Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Details: [subscription number 783016864] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Angelaki
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713405211
Architecture at war
Reinhold martin
To cite this Article martin, Reinhold(2004)'Architecture at war',Angelaki,9:2,217 225 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/0969725042000272843 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725042000272843
ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities volume 9 number 2 august 2004
erhaps enough time has passed since the initial rush to rebuild ground zero to warrant a general assessment of the resulting design. Or perhaps this is not really the issue. Instead, with respect to the politics of place, what actually gets built in lower Manhattan may be less important than the aesthetic effects already generated by the design process. Since in the mix of interests and investments out of which the current plan emerged, a specic assemblage of aesthetics and politics was consolidated. This assemblage associated a nominally progressive architecture with cultural hegemony, in a precursor both to the (thoroughly modernist) shock and awe bombing in Baghdad, and to the subsequent struggle for hearts and minds in an occupation that offered modernization as one of its primary inducements. In that sense, ground zero may have served as a kind of incubator for an aesthetic strategy that has since found broader application. And, like many developments in US foreign policy that they paralleled, the outlines of this strategy were drawn not by a dark conspiracy operating behind the scenes but rather in the light of day and the glare of the mass media. For example: writing in the New York Times on 30 September 2001, after more than two weeks of journalistic silence at a time when his colleagues were covering recent events with a breathless urgency, the papers inuential architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp, decided to weigh in for the rst time on the rebuilding debate already underway with a plea for what he called progressive architecture. Muschamp peppered his article with pseudo-philosophical musings on the subject of religious fundamentalism, against which he contrasted American reason, declaring (quite unbelievably) that
Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 03:15 20 October 2008
reinhold martin
ARCHITECTURE AT WAR a report from ground zero
our religion is progress material, intellectual, spiritual. This faith is compatible with the search for the good, and perhaps a prerequisite for it. The concept of progressive architecture is rooted in this faith.1 It would be easy to dismiss such assertions as so much metaphysical ag-waving, a form of frustrated aggression emanating from a representative of New Yorks culture industry, if not for the questions with which architectural discourse and its many publics were confronted following the destruction of the World Trade Center. Foremost among these was the question of the event itself, including its representation and commemoration, but also its repression and consequent prolongation.2 This question is lurking in Muschamps call, repeated com-
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/04/02021709 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/0969725042000272843
217
architecture at war
pulsively at every opportunity in subsequent articles, for a progressive architecture to rise in response to the destruction of an ofce complex that for many embodied the exhaustion of modernist ideologies of progress. This framing positions the event and the historical past it condenses as the proverbial pile of debris swept away by the winds of progress even as its effects continue to reverberate. Consequently, in calling for symbols that effectively relieve the burdens of history, Muschamp was also speaking in unison with the near-universal media consensus that everything changed after 11 September 2001, a millenarian consensus that also authorized unprecedented and virtually uncontested changes in foreign and domestic policy. In another light, however, Muschamps somewhat opportunistic call for a progressive architecture to emerge in New York is understandable, since for decades urban municipalities worldwide have been seized by a conservative, contextualist impulse that is inseparable from commercial efforts to maintain the phantasm of an idealized and sanitized urban past. Such efforts, common in Western cities but also in cities like Hong Kong and Shanghai, often pose self-righteously against the backdrop of jarring interruptions in the urban and social fabric wrought by such objects as the World Trade Center. This is a false opposition that conceals the complicity of pastiche or neo-traditional urbanism in the consolidation of a corporate lifestyle, as exemplied in New Yorks Battery Park City or in the emblematic Jin Mao Tower in the new Pudong district of Shanghai. The latter building is a particularly telling instance of an appropriation of tradition that reconciles nationalism with global capital, in the form of a pagoda extruded eighty-eight stories. It was designed by the New York rm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) the