothing.” Bravo!

Reg Cæsar says it equally well: “The new design is marginally better than the old, but doesn’t solve the WTC’s major problem: It mocked God.” Amen.

So the Towers of Babel have been knocked down. Instead of repenting of our national nihilism and then restoring Americanism, we’re just going to put them up once more! Again, up go the two middle fingers into God’s face—one for each hand. Do we need this?

In the Archives, week of May 16: Events in Massachusetts, I said “9/11 was a good example of a visible lack of divine protection,” a statement with which Mr. Auster concurred. Is divine protection attained by “mocking God”, as Reg Caesar puts it? Yet isn’t divine protection the most important thing our nation could aspire to at present? Or is more office space our ideal and balm for our national wounds?

Lack of divine protection is one thing. Divine wrath and punishment are something else. Has anyone read the Book of Revelation? For non-believers: has anyone seen “The Day After Tomorrow”? Forces of nature can readily show how weak human beings are. What will it take to make us come to our senses?

We’re having a hard time taking on Islam as an enemy. It seems that we’re having much less trouble taking on God. The outcome of the former may be doubtful; the outcome of the latter is certain. Haven’t we learned anything?

Please revisit the symbology of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, given by Reg Cæsar—a marvelous exercise in creativity. Look in the Archives, week of May 16: Events in Massachusetts: Comments.

May I say that I think Caesar and especially Mr. Raymond are overstating things just a tad when they make the World Trade Center an anti-God statement in the same class as homosexual marriage. If people would calm down just a bit and read what I’ve said above, they would see that I have all kinds of problems with the WTC. Of course it was a huge modern box with all that that implies. But, without going into more words than I can do at the moment, I can’t convey to you the experience of myself and other New Yorkers since 9/11, the dilemma of what to put there (do we put a short building to avoid tempting terrorists, do we put a tall building to show we’re not afraid, do we put a short building with 40 hollow stories at the top so that it looks tall but it’s really afraid and gloomily looking to the past), the awfulness or at least unsatisfactoriness of what they are planning to put there, and the emptiness of the projected memorial; and then the impact of this new design, presented in a large model, and how it perfectly integrates the past with the present, putting around the footprints the lower outer stories (or replicas of same) of the original buildings, while behind them rise the new towers. Suddenly the idea of putting up those same shapes again made complete sense, and it’s the best way of overcoming the bad feeling left by 9/11, which no other plan really achieved. It’s not about affirming a particular style of architecture, it’s about saying yes to life, saying that we’re not afraid.

Curiously, a majority of non-elite, non-intellectual people want the old towers restored. Is it because of an attachment to anti-God modernism? Or is it because of a desire to bring back something familiar and large and grand and bold and unafraid? You guys are looking at this too intellectually, just seeing the WTC as symbol of anti-God modernism, and not as a familiar spectacular building that people had grown fond of and would like—especially in light of the cold, victimological project that the authorities want to foist on them—to have back.

This is not something I often say, but you had to have been there. If you lived in New York, and were presented with this design as I was, you would be feeling differently. I’m not saying you would necessarily approve it, but you would see some of what I’m seeing.

Nothing would “heal the collective psychic wound” more than restoring what the barbarians destroyed exactly as it stood before. The question is, do we restore what barbarians destroyed in 2001, or do we restore what barbarians destroyed in 1968?

For those who need help in understanding the latter question, here it is in a nutshell:

http://www.hudsoncity.net/tubesenglish/hudsonterminalwithsingermorerealistic.jpg

http://www.hudsoncity.net/tubesenglish/hudtermsing.jpg

http://www.hudsoncity.net/tubesenglish/tocgallerystations.html

A few months before the attack I toured Franconia and marveled at the reborn structures flattened in the War, such as the Neumünster Kirche and Residenz in Würzburg and the Pompejanum in Aschaffenburg— the latter itself a recreation of a villa destroyed in Pompei. If 19th-, 12th- and even first-century edifices can be rebuilt in toto, there is no reason, other than lack of will, we cannot bring early-20th-century ones equally back to life.

There is heavy symbolism in the area’s biggest ghosts. The Singer Building shares with the North Tower a short stretch as the world’s tallest, and, on Sept 10, 2001, held the record for the tallest structure ever demolished. The Hudson Terminal Towers, which were on the WTC site, like their successors spent decades as the world’s largest office complex. As for restoring the street pattern, why stop there? Why not rebuild funky old Radio Row to exact specifications?

