Divided We Stand by Eric Darton

Author:Eric Darton [ERIC DARTON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-01-29T16:00:00+00:00

Was Yamasaki correct? Had “our culture” become an exercise in “beauty through structure and technology”? If so, Tobin and Yamasaki were preparing to deliver up one of its most uncompromising icons.

THE SERENE REPUBLIC OF LOWER MANHATTAN

However much Tobin and his subordinates desired that the World Trade Center be “noticed,” they had remarkably little to say about its architectural content. Many of Tobin’s public statements treated the towers less as actual structures than as futuristic harbingers of the coming millennial cityscape of “hundred-story skyscrapers on sites of two or more combined blocks, mostly in. lower Manhattan and in the midtown area,” Thus the “first buildings of the 21st Century” emerged from Tobin’s rhetoric swathed in an abstruse fog of “grace and beauty” that served to deflect attention from their cyclopean scale.

From the beginning of our work on the Trade Center, we had determined that, despite our tremendous space requirements, the Center should be a thing of grace and beauty that would enrich the lives of all who lived in it and visited it, and of which we could all be proud. These criteria were given to Mr. Yamasaki and the Roths in our first conversations with them. And when Yamasaki began to design the wide plazas and then, to meet our space requirements, to throw his towers toward the sky, we knew that our objective of a beautiful, as well as functional complex of Trade Center buildings, was going to be accomplished.

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