same rm that began working with developer Larry Silverstein on proposals for the World Trade Center site several days after the event itself. SOM have since become the lead architects on the project under the guiding hand of David Childs, Daniel Libeskinds alter-ego, whose bland but modern replacement for No. 7 World Trade Center (which collapsed late in the day on 11 September) will be completed in 2005. So Muschamp and many others were right to inveigh against the juggernaut of tradition. But such narrow stylistic considerations have also anchored the newly expanded public discourse on architecture in the USA rmly to such venues as the Arts & Leisure section of the Times, safely protected from the geopolitical complexities and conicts documented elsewhere in the paper. Still, there are correspondences between Muschamps position and others espoused in the mainstream American press. One notable example is that of his colleague, the Times Middle East editorialist Thomas Friedman, who also chose to cast the post-11 September situation as one of modern vs. anti-modern ideologies. In his 30 September article, Muschamp quotes Friedman as follows: The real clash today is not between civilizations but within them between those Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews with a modern and progressive outlook and those with a medieval one.3 Forced into a scheme that refuses to recognize the modernity of terrorism, progressive architecture at home thus supports a modernizing crusade abroad. And the architects job, with respect to the future of ground zero as framed by this context, becomes one of assisting in the foreclosure of any real public debate regarding the historical dimensions of the event itself. Instead, architects were essentially asked to plant a three-dimensional (neo-)modern ag on the site that pointed toward a triumphant future, symbolically opening the door to cultural and economic imperialism while declaring the historico-political case closed, ready for assimilation into the memory industry. Most, if not all, complied. Thus, as a pretext for further aggression, 9/11 had only just begun. While, in the interim, architects were faced with the question of what, if anything, they might commemorate in lower Manhattan, aside from the individual lives lost. Here the rhetoric of rebuilding provided a ready answer, since the most effective vehicle for rebuilding the triumphalist bubble turned out to be not an outmoded corporate neo-traditionalism but rather an architecture
Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 03:15 20 October 2008
218
martin
dedicated to producing striking images of the future. The rst evidence of this was offered in the form of an exhibition organized in New York by gallerist Max Protetch titled A New World Trade Center that ran from 17 January through 16 February 2002. There, a mere four months after the attacks, the public was presented with fty-eight proposals by architects, designers, and artists that, according to the gallery, together represented a landmark opportunity both for architects and the general public to explore the possibilities for the World Trade Center site.4 On the one hand (and again running parallel with the increased swagger of American foreign policy), this was a raw, unvarnished effort to exploit the landmark opportunity offered by 9/11s presumptive clearing of the decks a chance to fulll a heroic vision (post-Saddam and post-postmodern?) already prepared in think tanks and universities but theretofore preempted by the exigencies of professional realism. While on the other hand, the Protetch exhibition was also the rst real evidence of the capacities of a neo-modern aesthetics to channel the will to power in directions inaccessible to the more literal conformisms of architectures corporate, contextualist mainstream. Though by no means did the same aestheticopolitical drives course through all of the projects in the Protetch show, virtually all departed from the pastiche of neo-traditionalism, often in favor of another kind of historicism colored by nostalgia for the futurist aspirations of the historical avant-gardes. In this context, certain projects stood out for their combination of an avowedly progressive aesthetics (often associated with technological innovation through digital representation and/or new structural systems) and a regressive politics. Symptomatic of things to come on this front was the project submitted by Foreign Ofce Architects (FOA) for an undulating tower of bundled tubes, accompanied by these remarks:
Lets not even consider remembering What for? We have a great site in a great city and the opportunity to have the worlds tallest building back in New York. Ground Zero used to host 1.3M m2 of workspace, and that is a good size to attempt to return to NY what it deserves.5