I thank M. Raymond pour ses mots gentils. This is the page referred to:
http://www.skyscraper.org/TALLEST_TOWERS/tallest.htm

I forgot to include Mr. Sutherland among my critics. He wrote:

“Simply replacing the towers, even with new skins, is a way of saying that we arrogant, secular humanist moderns have learned nothing.”

I felt pretty much the same way myself, earlier. When I saw all these people writing to the editor all the time saying “We want back our beloved WTC!” I thought they were being shallow. Didn’t they see that 9/11 was God’s judgment? Haven’t they learned anything?

It’s not that that aspect of the situation isn’t true anymore, but that it has moved into the background relative to other considerations that now seem more important.

Remember, this is not a choice between the WTC II and the Empire State Building. This is a choice between the WTC II and Liebeskind. Need I say more?

Also, as is pointed out in some of the newspaper articles linked at the WTC II site, the Liebeskind project is financially unviable. They’re planning to break ground this July 4 (1776 foot high tower, July 4, get it?), but there is no money to put it up. Investors, tenants, are not interested in it. So this whole thing is dragging on, now getting on three years after 9/11, and there’s still that depressing cavity in lower Manhattan.

In my eyes the WTC was a momument about capitalism and free-people, not a mocking of God. If there is fault to be found with the building perhaps it is found in its praise of hyper-capitalism, which is indeed a troubling trend in modern America.

If the Liebeskind junta has no funds, isn’t this good news? Indeed, the Gardner/Belton plan itself feels a need to resort to bribery in their Reason #6: “A sensible arrangement of tax abatements and incentives could entice businesses…”

“The worse, the better” may be an inadvisable motto in politics, but it works quite well in city planning. If delays of three— or six or nine or twelve— more years make it any more likely something beautiful and inspiring will spring up, then patience is a virtue to nurture.

Mr Auster says you had to be there. I confess my own “being there” meant Governor’s Island in the Carter years— the blackout, the Son of Sam, the transit strike— futilely attempting to navigate by the towers. That would color my views. Those who worked within for years differ in their perspective. To paraphrase Guy de Maupassant on the Eiffel Tower, the best place in town is inside, because you don’t have to look at it.

I thought that restoring the grid pattern was a good idea for pracitcal considerations of traffic flow, not because of nostalgia.
I suppose rebuilding the towers would be beter than doing nothing, but I do feel that if we do rebuild them, we should do something to make them better than before; that way we can hsow the terrorists that not only can’t they defeat us, we will make whatever they destroeyd even better!
As for mocking God, I don;t see any reason to look at the WTC as mocking God. Sure the shape is ugly, austere, and boxy, but according to some theories, so was Noah’s ark (some think it was rectangular with a perfectly flat bottom). To say that they mocked God, is, in my opinion, a little far-fetcehd, and it reminds me of the Objectivist penchant for calling any design, music, etc. they didn’t like “anti-life.”

You might think of WTC as an anti-Noah’s ark. Noah’s ark, built to exact specifications revealed by Jehovah, was a passageway from death to life, while the world was in geological turmoil. The WTC, as we know, was a passageway from life to death, which happens to reflect our culture. Knowing that, we build it again. My comment: have we not learned anything?

I am SO glad Mr. Auster is not taking a vacation from VFR! His opening statement and succeeding replies to the VFR Folk “really got the blood flowing”, and that is in part what makes VFR such a wonderful place (No, I didn’t get paid to say that!)—it’s not just ideas, concepts and truths, but “the passion” behind them! I apologize in advance for the length of the following.

j.hagan has it dead on, in my opinion, in his May 27 7:21 PM post. Mr. Sutherland’s reply at 5:10 PM had many cogent points. I have always been one who has liked “old things” and “the way things used to be”. I wasn’t aware of Mr. Moses and the Port Authority and what they did to lower Manhattan. Thank you, Mr. Sutherland, for that history.

Mr. Auster does have some very good reasons for feeling the way he does towards the Belton/Gardner design. What a massive undertaking! I wonder if it will be completed in my lifetime. Meanwhile,…

Meanwhile, “life must go on” and so must death—the deaths of the jihadists, I mean—and hopefully the shutting down of all mosques in the U.S. and the deportation and/or incarceration of all illegals! The breaking story at WND tonight about “the imam in that Philadelphia mosque being arrested” and his apt. searched and items seized by the IRS and his deportation all but assured—after my post yesterday about shutting the mosques down—has given me new hope that maybe Lord Ashcroft is on the right track.

I do not say “life must go on” with any sarcasm or coldness, because it happened to me—in Manhattan and later, in California—and World Trade #1 tower had a part in that story.

