Stephen Gerard Dietemann Design

Rubble. It is a loaded word, a nightmare reduced to a simple image. The portrait of war, of its ghastly face, its eyes of unimaginable misery, revealing an insane grin, the unavoidable truth of dust unto dust. It is, of course, a portrait men have seen so many times before. The portrait, now, of our own age.

Two images come immediately to mind. The first, the remains of the World Trade Towers, thousands of tons of steel and concrete, glass and hundreds of other things we have created from the material of the earth. I recall my first thought upon viewing the wreckage, “This, then, is the opposite of architecture.” Who can forget that smoldering pile of debris, and what imagination could block from horrified consideration the human beings reduced themselves to the molecular level, mixed within? We cried for all those lost within, for their families, for their despair and for our own. We wondered why it could have happened, why anyone would chose to murder so many innocents, and we shuddered to imagine what it must have been like at the end for those who could not escape. The human imagination is immense but there are limits and these thoughts pushed those limits mercilessly. How, I remember thinking, could the surviving parent explain what had occurred to the frightened child, what could he or she say to clarify where their father or mother had gone? Who can imagine what the night of September 11 must have been like for those left to ‘explain’? It is a task I would wish upon no one ever and I know that most Americans would agree with me.

Yet every day we are now forcing that task upon so many in Iraq. Even as you read this column the Iraqi landscape is being reduced to rubble. We are in the process of reducing a country to dust in order, we are told, to ‘save’ it.

In calm and carefully modulated voices, our spokespersons are describing it all in such soothing, even clinical terms. Five hundred pound bombs are dropped like so many raindrops upon cities where people just like us live. Why am I stating the obvious? Because it needs to be said again and again until the reality of what is happening is understood, until each of us understands that what we are doing – or being done in our name -- is forcing thousands of men and woman to explain the inexplicable, and creating a thousand thousand nightmares from which it is impossible to awaken. I ask only that you take some time and look at the images we are not seeing in this country. Type in ‘Fallufa photographs’ on the internet to get started only because it is the latest example of what their rubble looks like. There is nothing modulated about these images, all rubble, blood, dirt and misery. Just like our rubble.

My greatest fear is that we will not look or that we will accept the bromides we are given nightly; ‘empire’ is a messy business at best and we are not even permitted to use the word. Am I being emotional about this? Yes; I do not want to be a ‘good German.’ As an architect I build and as a human being I feel. I will never forget the first time I saw blueprints for Auschwitz. As an architect I knew what needed to have happened to create such documents, the kind of deliberate and careful coordination between consultants and contractors, the modulated review and calm analysis and wondered this: why didn’t everyone involved scream , ‘no!’? Why didn’t the architect, the structural consultant, the contractor say, ‘No! I won’t do this!’ It occurred to me that it is precisely when a nightmare takes on a calm, rational face that only a deeply emotional answer is appropriate.

It is time to get emotional, to scream, ‘no!’ as loudly as we can to this insanity. It is, in fact, our only hope.