Though it remains unclear what New York deserves to forget, it is abundantly clear that such willful amnesia refers not only to a salutary rejection of the often sanctimonious imperatives of memorialization but also to an active blindness to the historical conditions of which 9/11 was only one component. Hardly disguised, this end of history argument for a new historical type a new type of skyscraper exploits its own contradictions to monumentalize the neoliberal consensus regarding new opportunities opened up by techno-corporate globalization: the responsibility of the professional in the new world order is merely to facilitate the arrival of the new while washing their hands of the overdetermined historical narratives and the dead bodies through which this new is named. Comparable in posture here is the project submitted by Greg Lynn FORM for a prototypical defensible skyscraper insightfully premised on the collapse of boundaries between global military conict and everyday life.6 Rather than dissent, however, the prototype and its author naturalize this state of affairs which was long ago given the name total war in a collapse of even the most rudimentary critique into an excited monotone. The resulting hymn to total war makes sense only when seen against the backdrop of Lynns ongoing commitment to the supposed inner, digital logic of the instruments of production and consumption associated with Hollywoods military-entertainment complex, with overtones of Ernst Junger. Thus Lynn as serts, with a lucid cynicism: The transfer of military thinking into daily life is inevitable.7 These two projects bear notice for several reasons. Firstly, their authors are signicant representatives of a recent return to formal and technological experimentation in architectural production that has begun to yield large-scale built results (such as FOAs impressive Yokohama Ferry terminal) while actively refusing to face its own political implications. These gures and their work are also representatives of an ideological direction in architecture that was initially understood to be Deleuzian, a desig-
Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 03:15 20 October 2008
219
architecture at war
nation to which we shall return. And nally, these two rms, together with other representatives of the techno-formalist turn, would reappear in a subsequent chapter in the saga we are following. But rst, things took a peculiar, if predictable, twist in the summer of 2002, when the now infamous six initial concept designs for the site were presented. Predictable, since these resolutely neo-traditionalist designs, produced by the rms of Beyer Blinder Belle, and Peterson Littenberg (with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill operating behind the scenes), were universally rejected for their lack of vision by a marketplace that had spent the 1990s celebrating CEOs like Bill Gates as visionaries. As it was used in this context, vision was also a code word for what Muschamp had called progress that indexed a reorientation of the cultural imaginary toward the reconstruction of a gleaming, sanitized future to replace the gleaming, sanitized past visible in the rst six schemes allusions to historical monuments like the Rockefeller Center. Indeed, the clamor for vision was such that the increasingly inept Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) was forced to stage a public relations counteroffensive, in part to insulate the administration of New York governor George Pataki (which controlled the process) from public criticism during his re-election campaign. And so, on 19 August 2002, the LMDC put out a second call for professional participation, in an open Request for Qualications for Innovative Designs for the World Trade Center Site. For his part, earlier that same summer Muschamp had begun convening meetings with prominent architects that resulted in an alternative plan for the site published in the New York Times Magazine on 8 September 2002. The Times study proposed a kind of open-air museum of contemporary architecture, organized in full accordance with the precepts of a traditionalist urbanism (despite Muschamps earlier protestations) complete with reconstructed streets, but populated by self-conscious set pieces executed with futurist elan. Nor was the geopolitics of architecture lost on Muschamp here, as evidenced in his description: The product envisioned by the study is a recast cultural identity for 21st century New York: a revised mythology of our place in the era of globalization.8 Unabashedly, he even felt compelled in closing to cite Jurgen Habermas: Modernity is an in complete project. So is New York.9 Whether or not Muschamps appeal to Habermas is as opportunistic as his own interventions in the ground zero debates, the modernity in question was most denitely as militarized as the quasi-theological mission our religion is progress Muschamp cited in his earlier echo of the Times editorialist Friedman. Referring to the outpouring of images and emotions in the debates over what should be built, Muschamp wrote: Fantasies of new buildings became a form of recovery: signs of the citys resilience in the face of unprecedented enemy assault.10 For at least one architecture critic, then, architectures job in a post-9/11 New York (implicitly compared to London during the Blitz) was to boost spirits on the home front. Meanwhile, the boys and girls in Washington prepared a counteroffensive that eventually leveraged retaliation in Afghanistan into a metaphysical crusade in Iraq, just as Muschamp leveraged 9/11 into the equally metaphysical though