In ‘91, while I was working/living in Manhattan, my fiancee died suddenly in California (where we had been living), and I had to rebuild my life. I quit my job in Manhattan—quite a good job and one with a real future—and moved back to California, jobless, near-penniless and completely griefstricken. While back in California, I had to sell many valuable possessions to live, including my piano (which I have never replaced). Yet, I was determined to go back to New York even for a short time, so with the money from the Steinway sale, I moved back to Midtown six months later. I was hired the night I got off the plane. I knew she would have wanted me to go back, even penniless, because she was completely devoted to my career. Manhattan was “the place” for me, and we both knew it.

The World Trade #1 had a very special meaning for me, because I auditioned for that very special job in Manhattan (The Rainbow Room) on the 105th (next to the top) floor. I will never forget, looking down on the Statue of Liberty (the piano was by the window, and it was a straight drop down) as I played for the agent. That great lady looked like “a chess piece” from up above so high.

When, ten years later, the scumbags flew those planes into the towers and brought them down, I felt “violated”, sad and extremely angry. I wanted revenge. I wanted those towers back! But as I thought about it many months and now years later, I knew I really did not want those towers rebuilt.

I believe that a “memorial” as what is there now—only perhaps a park like the Vietnam Memorial— would be better suited to the dead and their families. A park—yes! A park with flowers and trees and as Mr. Sutherland has so eloquently stated, a chance for those wonderful old buildings surrounding Ground Zero to come have a renaissance!! What a unique idea, right? Ah, but the polls! Alas, the achitects and “the movers” and politicians who want to make a financial killing will supercede anything that Mr. Sutherland and I want for that large spot in Lower Manhattan. “Progress” will win out.

World Trade #1 will never come back—not even in effigy. It is gone, and so are the lives of those that were lost/murdered. And so is that piano on the 105th floor with it’s melted plastic keys I once played, although I suppose these architects can build—with other’s money—the same-looking towers again and even put a new and better instrument on the next-to-the-top floor for other pianists to audition on!

When my late fiancee’s house in California was sold and the new owners had moved in, I brought a red rose to the doormat for the next two years on the anniversary of her death (She had died in the house, alone and desperately trying to phone me or 911. They found the phone under her body). By the third year, I realized that not only was it not fair to the new owners that I was trespassing on their property on that day in the two Augusts that followed, but I also realized that life had to go on, and that I was living my life for someone who would never come back. That house, though not destroyed by a band of bloodthirsty terrorists, had to be “destroyed” for ME, IN MY MIND, or I would never get out of the clutches of my sorrow! I stopped driving by that house, and have not gone near it for many years. My life, thankfully, has gone on.

I believe that World Trade #1 should NOT be “rebuilt in its own image”. I don’t need a replacement tower to carry those memories, the memories of taking the subway every evening in ‘92 on my way to The Marriott Financial Hotel from Midtown to the end of the line—directly underneath World Trade #1 where so many more Americans (and foreigners) lost their lives in those underground fast food restaurants I used to grab a bite in. I will never forget those scary, super-fast elevators that left my heart on some lower floors on my way up to the top, to The Hors d’Oeuvrie Lounge with my visiting fiancee. Some things are better left “buried”. I certainly don’t need a huge, new skyscraper complex to “feel better” or to, by building it, indirectly “tell the Islamo-terrorists where they can go”! A thermo-nuclear bunker-buster missle or two will do that just fine.

Mr. Hagan has said in a previous post that the WTC was, if anything, a monument about capitalism and free people. The WTC was built and owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The Port of New York Authority (the original name) was founded in 1921 by the state governments of New York and New Jersey to build and control mass transportation links around New York harbor. It is an inefficient government leviathan that reflects much of what is bad about the state governments of two of the most corrupt and wasteful states of the union.

If anything, the WTC was a monument to corporatist socialism, corrupt government agencies, waste and feather-bedding. The buildings may have gone up in the 1960s and 70s, but their motive spirit was straight out of the New Deal socialism of the 1930s. My proposal to restore the streets the WTC destroyed would be a better way to pay homage to capitalism and free people, if that is what we want. It is hard to believe now, but there was a time (before the governorship of Franklin Roosevelt, I suppose) when New York had something approximating a free market. I doubt that a free market New York would ever have built a World Trade Center in the first place. HRS

To Mr. Levin, though he disagrees with me, I can only say, that’s a magnificent and moving comment.

Mr. Jose writes:

“To say that they mocked God, is, in my opinion, a little far-fetcehd, and it reminds me of the Objectivist penchant for calling any design, music, etc. they didn’t like ‘anti-life.’”

