Stephen Gerard Dietemann Design

In last Sunday’s New York Times, architectural critic Herbert Muschamp wrote, “Architecture is an art of constructing meaning, among other things. The destruction of buildings is also symbolically charged.” He was writing, of course, about how to proceed in the aftermath of ‘the event’, an act of destruction so unimaginable, so vividly and indelibly etched in our individual and collective memory that recognition is immediate. Part waking nightmare, part cinemagraphic effect, seemingly surreal yet terribly real, the destruction of the World Trade Towers seems, a few weeks later, a mythic event, a prototype of destruction, a glimpse of hell itself. From the outside, Towers One and Two appeared the embodiment of modernity and security, one hundred and ten floors of high-strength steel, countless cubic yards of reinforced concrete and massive sheets of tempered glass stretching 1368 feet into the air above lower Manhattan. They were the physical manifestation of the American Age, its wealth, power, and glamour; proof of the preeminence of capitalism. At night they were visible for miles, dominating all surrounding structures, hulking above even the Statue of Liberty herself. Surely any recent immigrant could not be faulted for wondering if they, rather than the Statue of Liberty now heralded the American dream. Inside, like some sort of cultural version of ‘Noah’s Arc’, fifty thousand men and women of virtually every race, faith, nation and culture worked side by side, an equally powerful reflection of the pluralistic nature of modern western democracy. The ‘meaning’ of these towers was obvious and their choice as targets was no mistake.

Evidence is mounting that the men who must have made the destruction of these towers their private obsession for many years identify with a world that is the antithesis of virtually everything these towers represented. While I have no first-hand knowledge of their architecture, my sister, Chantal, spent a good deal of time in neighboring Pakistan several years ago. She described and photographed a world so different from our own that you occasionally wondered if the photographs had been fabricated and the stories apocryphal. Stone huts set in a precarious landscape of barren rock punctuated with small patches of vegetation, all slashed by raging rivers which increasingly drain away scarce top soil. There is virtually no clean water, electricity, or even rudimentary plumbing systems. Infant mortality is commonplace. Large areas of the country have been deforested and denuded of all but the most secretive animals and birds. Men and women interact rarely and furtively. One could think of this place as the anti-Manhattan. Add a forbidding mountain geography which reduces most roads to little more than dangerous paths and you arrive at a desperately poor and isolated world, as closed to modernity as Manhattan is open to it. Most importantly, hope -- at least in this lifetime -- is virtually non-existent in this desperate world.

Predictably, the men who actually carried out the destruction of the World Trade Center towers -- and paid for it with their own lives -- did not include their alleged ‘mastermind’, Osama Bin Laden, a man reputed to possess great wealth and no shortage of wives. Rather, they were recruited primarily from among the many desperate, inculcated with a murderous distortion of Islam and promised eternal bliss in the great beyond. There are, it is apparent from the images I have seen, thousands upon thousands of men (and perhaps women as well although they are mostly invisible) who sympathize with them as well. However, to seek a strictly religious explanation – to blame Islam -- for the murderous rage we witnessed on September 11, as many are now doing, is incorrect. The question should be : how can such a distorted, deadly view of religion be made so credible to these men, even to the extent of sacrificing their own lives? Again, the architecture of their world offers a better explanation. They live in a world of nothing, with virtually nothing to lose. A percentage of men in this situation – and it is almost always men -- have always been dangerous and these men are no exception.

The writer Susan Sontag noted in her speech given on May 9, 2001 in acceptance of the prestigious Jerusalem Prize for Literature, that we must, “understand that, whatever is happening, something else is always going on.” Poignantly she writes, “I am haunted by that ‘something else’”. In this case, the ‘something else’ is the unpleasant reality that there is a vast disparity in the distribution of the benefits of modernity, technology and the emerging global economy, with clear losers – the people of Afghanistan among many others -- and winners – primarily the citizens of Western Europe and the United States. Worse, the disparity is increasing along with a rising population, primarily in Third World countries, increasing the pressure in an already pressurized situation. I’d amend the old adage, “follow the money” to “check out the housing”. The fact that some among those who killed thousands of our citizens are not poor or desperate does not change the fact that the majority who support their actions are.

There exists an imbalance and if not addressed properly will result in similar and worse horrors for years to come. Responding with war alone will never end terrorism and our leaders give us a false sense of security when they tell us this. Even as it is clear that justice demands the measured punishment of those who orchestrated the murderous events of September 11, 2001, I, too, am haunted by the ‘something else’ but hope that our own clouds of rage do not dissipate in the form of even greater horrors.

Stephen Gerard Dietemann
Artful Mind October 4, 2001