ostensibly more cosmopolitan crusade for what he called here a new aesthetics of architecture. A notable exception in the Times showcase was the disarmingly sober contribution made by Rem Koolhaas and his colleagues Dan Wood and Joshua Ramus in the New York ofce of OMA (Ofce for Metropolitan Architecture). An upside-down ofce tower growing progressively wider toward the top rather than at the base, giving extra space to the more desirable and expensive upper oors,11 it frankly acknowledged the economic interests that had underwritten New Yorks modernity since the nineteenth century. Hardly an exercise in economic determinism, however, the project simultaneously acknowledged the dollar sign (or what Koolhaas has elsewhere called the regime of $) as a dream image. It nevertheless exhibited an ambivalent silence in the face of capitals phantasmagoric facticity, comparable to the silence Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co had once attributed to Mies van der Rohe via a
Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 03:15 20 October 2008
220
martin
citation from Weimar-era critic Karl Kraus: Since the facts have the oor, let anyone who has anything to say come forward and keep his mouth shut.12 For his part, Muschamp was unable to follow this injunction, feeling obliged instead to speak on behalf of New Yorks cosmopolitan multiculturalism and the relative sophistication of our cultural appetites, which he saw embodied in the Times study: We are one great polyglot aspirational surge.13 Left open was the question of afnities between the libidinal economy celebrated by Muschamp here, and the great polyglot aspirational surge that some have called late capitalism, and others Empire. Meanwhile, on 26 September 2002, the LMDC announced the results of its own quest for innovative designers to produce more effective images for circulation in the mass media. According to the press release, 407 teams of architects, planners, and designers representing 34 nations had responded to the LMDCs call.14 Six were chosen. In addition to several of the participants in the Times study, among these was a group that called itself United Architects, an international collection of relatively young designers described by the LMDC press release as visionaries in possession of an expertise in, among other things, theory. Though the project eventually submitted by United Architects failed to capture the public imagination, it rather than the winning entry by Daniel Libeskind that relied on early twentieth-century visual tropes such as fragmentation is perhaps more representative of an emerging tendency in architecture that raises signicant questions regarding the status of theory in the eld. For some time, individual members of the United Architects group including Greg Lynn (of Greg Lynn FORM), Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi (of FOA), and Ben van Berkel and Carolyn Bos (of UN Studio) have consistently cited the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to accompany pre sentations of their work.15 That such citations have been unceremoniously dropped by most as they have assumed an increasingly anti-intellectual stance, now preferring techno-militaristic terminology such as performance and instrumentality, is signicant, since it potentially marks, like the work itself, the realization of a certain distorted Deleuzianism, rather than its abandonment in favor of more expedient rhetoric as the architects accumulate professional commissions. Here, it is worth citing a passage in which Slavoj Zizek cites Jean-Jacques Lecercle as he amusingly describes the scene of a yuppie reading Deleuze on the Paris metro. Where Lecercle sees incongruity in the yuppies puzzled look as he reads a book explicitly written against yuppies, Zizek imagines another possibility:
What, however, if there is no puzzled look, but enthusiasm, when the yuppie reads about impersonal imitation of affects, about the communication of affective intensities beneath the level of meaning (Yes, this is how I design my advertisements!) 16
Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 03:15 20 October 2008
Does this not also conjure United Architects, a group of young professionals whose members included, in addition to those already mentioned and others, the Hollywood-based entertainment and design rm Imaginary Forces? Citing Deleuze becomes redundant in a context in which affect is the primary commodity. These architects just do it, and in doing so they risk reproducing the micro-fascisms that Zizek sees lurking in a pseudo-Deleuzianism that exploits Deleuzes own philosophico-political complexities to turn a revolutionary philosophy into a pro-capitalist one.17 Indeed, at ground zero the public relations message emanating from United Architects begins with the teams name, which resourcefully morphs the USA into the UN, a hybrid that itself dissolves into a transnational becomingBenetton in the teams group portrait assembled multi-racial faces in a eld of colored squares. In support of the implied theme of resolute unity-within-diversity (in the face of a faceless enemy?), the project statement offers further rhetoric about solemnly moving forward (progress again), while images of the scheme proclaim the result the United Towers a bold vision of the future dedicated to returning pride to the site.18 And the Deleuzianism? Difference within con-
