![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
The symbol
Aug. 29th, 2010 12:41 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
merig00.livejournal.comLower Manhattan looks like a jumble of lego pieces without them. The elegance of these tall buildings glowing in the sun in the early hours was breathtaking. Only someone without heart can call such beauty the symbol of capitalism, free trade, American might, or what not. Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the Twin Towers, made little secret that he was inspired by Gothic architecture; this is seen in all of his designs. The Twin Towers was a pointed arch and Gothic tracings repeated thousand fold and turned into enormous steel stocking playfully exposed to the sun.
It was the authentic Gothic cathedral accidentally built in the 20th century America: the verticality, the aspiration of Heaven. Gothic is the Divine seen as the supernatural light, "lux continua" transforming the material and mortal into immateriality and immortality. People feel this aspiration and respond to it. The architect knew what he was doing; he underwent the transformation himself:
...the basic change occurred during thie trip that I took around the world in 1954 when I realized that architecture as we were practicing it was inadequate, and that it did not bring us the kind of experience as people that we ought to make available to ourselves. Now this was fairly evident to me in going through the old buildings. In this tour around the world I was not interested in contemporary buildings because I had seen contemporary buildings actually until they came out of my ears. And so I decided that I wanted to go back and find out what happened in the older buildings. And so I started with the cathedrals and then I went to Italy and looked at the Renaissance, which is very thrilling to me, like the squares in Rome, or even the older squares such as exist in Venice, the Piazza San Marco. And I kept realizing that these qualities that we see in the older architecture, such as the play of sun and shadow, which is something that was neglected in our modern architecture was vitally necessary to the total experience of man in this environment. Other qualities that I thought were terribly significant were the texture, of course, ornamentation, which also enabled the building to be alive with the sun. And silhouettes against the sky which I felt were vitally necessary to our sense of aspiration in buildings. In other words, when you see a New England church steeple against the blue sky, this is a very exciting kind of experience because it somehow brings about an aspirational quality, a sense of reaching for something which is terribly important to our mundane way of life. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralh
THEY also knew what the Twin Towers were about. We might've forgotten ourselves, but THEY still remember what made us into what we are.
I miss these steeples pressed against the blue autumn sky.
via![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shkrobius
It was the authentic Gothic cathedral accidentally built in the 20th century America: the verticality, the aspiration of Heaven. Gothic is the Divine seen as the supernatural light, "lux continua" transforming the material and mortal into immateriality and immortality. People feel this aspiration and respond to it. The architect knew what he was doing; he underwent the transformation himself:
...the basic change occurred during thie trip that I took around the world in 1954 when I realized that architecture as we were practicing it was inadequate, and that it did not bring us the kind of experience as people that we ought to make available to ourselves. Now this was fairly evident to me in going through the old buildings. In this tour around the world I was not interested in contemporary buildings because I had seen contemporary buildings actually until they came out of my ears. And so I decided that I wanted to go back and find out what happened in the older buildings. And so I started with the cathedrals and then I went to Italy and looked at the Renaissance, which is very thrilling to me, like the squares in Rome, or even the older squares such as exist in Venice, the Piazza San Marco. And I kept realizing that these qualities that we see in the older architecture, such as the play of sun and shadow, which is something that was neglected in our modern architecture was vitally necessary to the total experience of man in this environment. Other qualities that I thought were terribly significant were the texture, of course, ornamentation, which also enabled the building to be alive with the sun. And silhouettes against the sky which I felt were vitally necessary to our sense of aspiration in buildings. In other words, when you see a New England church steeple against the blue sky, this is a very exciting kind of experience because it somehow brings about an aspirational quality, a sense of reaching for something which is terribly important to our mundane way of life. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralh
THEY also knew what the Twin Towers were about. We might've forgotten ourselves, but THEY still remember what made us into what we are.
I miss these steeples pressed against the blue autumn sky.
via
shkrobius ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}