Timework Web wrote:
>
> The image of the 1972 demolition of Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in
> St. Louis occurred to me on Sept. 11, as I listened to the radio broadcast
> from New York and the live feed of someone narrating the collapse of the
> first tower. That image constellation has been lurking ever since but I
> haven't heard anyone else mention it.
>
> So today I remembered and did a google search on Pruitt-Igoe and World
> Trade Center. Whoooaaa! Try it yourself, urban design wonks.
[snip]
I believe I heard one of the Loizeaux -- the owners of CDI
(Controlled Demolition Inc) -- on ABC news while the WTC towers were
going down. How ABC has the wits to get CDI on the phone
that morning shows the media aren't totally lost in Frasier-space.
Controlled Demolition Incorporated's
November 16, 1975 World Record
Implosion of the 361 feet tall, tallest
standing concrete building ever felled
with explosives Mendes Caldeira Building
S�o Paulo Brazil
--
The words that came to my mind as the
WTC towers were coming down were words
I have had occasion to think fairly often over the past 30 years,
from Hermann Broch's _The Sleepwalkers_:
a community of life that has ceased to justify its existence,
a so-called community devoid of force but filled with evil will,
a community that drowns itself in blood and chokes on
its own poison-gases.... (1929-32, p. 646)
George Steiner once called the 100 years beginning ca. 1873:
The Century of Barbed Wire.
--
**** What to replace the towers with? ****
Here's my [entirely serious
and humanistic] proposal, plus a link to some more
important people's more likely ideas, including -- those
who forget history? -- a neo-Albert Speer light show for
the site:
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/wtc.html#rebuild
And, while we're at it, Louis Kahn, the great humanist architect who
died of a heart attack in a men's room in New York's
Penn Station (probably because this country is too
invested in more important thing like making "killings
in the market" to have provided him with a private jet
and a limousine, so he had to rush to make his own
travel connections....) is
one person who undertood why a city (or anything else,
for that matter) might deserve to exist:
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/jpg/Kahn_Salk.html
Never again.
+\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