221
architecture at war
tinuity: a single continuous building that differentiates itself into ve linked towers built in ve phases. A monument to corporate diversity, the project internalizes the naturalized growth fantasies of global capitalism in the form of a relentless, evolutionary development of the site. Affective unity is shown not to preclude difference a basic premise of the kinder, gentler imperialism that now has the USA speaking with respect about Iraqi culture even as multinational contractors (engineers, managers, and mercenaries) lay the groundwork, in theater, for more growth. By reproducing such a logic at the aesthetic level, an architectural avant-garde thus nds itself switching sides in the culture wars that brought (critical, poststructuralist) theory into the discipline with a vengeance in the 1980s, in part as an expression of dissatisfaction with postmodern architectures reinforcement of the political status quo. Since by responding obediently to the call for vision while remaining utterly blind to the violence of the affective intensities they are being asked to serve up, these architects and others put themselves in a position of docile compliance with the imperatives of a nation at war, regardless of ideological claims to the contrary. Likewise for the proposals symbolism, which in many ways crossed nationalism with theological pathos more systematically than did Libeskinds expressionist winning entry. It required only a little imaginary force to see the corporate, crypto-Gothic cathedral (their term) designed by United Architects as a baldly symbolic response to an act associated with militant Islam. This particular connection (whether or not intended by the architects) reproduced the violence of the attacks themselves in aesthetic form. But by melting such ruthlessly meaningful symbolisms into a dynamic series of visual effects that had the buildings dissolving into a majestic forest in an accompanying video, while simultaneously allowing the more unconscious impression of a family of skyscrapers holding hands in the absence of the missing twins, the project set in motion a uid dynamics comparable to that which organized subsequent militarization, as American political fantasies morphed Osama into Saddam. In the architecture of becoming that mixed spirituality with marketing offered up by United Architects, the particular, violent irony of the USA claiming to act morally on behalf of the UN (to become, in effect, the UN) in invading Iraq was pregured affectively and aesthetically beneath the level of meaning. Though their project was clearly not his favorite, Muschamp proposed renaming United Architects The International House of Voluptuous Beauty in recognition of their apparent efforts to realize form for forms sake.19 This farcical historical repetition was belied, however, by the projects own rhetoric. Indeed, so strong was the public, highly politicized desire for a potent, visionary aesthetics in the LMDCs search for innovation that even economic prot was asked to take a back seat. In the set of revised guidelines handed to these teams, the amount of income-generating ofce space required was reduced from 11 million square feet to 6.510 million square feet, thus potentially liberating the designers from limitations associated with sheer bulk and leaving more room for the exertion of architectural nesse, beginning with the reproduction of the nonexistent tower footprints. On 12 October 2002 the Times celebrated this new freedom to maneuver in an editorial symptomatically titled Larger Visions for Downtown that again tied architectural invention to a thinly disguised nationalism:
The guidelines do not require a detailed design for the memorial, which will be the centerpiece of the entire project. Instead they ask for an overall concept that ensures that whatever replaces the towers becomes a prominent part of the skyline and sends a clear signal to anyone approaching Manhattan that the city has been rebuilt in a triumphant way.20
Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 03:15 20 October 2008
Uncannily, an image was thus conjured of planes once again approaching Manhattan, but this time mesmerized by the radiance of their target, from which would emanate a clear signal of cultural triumph by way of the dazzling vision that had replaced the banality of the earlier towers. When the results of the LMDCs Innovative Design Study (including the Libeskind and
222
martin
