The Fragility and Promise of Glass Architecture in New York

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When the World Trade Center collapsed, billions of hearts in shades of Madder Root fell across the skies in unfettered unison as if conducted by the God given orchestra of angels.

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Mourning binded our souls in confusing stages of mental turbulence. There was no rhyme nor reason for these periods or patterns of mournful distress.

Many years ago the Architect Richard Meier commissioned me to record the footprint of the devastating attack on 9/11. I ran like an Ostrich after sipping spiked punch, stalking a sneaky snake. Round and round I ran. The urban sounds of sirens pierced the air. Uncontrollable crying and warnings of apocalypse filled the air. Snippety snap snap my camera clipped. Wide angle and zoom lenses captured what they needed to capture. Authorities grabbed my camera. I explained my legacy, New York’s legacy, and they let me continue.

I remember standing on the second level of a pizza shop across from the disaster. The proprietor and a dozen or so patrons came up to the second floor to watch me shoot. They wanted to know what I might see from this angle. The proprietor slipped me a few slices of pizza. I kept shooting. I felt a bit like Rear Window’s Jimmy Stewart sans Grace Kelly. Through the looking glass I waited for movement, I waited for my camera to see the history that lived. There was nothing in the WTC footprint but ghosts. The camera taught me to see the living and the deceased. To this day I have not seen what my camera saw.

I have often thought of Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert. He was the cheerleader responsible for the building and dedication of the 1851 London Crystal Palace design. It was one of the first and great glass designed buildings in modern history. It was a great achievement for the Prince. It was a great achievement for architecture. When it caught fire many decades later, I wondered how the Prince might have re-acted: I considered that he would fall to his knees and mourn the death of creation. He would look up towards the consuming flames while glass remnant shards rained on top of his heart. I can imagine his fervid cry, “what a life”. Albert is dead, all that we remember of the World Trade Center is buried below the city.

Emboldened by my dreams I stood facing (as if floating inside) giant panes of the new One World Trade Center One. In front of me was the new New York. In back of me was the past and future conjoined as if two babies at birth: Old New York‘s heart was feeding the glass high rising architecture into a new stratosphere. The poet Frederick Garcia Lorca would have claimed that he was “murdered by the sky”. The poet would be disoriented by the unforgiving angles of progress.

For this photographer, The architecture (World Trade Center’s substitutes) Skidmore and Owens and Merrill, Norman Foster, Fumihiko Maki and Santiago Calatrava braced me. It has always been an universal motivation to see tragedy and build from it. This is the way of the camera too. The camera sees what it need to see. Not the other way around. The camera shapes your vision. The lens sings the mantra:”Go forth”. It was as if Aaron Copland’s “The Fanfare for the Common Man sprung my feet free.

Before my eyes lifted north on broadway, I noticed an array of colorful pigments on the ground. They were probably remnants from an amalgamation of sorrow: what stood before my feet was a period of history. I imagined art history’s Albrecht Dürer was gathering colors for his “European Blue Roller” or such. But as my eyes moved north I glimpsed at a single Barthman’s Sidewalk Clock at the corner of Broadway and Maiden Lane. The circular glass clock embedded into the sidewalk pyschedelically morphed into thousands. The sign was clear. I marched like Joe Pendleton in “Here Comes Mr. Jordan”: I stepped on every (Clock)ivory key north to heaven. I was flanked by hundreds of glass buildings standing erect like a soldiers salute. Heaven is where every standing unit of glass architecture poses for me.

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My voices whispered. I was in the company of millions of architectural stories. I stood in the middle of The Canyon of Heroes. I dreamed that ticker tape rained on my head with streamers made from melting gold hung from patina rooftops. Alas, not a single ticker tape sailed above me. I was alone. I am always alone with my voices and my camera.

I took snippety snap snaps of every reflective light. I heard the Mingus Harlem Jazz Ensembles usher in encouragement. I heard Miles Davis’ “Dingo” pace me through my walk: East on Wall Street, west across Liberty Street, thousands of gleaming glass buildings awaited my purpose. Ten thousand glass poseurs awaited my lens.

To the Bronx possibly I marched.