On Williamsburg Bridge, Tuesday 13th October 2009

Shock-silver clouds and flash-silver rails; the sky a leaking of electrical blues, pushed ever upwards with the sun in pursuit; impossible autumn-green parks, fluorescent once-a-year-green parks, like italic quotations in the city’s grey prose. Rivets, girders and cage, the industrial bridge a thoughtless, careless pink.

Rich handpainted view, a moving freeze-frame. Superfine definition creates illusory motion. Every pixel coming forward, coming out. Real has become hyper-real, vivid, false. It has been veiled in the bright sunlight of consciousness. In the end the most beautiful thing is to be conscious.

The city's too-close horizon an urban Rousseau of vertice and plane. Winking gilded roofs peep out, sun-blasted brownstone blocks chessman-neat. Distant thunderstorms rollock and billow.

Downtown New York

Without the Twin Towers, Downtown New York is barely recognizable. Its dumpy oblong skyscrapers could be anywhere – Phoenix, Atlanta, Vancouver, Miami, Seattle, even Bogotá. Along with the Empire State Building, they were the defining insignia, the animistic totem of the tribe of New Yorkers. Now, Downtown could be anywhere, anyone’s.

Which is which?

Which is which? Answers at the bottom of this post.

The city’s identity is saved by the Empire State Building in Midtown, and the monumentally over-sized bridges of the East River. These symbols retain the distinctive arrogance of the new imperialism, as the palaces of London, Paris and Vienna manifest the contempt of the wealthy imperialist for his pillaged colonies.

Architecturally, in New York’s loss, we can see the indispensability of enduring landmark buildings in the definition of location. It is these iconic buildings which should reflect the people for whom they become a landscape, a permanent backdrop, and in reflecting them, also represent them symbolically, become their identity. Egypt and the Pyramids, Paris and La Tour Eiffel and Notre Dame, London has many defining landmarks – Tower Bridge, The Palace of Westminster perhaps above all. Thus architects have a responsibility to those in whose backyards they build – a responsibility of psychological affiliation. They must not construct their own personal visions, but use their vision to sum up the enduring and possibly concealed identity of the citizens and inhabitants of those places. These icons must be built to last, as a civilization’s identity lasts longer than the lifetime of one of its inhabitants. My identity as a Londoner comes in great part from absorbing a sense of myself through my surroundings: the River Thames, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Palace of Westminster, the BT Tower, Canary Wharf, views from Hampstead Heath and Kenwood House, Tower Bridge, the Eye, Westway, St Pancras; equally the future “identity”, inasmuch as such a thing exists, of future Londoners will continue to be fashioned by these same influences.

This necessity, for endurance and quality, must be in the forefront of an architect’s mind: will it last? is it a gift to the future of its setting? will it become part of the identity of its place? can it become its location? The swagger of riches, the two-fingered salute to socialism that the Twin Towers were, could only exist in New York, and so naturally came to be an allegory for the city.

Equally Tower Bridge, the Victorian re-invention of an idealised faux-Gothic memory, could only represent London: the centre of a country, perhaps more than any other, which is both proud of its past and hostage to it.

The Twin Towers were a timely emblem for New York and for New Yorkers. They perfectly pre-empted and went on to represent the phenomenal financial success of the 80s, they were a temple to the values of the modern capitalist paradigm. Like a symbol such as St Peter’s in Rome, they could be seen all over the city – a moral certainty, a harbinger of the new meritocracy, a reflection of what the city stood for, evidence that bigger was better. They were also what New York was to the world – confident, wealthy, brash, fearful, oversized, defiant, exhilarating.

Psychologically, psychoanalytically, Downtown Manhattan was castrated on 11/09. In "The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy" (1910, p144), Freud states that the child is “in fear of the father, in defiance of the father and in disbelief of the father.” This child wants both to ape his father, but also kill or castrate him. The instinctive urges of the child - of an adolescent civilization - attacked from envy what it both hates and yet aspires to be: a strong and self-determining civilization. This “father” (in this case perhaps an uncle – Uncle Sam) is powerful and vengeful, it can both bestow and withhold, save and destroy, punish and reward. Since 2001, America has reinforced the relationship of an inconsistent father alternately criticising and spoiling an angry juvenile son. Through retributions, wars, invasions and threats it punishes; simultaneously it rewards: cajoling, sweetening, rebuilding and making promises, expecting to raise the rest of the world in its own dysfunctional image, like a parent filling its child with all the faults it had.

Photos are, from top: Seattle, Miami, New York, Vancouver, Bogotá, Atlanta

Williamsburg Bridge NY, the architecture of belittlement

The Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges

One of the beautiful things about the great bridges over the East River, between Long Island and Manhattan, is their spatial arrogance. So grand are they that they tower not only above the water, but also well over the land on both sides. When the Williamsburg Bridge reaches Manhattan from Brooklyn, the pedestrian walkway is still over 100ft above ground level. It towers above the cars of East River Drive and the football players of East River Park as it had towered over the boats and barges and docks.

Williamsburg Bridge from Williamsburg, Brooklyn

The function of bridges is to cross rivers, not to trivialise them. The Williamsburg Bridge soars eye-to-eye with the symmetrical towerblocks of the East River Housing Corporation, as contemptuous for them as it is for the great waterway it belittles.

It finally lands, walkways, eight lanes of traffic and two trainlines, twenty minutes walk, six blocks, one kilometre, inland.

Despite looking like a veteran of the age of steel, Williamsburg bridge was begun in just 1896. New York had just started realising its strength as it began to rival European nations in its architectural manifestation of imperial arrogance. As the palaces of London, Pairs and Vienna, and the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, are intended to leave the onlooker in no doubt as to the holders of power and wealth, so in New York did these colossal building projects aspire to swell New York’s self-image, and its metaphorical height amongst the big boys of the old world. Man, unsurprisingly, has always erected giant buildings as physical evidence of his power. Great civilizations have always commemorated themselves through their architecture – the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Dynastic Empires of the Far East. From the flowering of the gothic in the late middle ages, through the Renaissance and into the era of Empire, all the world’s tallest structures existed in Europe – first the cathedrals of Lincoln, Hamburg, Cologne, Rome and finally La Tour Eiffel in Paris. Europe’s dominion was nearly complete. In 1870 the British Empire (the largest the world has ever seen), controlled 35% of the world’s total GDP, a quarter of the landmass, and a quarter of the population.

Cologne Cathedral - Europe's skyline

The twentieth century saw the collapse of empire and the rise of American power, so that by 1945 the United States controlled 35% of the world’s GDP. This social and financial shift is echoed architecturally: from the construction of the Chrysler in 1930 until 1998, every tallest building in the world was in America. But now, 2009, the New World is soon to join Europe in the Old World: the wheel of time grinds down all things over which it passes, and the sun beginning to set on the endless wealth and pride of Imperial America. The New, New World is China and the Far East – now ten of the twenty tallest buildings in the world are in China alone, ten of the top fifty are in the UAE, and 24 of the top thirty are in UAE, Malaysia, China, Taiwan and North Korea combined. If oil reserves are really about to run out, this new ascendancy might find itself rudely curtailed.

Kuala Lumpur - the New New World

There will be fewer and fewer colossal buildings in the old world (and the now ageing new world). Those that are being built and designed will be increasingly unpopular and unrepresentative. Our societies, now fading and subtle, can no longer make a psychological affiliation with the architecture of bombast. And I see in the paper as I write this…as if on queue…could anything make less sense now, than a new Eiffel Tower for London?