United Architects schemes) were made public with great fanfare in mid-December 2002, the New York Times continued to serve as a site in which the alliance between aesthetics and politics was negotiated. The Times editorial page celebrated the designs as offering a rare possibility for civic and architectural triumph.21 Muschamp also continued to promote the (otherwise important) research that they represented largely on the basis of their supposed vision, in one instance condescendingly suggesting that the designs were so compelling that planners and public ofcials around the world have been downloading images of these six projects with an eye toward constructing them in their own regions. In a few years knockoff versions of them will be transforming skylines in Asia and elsewhere.22 Theologian and erstwhile architecture theorist Mark C. Taylor was even enlisted into the cause; he complied by offering the extraordinary exhortation (published in the Times on 29 December 2002) to avoid becoming obsessed with a past we will never understand and instead turn optimistically toward the future. While aimed primarily at the memory industry, such collateral dismissals of any effort to articulate the historical (and political) dimensions of 9/11 as so much backward-looking nostalgia also continued to confuse images of progress with positive historical change, and mystication with critical reection. Chillingly, as if to underline the elision, Taylor approvingly concluded his summary with the message he heard coming from United Architects: e pluribus unum.23 Again, what looks progressive fades into its opposite. The subsequent chapters in the story are by now well known, down to the made-for-television struggle between Libeskind and Childs for control of the projects architectural image that Childs eventually won. Where many have seen this as further evidence of the forces of corporate greed, or at best realism, winning out over artistic integrity (idealism?), the foregoing account may suggest slightly different conclusions. Like the distorted smatterings of theory in the discourse of those who would eventually become United Architects, it is possible that Libeskinds emotionalism simply became redundant, as images of progressive architecture including Libeskinds circulating in the winter of 200203 were replaced on American television screens that spring with images of the shock and awe bombing campaign in Baghdad. Total war had been waged in the aesthetic training camp called ground zero, only to be projected back outward, in near-perfect symmetry. Thus by early February 2003, four months after the US Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (of 11 October 2002), the LMDC had narrowed its choice to two of the six original innovative designs. During the ensuing debate, which pitted Libeskinds crystalline fragments against the open latticework proposed by the Think group, Muschamp reasserted the connection between the architecture of ground zero and war: While no pacist, as a modern-day New Yorker I would like to think my way to a place beyond armed combat. The Think project accomplishes this It transforms our collective memories of the twin towers into a soaring afrmation of American values.24 Describing the Libeskind proposal as an emotionally manipulative exercise in visual codes, Muschamp goes on to note that in contrast to the more secular Think scheme, [e]ven in peacetime [the Libeskind] design would appear demagogic. As this nation prepares to send troops into battle, the designs message seems more loaded. Unintentionally, the plan embodies the Orwellian condition Americas detractors accuse us of embracing: perpetual war for perpetual peace.25 Muschamp had nally seen what was on the screen the entire time. But in apparently forgetting his own assertion in late September 2001 that secularism was itself a religion, he was more than willing to sign on to the broader cause of spreading Enlightenment-as-myth, in contrast to the feudal superstition in which our enemies remain mired.26 This, then, was only a partial turnaround for Muschamp, who in an earlier assessment had more cautiously described the cloying Libeskind scheme as a perfect balance between aggression and desire.27 In his enthusiasm for the Think project, he failed to acknowledge the elements of
Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 03:15 20 October 2008
223
architecture at war
his own discourse that reproduced Orientalist fantasies in which an implicitly Western secular rationality was opposed to implicitly Eastern (or medieval) myth. Explaining his increasing dismay over the Libeskind proposal, Muschamp associated its retro vision with that of the neo-traditionalist project submitted by Peterson Littenberg, collaborators on the failed early proposals:
Peterson Littenberg is nostalgic for Art Deco Manhattan circa 1928, before the stock market crash caused the United States to abandon the prevailing ideology of social Darwinism. Mr. Libeskinds plan is nostalgic for the world of pre-Enlightenment Europe, before religion was exiled from the public realm.28
Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 03:15 20 October 2008
logic of repressive power. Even today, architects, critics, and other producers have yet to respond to the challenges thus posed, preferring instead to misrecognize the demand for vision as an opportunity that was later betrayed by the back room deals of developers and politicians, rather than the overexposed, affective intensication of neo-imperial desires that it represented from the beginning. Thus the global city prepared itself to market an image of supposedly enlightened rationality symbolized in a visionary architecture. The dilemma, put simply, was that this gesture was made in the service of an emboldened sense of empire and war on all fronts, and not against it.
