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

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p> span class="CRbreakgrafline">Now would be the perfect time to relearn some of the lessons lost when modernism explicitly rejected the past, so that something can be built at Ground Zero that is elegant in the most timeless sense of the word, elegant in the way that the Woolworth Building, mere blocks from the Trade Center site, is. Elegant the way many buildings from the first, all too brief generation of skyscrapers were a century ago, before modernism declared ornament, decoration, gentle curves, and playful details to be frivolous. o:p> /o:p> /span> /p> p> span class="CRbreakgrafline">Tom Wolfe summed up the case against modernist architecture in his 1981 book From Bauhaus to Our House , explaining how the European modernists of the early 20th century consciously cast tradition aside, believing they could create not just buildings but aesthetics and cities according to simple rational principles. The results were cold, ugly, inhuman, and impractical. (Modernist buildings, with their flat roofs and massive facades, were often leakier and draftier than expected.) o:p> /o:p> /span> /p> p>