To which, if I were Caesar, Mr. Raymond, or Mr. Sutherland, I would have to reply: Touché.

Fair point by Mr. Jose, although, pace Mr. Auster, I didn’t say the WTC mocked God. I said it was ugly. I suppose it follows from my slap at arrogant secular humanists that one could think I was accusing the WTC’s builders and would-be rebuilders of mocking God. I hadn’t thought my way there. May be something to it, though… Those over-high towers containing, legally and illegally, half the nationalities on Earth thrusting up out of the multi-cultural morass that is post-modern New York - our Twin Towers of Babel? One was good enough for Babel, but here in the Land of the Free, we have to go one better. HRS

After reading every post on this superb thread ove for a second time, I have to agree with all of you a little, even including Mr. Auster (who covered practically every facet of the issue). It is hard to disagree with “progress”—it makes one appear to be “ancient” and “not with it” if one disagrees with it. Mr. Sutherland’s 10:14 AM post and 11:17 post were riveting. I look at Manhattan perhaps more “romantically” than many people do. I am so happy to have Mr. Sutherland’s more “down to earth” perspective to read here.

When I said the original towers “mocked God”, I did not mean this was the builders’ intent; rather, that they ignored God, and spiritual matters in general. The result is often the same, however.

Even the Rockefellers probably weren’t thumbing their noses heavenward, and certainly not the wishy-washy Minoru Yamasaki.

Wonderful project. I adore it (even though I think it unwise in the long-term because of WMD’s). What about spending billions on virtual meetings between humans with exquisite satellite holographs? In any event, I hope that this time around, the architect will be an American, who will be practical and will not allow the safety of his countrymen to take a back seat, as did the Asian that designed the original towers. We build to last: Empire State Building, large-deck aircraft carriers, B-52’s, Marines, and the Louisiana Superdome, largest such structure in the world that would require billions to recreate and is still gorgeous, well-located, and invincible.

Its secrets are unknown. It has enormous rooms for any-sized parties. Everyone is close to the game, even in the steep but close high seats. (LSU won the National Championship in the Dome, just in case any of the always mighty and tough Sooners forgot.) The in-house parking is enormous. It has several restaurants. Its enormity can only be realized by visiting it; yet it is not in any way ornate. Its functionality is perfectly balanced with its size. Tour it for a few dollars or, as I have done surreptiously, as many others, when I frequent one of its restaurants. I have been to a number events, and it never fails to awe me; remember the Romanian Nadia Comaneche(?) I was right at mat-side with my pushy cousin. What was New York thinking: A foreigner, despite the plethora of American brilliance in New York?

Let me ask Mr. Murgos the same question some people have posed to me: why is a traditionalist guy like yourself enthusiastic about the return of an ultra-modern, spare building like the WTC?

Good question for Mr. Murgos, and I have one of my own. What is there to like about the Louisiana Superdome from a traditionalist’s point of view? I am not from Louisiana, but I know New Orleans well. The Crescent City has plenty of problems, but it is one of the American cities that has great, and distinct, character. It is a low-lying city with mercifully few tall buildings, which clash with the city’s distinct urban texture. I have the same reaction to the Superdome that I had to New York’s World Trade Center: it is a building at war with its surroundings, as well as dull to look at. New Orleans would be better off without it. HRS

Mr Murgos is off-base on another matter as well: the WTC’s architect was a native of Seattle, Washington. As such, he was the last US-born architect to hold the world’s-tallest prize. (Fazlur Khan [Sears] and César Pelli [Petronas] are naturalized US citizens, and a Chinaman designed the new tower in Taipei.)

As for the “safety of his countrymen”, despite his Japanese parentage, Yamasaki was given the sensitive task of designing military bunkers during the Second World War. (He should have drawn on that experience!) When buildings get this high, though, architects wisely cede safety questions to structural and civil engineers:
http://www.civil.usyd.edu.au/latest/wtc.php

We might be getting the title back. Skidmore-Owings-Merrill is designing a 2000’+ tower on the Persian Gulf, the Burj Dubai: http://www.emporis.com/en/wm/bu/?id=182168
The chief architect, Adrian Smith, is a graduate of the U. of Illinois at Chicago, but I haven’t been able to dig up his birthplace.

A fascinating biographical detail about Minoru Yamasaki: he took an extended break in the middle of his career to embark on a worldwide architectural study tour, which included his father’s home village. On his return, he is said to have written some moving essays about how modern man, esp. modern architect man, needed to return to his spiritual and civilizational roots.

Unfortunately, there is no evidence he put these grand ideas into practice! I would love to get my hands on the essays, though…