Because he continued to see a quasi-futurist aesthetics as an alternative to the sinister passage from Caligari to Disney in the Libeskind project, Muschamp also failed to recognize the equally theological bellicosity of the cathedral submitted by United Architects. As with all of the complexities and contradictions inherent in the phrase humanitarian bombing, as it was applied to Afghanistan, the legacies of secular humanism had been actively assimilated into the symmetrically fundamentalist regime of good vs. evil under which war was being waged. Progress was something to be imposed militarily. And progressive architecture at ground zero was its mirror image, a condition in which the transfer of military thinking into daily life [was] inevitable, to recall United Architects spokesman Lynn. This, then, was not merely a sordid rerun, beginning with the twin towers of light, of the aestheticization of politics. It was aesthetics as politics. Thus, the various other projects for ground zero cannot simply be evaluated on the basis of their apparent depoliticization of the event. They too must be evaluated for their explicit political content as manifest in aesthetic terms through their collective, earnest straining to adhere to the protocols of cultural progress. By enthusiastically accepting such protocols, progressive architects showed themselves unprepared and perhaps unwilling to unbind the chains that link their production to the cultural
notes
An earlier version of this text appeared in the Newsletter of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University (fall 2002/spring 2003). I am grateful to Gil Anidjar for his thoughts there and elsewhere on the subject. 1 Herbert Muschamp, Filling the Void: A Chance to Soar, New York Times 30 Sept. 2001, Arts & Leisure 1. 2 Reinhold Martin, One or More, Grey Room 07 (spring 2002): 11423. 3 Thomas Friedman expanding on the words of Shimon Peres, as quoted in Muschamp, Filling the Void 1. 4 Max Protetch, A New World Trade Center: Exhibition Overview, available http:// www.maxprotetch.com/SITE/PREVIOUS/ ANEWWTC/index.html (accessed Mar. 2004). 5 Max Protetch, A New World Trade Center: Foreign Ofce Architects Bunch Tower, available http://www.maxprotetch.com/SITE/PREVIOUS/ANEWWTC/FOA/index.html (accessed Mar. 2004). 6 Max Protetch, A New World Trade Center: Greg Lynn FORM, A New World Trade Center, available http://www.maxprotetch.com/ SITE/PREVIOUS/ANEWWTC/FORM/index. html (accessed Mar. 2004).
224
martin
7 Ibid. 8 Herbert Muschamp, Thinking Big: A Plan for Ground Zero and Beyond, New York Times Magazine 8 Sept. 2002: 55. 9 Ibid. 58. 10 Ibid. 46. 11 Ibid. 53. 12 Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1986) 2: 311.
Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 03:15 20 October 2008
22 Herbert Muschamp, In Latest Concepts for Ground Zero, its Reality vs. Renaissance, New York Times 23 Dec. 2002: E1. 23 Mark C. Taylor, Beyond Mourning, Building Hope on Ground Zero, New York Times 29 Dec. 2002, Arts & Leisure 40. 24 Herbert Muschamp, Balancing Reason and Emotion in Twin Towers Void, New York Times, 26 Feb. 2003: E1. 25 Ibid. E5. 26 Ibid. 27 Muschamp, The Latest Round of Designs Rediscover and Celebrate the Vertical Life B10. 28 Muschamp, Balancing Reason and Emotion in Twin Towers Void E5.
13 Muschamp, Thinking Big 58. 14 LMDC, Lower Manhattan Development Corporation Announces Six Teams of Architects and Planners to Participate in Design Study of World Trade Center Site: Noted Architects and Planners from Around the World Come Together to Help Shape the Future of Lower Manhattan, available http://www.renewnyc.org/ News/DisplayStory.asp-id 39.htm (accessed Mar. 2004). 15 See, for example, Greg Lynn, Folds, Bodies and Blobs: Collected Essays (Brussels: La Lettre volee, 1998); Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, Move (The Netherlands: UN Studio & Goose Press, 1999); Farshid Moussavi, Alejandro Zaera-Polo et al., Phylogenesis: FOAs Ark, Foreign Ofce Architects (Barcelona: Actar, 2004). 16 Slavoj Zizek, The Ongoing Soft Revolution, Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 292. See also Zizek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004) 183. 17 Zizek, Organs without Bodies 18395. 18 LMDC, Introduction, available http:// www.renewnyc.com/plan des dev/wtc site/ new design plans/rm f/default.asp.htm (accessed Mar. 2004). 19 Herbert Muschamp, The Latest Round of Designs Rediscover and Celebrate the Vertical Life, New York Times 19 Dec. 2002: B10. 20 Editorial, Larger Visions for Downtown, New York Times 12 Oct. 2002: A20. 21 Editorial, Visions for Ground Zero, New York Times 19 Dec. 2002: A38.
Reinhold Martin Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation 400 Avery Hall Columbia University New York, NY 10027 USA E-mail: rm454@columbia.edu
Downloaded By: [Canadian Research Knowledge Network] At: 03:15 20 October 2008