Art Deco at Ground Zero

Five years after 9/11, how about a design actual human beings might like?

Todd Seavey from the December 2006 issue

div class="bodytext"> p> When Mohammed Atta flew a plane into the World Trade Center five years ago, he was not only a terrorist striking a blow against America. He was a former architecture student striking a blow against modernism, the mid-20th-century style often characterized by geometric shapes, cold glass and steel, Louis Sullivan’s minimalist principle that “form follows function,” and Adolf Loos’ more puritanical rule that “ornament is crime.” span class= "CRbreakgrafline"> o:p> /o:p> /span> /p> p> span class="CRbreakgrafline">We’ll never know if such a thought crossed Atta’s mind in his final moments, but it wouldn’t have been the first time terrorists saw modernist architecture as a weird imperialist imposition. In 1997 Basque separatists threatened to blow up Frank Gehry’s Spanish branch of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, which looks something like a giant titanium cabbage. A variety of traditionalists and leftists have criticized ostentatious, gaudy-modern sites like the Planet Hollywood restaurant bombed by Muslim terrorists in Capetown, South Africa, in 1998. Not all the critics are insane. o:p> /o:p> /span> /p>