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

(Page 3 of 8)

span class="CRbreakgrafline">The arch-modernist Le Corbusier wrote maniacal diatribes against traditional aesthetics, calling old, organically developed towns “things that have merely happened” rather than being planned, fit only for meandering “pack donkeys.” He dreamed of razing all of Paris’ old buildings in order to replace them with his now all-too-familiar trademark concrete public housing blocks. When an early critic of Le Corbusier called him boring, he dismissively denounced the doctrine of “life with its many facets and unending variety; life, two-faced or four-faced, putrescent or healthy, limpid or muddy; the exact and the arbitrary, logic and illogicality, the good God and the good Devil; everything in confusion; pour it all in, stir well and serve hot and label the pot ‘Life.’ That should be enough to make any living being a many-sided character of infinite variety.” This, I must stress, was Le Corbusier’s description of evil. o:p> /o:p> /span> /p> p> span class="CRbreakgrafline">The dehumanizing results still surround us. Take the odd little planned community called Roosevelt Island off Manhattan’s eastern shore, peopled by an odd mix of U.N. employees, hospital staffers, and (by explicit demographic design) a certain number of low-income residents. Combining the dreariness of Le Corbusier with the hopelessness of Asbury Park, New Jersey, the island’s Main Street is a narrow, modernist canyon with Pompidou Center–like orange ducts at one end. Styleless red signs line Main Street, with sterile, artless names all rendered—by law—in the exact same font: Thrift Shop, Community Library, Fish Store, Cocktail Lounge, General Store, Travel Agency/Bakery, Public Safety Dept., Parish Chapel, Island Management Office. One former Roosevelt Island resident tells me the place reminds her of living in Romania as a child: “During the Ceausescu regime, they demolished certain cultural and religious buildings, and they were building a huge number of buildings that were all modernist—no uniqueness, just very sterile—to house the workers in the big factories.” o:p> /o:p> /span> /p> p> The sad truth is that the World Trade span class="c1">Center, while ostensibly an icon of a hectic and diverse world of ever-changing commerce, was also a bland modernist structure—though it certainly didn’t deserve its horrible fate. o:p>