It's been a year or two since I last watched Ken Burns documentary New York. I suspect it would be interesting to watch that pre-9/11 work in light of the shifts in perspective that have taken place since then.

One chord I recall from the documentary was its discussion of monuments. Burns notes that New York was a city that seemed nearly contemptuous of the grand monument. Its grand architectural gestures were purely commercial -- building like Chrysler, Empire State, or even the ugly but truly monumental World Trade Center.

Those who spoke to Burns about that lack of monumentality in New York ascribed it to the city's commercial vigor: It was so intent on racing toward a grand future that it couldn't rest in an honored past. Grand monuments, in this view, are a way of setting the gaze on some past glory. New York lacked such monuments because it saw its glory always in the future -- and in a specifically commercial future.

Without reference to the Burns documentary, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaus last week struck a similar chord when discussing the New York ground-zero plans with Charlie Rose. Trying desperately not to sound utterly contemptuous of the monument-building in New York, Koolhaus was nonetheless cool to the sentimentality in which it is grounded.

Koolhaus percieved a deep change in New York's perspective after 9/11 -- a change that, in his view, caused an inward shift in the city's perspective and an inability to see a bright future for itself.

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I heard a bit of his view on the New York 9/11 memorial the other day when Dutch architect Rem Koolhaus was guest on Charlie Rose.

To get his full take on it, I picked up this month's Wired. He is guest editor for a wide-ranging section about space and spaces that includes a brief article by Koolhaus himself on New York's architecture as it expresses the city and through which the city creates itself.

He divides the city's architectural timeline into five epochs. The period from 1850 to 1933 is New York's "revolutionary moment": "New York is built ... in a single spurt of imagination and energy. The first prototype of the modern metropolis, Manhattan is turned into a laboratory to test the potential of modern life in a radical, collective experiment."

He quickly dismisses the epoch of the 50s and 60s as a time of a few "important" buildings and a flurry of bridge and tunnel construction designed to ease escape to the suburbs. "The results appear lackluster..."

The 1970s are ushered in with the most significant addition to the skyline since the revolutionary period. "...the World Trade Center is finished. No one likes it. The towers are abstract and structurally daring.... The towers dominate the skyline but don't participate in it -- twinning is their only genius.


"1972 is a turning point: The towers are delivered at the exact moment New York's passion for the new is spent. Along with the Concorde, they are modernism's apotheosis and its letdown at the same time -- unreal perfection that can never be equaled."

The city falls through chaos to try to recreate itself with cute sloganeering. Its architecture becomes reflexive: "...art deco becomes the new. A tectonic pornography -- over-dimensioned displays of excitement, each relentlessly pursuing its own release, an architecture of money shots."

He sees the 80s and 90s as a time of accelerating control, culminating in Rudy Giuliani who "instigates a law bubble of his own. Giuliani's is a regime of enforced quality of life.... The city becomes safer for some, more dangerous for many others. 'Zero tolerance' is a deadly mantra for a metropolis: What is a city if not a space of maximum license?"

Now comes the current epoch: 9/11. Just one date since all notion of progress is expected to stop and reflect back on that date. "...the transnational metropolis is enlisted in a national crusade. New York becomes a city (re)captured by Washington. Through the alchemy of 9/11, the authoritarian morphs imperceptibly into the totalitarian."

And the result: "Instead of the two towers -- the sublime -- the city will live with five towers, wounded by a single scything movement of the architect, surrounding two black holes. New York will be marked by a massive representation of hurt that projects only the overbearing self-pity of the powerful. Instead of the confident beginning of the next chapter, it captures the stumped fundamentalism of the superpower. Call it closure."