The surface of the road disappears as the water gradually rises to the level of the concrete curb. From there, the tide flows east in the grooves between cobblestones, carried first by capillary action, then forced from behind by the surge. Water climbs up onto the narrow swath of park on the Hudson River’s east embankment, washing across the four southbound lanes of the West Side Highway, around the landscaped medians and over the northbound lanes before pooling among the trashcans and hydrants on the corner of 27th Street. A conflagration tears through material with indiscriminate fury, while an inundation rolls passively through channels of least resistance, moving deliberately, inevitably, but without the promise of the catharsis of physical transformation. It drips and dribbles, sluices and sprinkles. Nearly 300 sculptures and drawings by Auguste Rodin were lost in the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center. Guy Montag burned libraries in Fahrenheit 451, and Don Quixote’s priest and barber burned the romances that turned the hidalgo mad. Malcolm Lowry saved Under the Volcano from his burning cabin but lost In Ballast to the White Sea. A prison guard burned the only manuscript of Jean Genet’s Notre-Dame des Fleurs so that Genet had to write it again from memory. Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio, Taliesin, burned to the ground after his cook locked Wright’s mistress, her two children, and several carpenters in a dining room, doused the house with kerosene, lit it on fire, and attacked anyone who escaped with a hatchet - there are still letters in Wright’s archives with singed edges. Agnes Martin may or may not have burned all of her paintings when she left New York. Herman Melville burned his manuscripts and letters. Vladimir Nabokov and Emily Dickinson left similar instructions. Franz Kafka burned 90 percent of his life’s work and requested that more be burned upon his death (it was not). When I imagine a work of art being destroyed it is almost always by fire - the spontaneous combustion of linseed oil in rags or nitrate film in storage vaults, Orwell’s memory hole or Savonarola’s bonfire of the vanities. The following excerpt from Sandfuture includes episodes from my own experience of 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy, spliced together with biographical passages from Yamasaki’s early life and his time working as the lead architect of the World Trade Center. I wanted to write about architecture in a way that felt closer to how I experienced it, and the only way to do that was to include myself in the narrative. I wanted to capture his story somehow, but not in a traditional mode of architectural storytelling. Louis and the World Trade Center in New York - were both destroyed on national television, but also how his unorthodox interpretation of modernism has been relegated to the margins of American architecture history. Not only that his two best-known projects - the Pruitt-Igoe Apartments in St. It was then that I came to appreciate how extraordinary his story really was. I began with the idea of writing generally, but almost immediately arrived at the idea of looking at Yamasaki’s work more closely. Fifteen years later, well into my career as a contemporary artist, I started working on this book, uncertain about the practice of making physical objects after seeing so much art work damaged during Hurricane Sandy. I first became aware of Minoru Yamasaki’s work in the summer of 2001, when I was standing at the foot of the World Trade Center wondering how it could be that I had just graduated with a degree in architecture and I had no idea who had designed the Twin Towers. Photo: Balthazar Korab, Courtesy of Library of Congress Entrance arches of Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center with Ideogram sculpture.
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