The World Trade Center should, because of its importance, become a representation of man's belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men, and through cooperation, his ability to find greatness.
- Minoru Yamasaki, chief architect of the World Trade Center
We have all come to some sort of accommodation with the towers, God help us, and there have even been moments when I have seen them from afar and admitted to some small pleasure in the way the two huge forms, when approached from a distance, play off against each other like minimal sculpture. But the buildings remain an occasion to mourn: they never should have happened, they were never really needed, and if they say anything at all about our city, it is that we retreat into banality when the opportunity comes for greatness.
Paul Golberger
I want Bush tomorrow to say that we will rebuild it - taller, bigger, stronger.
- Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan and many others have called for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. The developer who holds the lease has vowed that the towers will rise again. It is easy to see the emotional appeal of such a view: it would show us defiant in the face of terror, unbowed, climbing again gleaming into the sky: taller, bigger, stronger.
And the impulse is completely understandable. We want to replace what we lost; in a way we want to become the people who never lost it, who this never happened to. On a small scale we see this in a person who has lost a dog, and wants a similar one.
The rebuilding of the WTC would have symbolic power. But before we undertake such a project, maybe we had better think about whether this is the particular set of symbols we want to reassert. The terrorists who destroyed the towers were thinking about it as a symbolic act, and the towers themselves as a symbol. They could not have really felt the human reality of what they were destroying; the human reality we see now continually on our televisions: the faces, the families, the communities that are shattered.
If we too insist on regarding the act symbolically, then we too will lose the human reality. We too will start killing people, shattering families, shattering communities as we retaliate.
And if we insist on understanding the WTC as a symbol, we lose the battle, because as a symbol, the WTC does not bear thinking about.
Yamasaki's claim that the WTC represented individual dignity is, let us say, questionable. The building was inhuman in its scale and in its design. The area around its base was an uninhabitable valley of winds. The gleaming glass and steel rectangles were objects of a kind of unimaginable ferocity, a human imagination so dedicated to its own annihilation that it was the opposite of anything mammalian, a kind of refutation of the human body.
The aesthetic is high modernism, the perfect simplistic geometry an attempt to expunge anything expressive, idiosyncratic, particular into an absolute standard of purity and pristinity that was meant to transcend the human.
The WTC was a symbol of a self-loathing so profound that it seeks an absolute power for human beings to destroy themselves in their particularity and humanity, a symbol of a pride so overweening that it builds Babels that the Bible could not have imagined, the attempt of David Rockefeller who envisioned it and Nelson Rockefeller under whose governorship it was built to become little gods.
The pyramids were built by slave labor as the attempt of the Pharaohs to transcend death, that is, to overcome their bodies. The huge structures of ancient Rome were built by people who demanded that they be worshiped as gods. The World Trade Center was built by people who intended to draw infinite amounts of cash from the world's economies to themselves. It was a symbol of greed, pride, and oppression, which is why terrorists flew planes into it.
We had better insist that the tragedy here was the destruction of real, particular human beings, and not of millions of tons of concrete and steel. We had better insist that it was persons, not symbols, who were destroyed.
Though it was a hive of human activity and a tourist destination, I think it is fair to say that the buildings, though they were overwhelming and impressive, were not beloved, though people made their peace with them or even worked to find their beauty. Those responses are valid; taller, bigger stronger is just immaturity, a plaintive desire for masculinity, a reading of the terror as an emasculation.
Let's build something human. Plant some trees. Make a garden or some homes: not a symbol, a real place; not a place to die; a place to live. ____
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