Stephen Gerard Dietemann Design

First, an apology. My last column, "Return to Dallas, Redux" in April, contained too much information. More exactly, the column should have ended with the paragraph, "He is absolutely correct - but only in the absence of forces such as racism limiting his possibilities. As a white man (he identified himself as such) he does not assume the limitation of racism since it has never been part of his personal experience. Sadly, for a large portion of the population - soon to be a majority of the population, incidentally - the same cannot be said". Unfortunately, I send the Artful Mind my 'working column', complete with discarded paragraphs, thoughts and possible directions rather than my 'finished column' devoid of all that verbal thrashing around. The effect, as several of my friends charitably noted, was a rambling column with a healthy dose of redundancy. I won't let it happen again.

We are a nation at war but here the signs of this war are eerily absent. In fact it is an emptiness - the now almost fully excavated pit at the base of what was the site of the World Trade towers - that remains the most poignant sign of this war. The absence of war’s effects and consequences appears to be an increasing trend, at least in my lifetime. While my grandparents described the presence of World War II in the United States - shielded lights, ration coupons, posters warning of the dangers of casual comments to strangers, the bunkers along the coasts and the diversion of civilian materials to the requirements of war - I remember the signs of Vietnam most vividly as a continuous series of images - burning jungle, angry students, confused /sad/terrified/resigned soldiers and peasants - on the television. The many other wars we have involved ourselves in since my birth in 1953, including Panama, Chile, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Balkans - the list is long - were virtually invisible here. War in the United States has for some time been most conspicuous by its absence.

Much of the rest of the world, however, is replete with tangible signs of war. In their intriguing book, The Architecture of War, Keith Mallory and Arvid Ottar, present such evidence. They start the book with the following fact: "In the first half of (the twentieth) century almost astronomical sums were spent on war or the preparation for war. A large portion of this money was expended on military construction - on programmes which covered every conceivable aspect of building." The Maginot Line, the West Wall, submarine pens at Bruges, the 'Moir' pill-box all remain as reminders of war. Less obvious, but no less horrific are the POW camps and the concentration camps where in addition to the murder of so many people, the slave labor necessary for the smooth running of the Germany and Japan war machines were kept.

I have seen some of these places discussed by Mallory and Ottar and visited others like them. It is difficult for me to imagine that anyone could walk through such places and even though most are long abandoned, not feel a chill. Each is a repository of loss and fear, of death and illusion, of terror and hopelessness, the intangible architecture of war contained within the actual architecture of war. History records the 'winners' and 'losers' and provides a summary of events but this information remains an abstraction. The power of the architectural remnants of war is their ability to convey the actual experience of war. These places vibrate at a frequency human beings cannot ignore or make abstract. I suspect the same is true of a visit to the remains of a B-52 in a jungle in southeast Asia, a scuttled submarine in Russia or a sniper's perch in Serbia.

Perhaps the great sin of the twentieth century was the abstraction of individual suffering. Statisticians and politicians have been permitted to seize and pervert the moral ground, to create terms like 'collateral damage' and 'friendly fire'. I have written in the past of the horrible abstraction of effort and intent required by the Nazis and their sympathizers to construct a place like Aushwitz and it is difficult to imagine anyone using an antiseptic term like 'collateral damage' in a place like that; it is equally difficult to imagine such euphemistic terminology inside a trench at Verdun, a bunker at Normandy, or a bomb shelter below Strasbourg. Those who experienced the most horrible aspects of war seldom advance abstract notions of war.

The excavated pit in lower Manhattan will soon be an office tower again and we are once again embarked upon a war that is designed to leave as few traces of itself as possible upon each of us here. Of course minimizing damage to yourself while maximizing damage to your enemy has always been the intent of war, but this new, invisible architecture of war leaves me extremely uncomfortable. This is especially true when, as is increasingly the case, the ‘official’ definition of patriotism trumps all further discussion of ‘empire’ as well as causes, ends, or methods. Perhaps Aristotle was right when he noted that only the dead shall know the absence of war, but the price of war must never be minimized, or worse, ignored. The architecture of war makes that clear.