Journal #23:

"deviant"

A Tale of Two Symbols
by: Adnan Morshed

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way-in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good and evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.

 

From an urban historian's viewpoint, September 11's lethal combination of jumbo airplanes and skyscrapers calls into question the meaning of these symbols. When the airplane and the skyscraper were turned into killing machines, what happened to their ascensional functions masquerading as nothing less than twentieth-century modernity itself? Did the collision of these two symbols hint at the collapse of their idealized meanings? Or did nostalgia and patriotism in fact reinforce the ideologies of progress formerly embodied in the airplane and the skyscraper? Was the terrorists' attack predicated on their belief that these were symbols of domination that could be put on a fatal collision course transforming them into the conveyors of a subversive political statement? I pose these questions as an operating framework primarily to look at two compelling urban images with a view to understanding the semantic zigzag of these two potent symbols (Figs. 1, 2).

During the 1920s, the juxtaposition of these two soaring icons of the modern world-the airplane and the skyscraper-almost literally marked the ascendancy of New York, to paraphrase John Dos Passos, as the "capital" of the world.¹ It was the so-called "golden age" of aviation and skyscrapers, both technologies striking a chord with the popular imagination, as well as changing the ways people experienced and viewed the physical world. In its own right, each symbol reinforced the American belief in technological advancement. But it was their synthesis-an airplane flying over Manhattan's vertical urban form-that became the trope par excellence for the gospel of progress. Witness the caption to such an image: "Almost a symbol of civilization is this picture-the fantastic towers of a great city rearing from the earth, and above them a machine that flies-new ways of living and traveling."² The image on the back cover of Le Corbusier's book Aircraft (1935)-an airplane flying over Manhattan-retained this doubly operative modernist myth, as Le Corbusier's gaze simultaneously focused on the two quintessentially modern phenomena: the airplane (new forms of mobility) and the vertical city (new forms of living). Such a double vision revealed not only the consistency of a dialogue between these two phenomena but also the synergic functioning of their symbolism in instilling the notion of progress into modern life (Fig. 3).³

The combination of the airplane and skyscraper provided a cultural telescope for multifaceted utopian imaginings and, eventually, for focusing on the very ideologies of progress. Avant-garde urbanists, architects, science-fiction illustrators, film directors, and novelists flitted around this idea to sing their panegyric to progress. The architect/delineator Hugh Ferriss narrated his Metropolis of the 1920s as nocturnal airplane journeys between and above the great canyons of the vertical city (Fig. 4). Although pessimistic in its depiction of the modern world, the German silent film Metropolis (1926), reportedly inspired by its director Fritz Lang's visit to New York in 1924, employed futuristic urban images in which airplanes navigated skyscraper cities. The first science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories (1926), transformed Manhattan into a utopian vertical city swarming with aerial vessels. And when in King Kong (1933), the giant gorilla (depicted as a sign of barbarism) attempted to tear apart the Empire State Building, the symbolic citadel of capitalism, it was an airplane that flew in as the building's guardian angel (Fig. 5).

Since the end of World War II, much criticism has been directed at the semiology of modern icons, including the airplane and the skyscraper. Such criticism has often been based on suspicions of modernity's promises of progress and emancipation. Nonetheless, these two ubiquitous phenomena of modernity have not ceased to offer a symbolic pair, enabling ever-newer modes of moving and living in a capitalist world. In fact, the recent phenomenon of so-called space tourism and the obsessive global competition to build the "world's tallest building" form a twenty-first-century analogue of the earlier pair that animated the modernists of the 1920s.

But, as Charles Jencks famously suggested, ideologies can die an abrupt death: "Modern Architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 pm when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme [was] given the final coup de grace by dynamite."⁴ Is the world as black and white as Jencks wants us to believe? Did the symbolism of the airplane/skyscraper coupling die a violent death at 8.45 a.m. on September 11, 2001? Did the silhouetted United Flight 175 speeding ominously toward the South Tower of the World Trade Center subvert the idealized meanings of the two most powerful symbols of the 20th century? The demolition of Pruitt-Igoe was more or less a socially sanctioned choice, compelled by aesthetic views on inner-city spatial pathologies; whereas the violent collisions of airplanes and the twin towers were intended-following the twisted inner logic of terrorism-as much to stab the heart of their symbolism as to inflict pain on American consciousness.

Hinged on an imagined "death" of the twin towers, the post-attack media have spun September 11 for various eschatological prophecies, such as "the world has forever changed," "the end of civil liberty," and "the defining moment." But can it be that simple? Alongside the immense sense of tragedy, the question that also haunts us now is how the discourse of symbolism straddles the cultural meanings of death and resurrection (many have demanded that the twin towers be rebuilt exactly the way they were).⁵ Having ironed out symbolism's discursive contours, we are precariously left with stark binary choices: it is either a lamented "death" of the towers or their triumphal rebuilding.⁶ The response of artists Paul Myoda and Julian LaVerdiere-two light beams rising from Ground Zero refilling the void with incandescent "towers [that] are like ghost limbs, we can feel them even though they're not there anymore"-cogently articulated the nebulous correspondence between the towers' death and their anticipated rebuilding. The title of my essay consciously conjures up Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859). In the opening sentence of the novel, Dickens presents the idea of a liminality, in which the simultaneity of "the best of times" and "the worst of times" defines the sublime sentimentality of the French Revolution. Preposterous as it may sound, the post-September 11 culture resonated with similar binary sentimentality that has blurred our view of the complex links between death and resurrection and of the fact that symbolism cannot die a simple death. We will probably know the matrix of the airplane, the skyscraper, and September 11 only retrospectively when we reposition ourselves outside of a Dickensian liminal time.

 

 

Notes:

I would like to thank Mark Jarzombek, John Christ, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Kirsten Weiss, and Zeynep E. Çelik for engaging discussion on the theme of this paper.

¹ John Dos Passos, The Big Money: USA, vol. 3 (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1937): 63-65.

² Harry Guggenheim, The Seven Skies (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1930): 36.

³ Not all were as sanguine as Le Corbusier and other modernists, though. H. G. Wells's The War in the Air (1908), for example, centered on the aerial bombardment of New York City by German zeppelins.

⁴ Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991 [1977]): 23.

⁵ Robert Stern, for instance, has demanded: "We must rebuild the towers. They are a symbol of our achievement as New Yorkers and as Americans, and to put them back saysthat we cannot be defeated. The skyscraper is our greatest achievement architecturally speaking, and we must have a new, skyscraping World Trade Center." See The New York Times Magazine (September 23, 2001): 81.

⁶ "Filling the Void, A Memorial by Paul Myoda and Julian LaVerdiere," The New York Times Magazine (September 23, 2001): 80.

 

Illustrations:

Fig. 1: United Flight 175 speeding towards the South Tower of the Word Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Fig. 2: Airplane/Manhattan. Published in Harry F. Guggenheim, The Seven Skies (New York, London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1930): 36.

Fig. 3: Airplane/Manhattan. Published on the back cover of Le Corbusier, Aircraft (New York: Universe Books, [1935] 1988).

Fig. 4: Hugh Ferriss, Overhead Traffic-Ways, 1929.

Fig. 5: Film still from King Kong, 1933.
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