10:37 PM *
this morning (undertown): the train's population dwindles at spring street to a handful of people in my car. whole benches empty, me holding a pole at the exact center, the only one standing in an E train car at 8:50 a.m. i felt a chill; how many fewer people would be on this train, last stop Chambers Street/WTC? i stood up a little, out of respect, or to shrug off the mood, as the train was stopping and i turned and stepped firmly to the door.

8:35 PM *
this morning (uptown): managed to get myself out the door without heartbreak setting in. instead, that soberness that hits after a long illness is passing, but has not yet completed its run, as i walk toward ninth avenue. then as i walk to the subway, i notice the sun is out, i'm blinded, a gorgeously deep blue sky, something like i imagine to be the color of my imaginary future boyfriend's eyes, gazing at me, softly brushing my face with that gaze, intent, nearly motionless yet full of life. life for life and sharing that. the white cirrus clouds bright and figurative, moving to the east. is that the smoke cloud, or the actual sky? too high to be smoke, too pure to be anything but delirious nature.

this morning 2 (downtown): those bright cirrus clouds, those deep blue eyes, that gazing movement happens behind the slowly wafting white cloudlike smoke coming out of the ground where several buildings used to be. the sky is on the ground, yet it's still "a movement space".

this evening (downtown): still bright, still barely cloudy, still moving, still whispering my name with a look.

this evening 2 (uptown): long strings of cirrus clouds are sparkling electric fire orange against a still-blue sky, the same calm attention. the clouds are exactly parallel to the avenues, and i smile and tear in relief: the city is in the sky again. dazzled, i'm stunned by natural beauty for the first time all week, the second-nature beauty of my city moving again in time.

9.16.2001

5:32 PM *
my last few outings have been gatherings with friends. our common sadness is fueled by the layers of uncertainty in our lives; many of our projects/events canceled or indefinitely postponed; the effect of cancellations on our financial situations; the need to get away from a city that has become a huge shrine, a single unhappiness; the complete inability to bear news sources despite the need to keep up with the news; the possibility of a nation at war for perhaps years; the fact that we all saw events or knew people who are missing, and the realization that we are in a deeper shock than we all expected; the fact that no one else, friends or strangers on the train, seems to be bouncing back at all.

9.15.2001

12:38 PM *
i have been continuing my diligent collecting of notes and sketches and old and new photographs for these entries. when the time came to put this set of them down--now--i came upon several descriptions that are components of what i need to say:

Another recurrent interest is the issue of private space and the attendant tropes of accessibility and inaccessability that both fascinated the artist as well as haunted his reception. Under a sketch of a ring of keys he once wrote, "a catalogue and apology of locked spaces to be carried in the pocket...

...an equal but opposite anarchitectural interest concerned the seemingly extensionless scale of space wrought by the vertical city and its high-rises, which the artist opposed to the limitless span of the horizon. Responding to his own call for "the perfect structure," Matta-Clark wrote elliptically, "...erase all the buildings for a clear horizon." To illustrate this "perfect structure," he sketched twinned skyscrapers, ideograms of a sort, on a horizon line compelte with the half disc of the sun. But the perfect structure--or structures--was not so much the skyscrapers as the condition of their erasure, indicated b the two blunt "X's" that violently mark the images of the buildings. Where once the vertical trajectory of the skyscrapers suggested a certain colozination of space, their erasure to a horizon line--itself extensionless--acknowledged the space negatively framed by the buildings. It recognized the impossibility of reaching and thus appropriating the horizon line as well, a thing that always slips beyond the grasp as a headlong, forward trajectory and a lateral spread at once.

It is clear what Matta-Clark was referring to in this erasure of buildings to the horizon. Yamasaki's World Trade Center had been formally dedicated in April of 1973, and the artist was alternately attracted and repulsed by its giganticism. To borrow from Michel de Certaeau, perhaps the Center represented for the artist "a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production," as it dramatically refigured Lower Manhattan along a vertical axis. As the symbolic figure of private interests in the city, the towers also represented Late Capitol's newest and most profligate of monuments. Matta-Clark, however, regarded its existance as an anarchitectural opporunity. In a letter to the Graphic Consultant for the Art and Design Program at the World Trade Center, he identified himself as "representative" of the Anarchitecture group and offered his creative services on their behalf. "In our response to highly determined spatial conditions," he wrote, "...we believe we could contribute some positive and interesting insights into the new scale and complexity of the World Trade Center." Matta-Clark's language is purposefully ingratiating, but as implied by his desire to "erase" the buildings, his motivations were by no means utopian. His photograph of the twinned buildings features the monoliths positioned against a skyscape of drifting cumulus. Set against the monumental slabs of the towers, the clouds offer a glimpse, however fleeting, of a space held outside of the buildings--a movement space.

two months before i read these words, in previously referenced Object to be Destroyed, i'd taken a series of shots of wtc for the competition i was working on. early march pictures. a lot of what we needed the pictures for were purely formal: a vertical band made horizontal on our building. the extension of new media art space was infinitely horizontal because of telecommunications; therefore, we were going to show wtc on its side (anyone who followed the moma competition or any of a glut of new york architect proposals from the last 15 years will know that this move is highly common). however, the pictures i found myself taking oscillated between the documentary ones i needed for the competition image and the ones that use the large graphic power of the wtc complex buildings as an equivalent field to the sky, creating uncertainty between sky and man-made object.

the following is from "Mies van der Rohe's Paradoxical Symmetries," an essay by Robin Evans, 1990. his implicit critique of contemporary 'distraction' in works of art resonates with me, and in my mind belongs here in notes related to the symmetrical power (equally productive and destructive) of infrastructure. indeed, these ideas of infrastructure make useless distinctions of beautiful and not-beautiful, whether something as brutal as two monolithic towers were works of art. indeed, the works referenced above begin to map new terms for producing things, transcending previous art or architectural historical interpretations.

Alberti thought it prudent to build beautiful buildings, because beauty preserves things from assault. He asks, 'Can any Building be made so strong by all the Contrivance of Art, as to be safe from Violence and Force?' and he answers that it can, since 'Beauty will have such an effect even upon an enraged Enemy, that it will disarm his Anger, and prevent him from offering it any Injury: Insomuch that I will be bold to say, that there can be no greater Security to any Work against Violence and Injury, than Beauty and Dignity.' Beauty turns vulnerability into impregnability, and it is easy to see from this example that the beauty and dignity of buildings was the same kind of beauty and dignity that women were supposed to have, and probably for much the same reason. Alberti implies that an army regards a monument like a man regards a woman, and not much separates Alberti's views on the subject from those of Jean-Paul Sartre five hundred years later. In The Psychology of Imagination Sartre explains how beauty puts things out of reach, prompting feelings of 'sad disinterest'. 'It is in this sense that we may say that great beauty in a woman kills the desire for her...To desire her we must forget she is beautiful, because desire is a plunge into the heart of existence, into what is most contingent and absurd.'

Although the terms attractive and beautiful are considered almost synonymous, beauty, as described by Alberti and Sartre, is not attractive; it is, to coin a word 'distractive'. The kind of beauty that dominates Western consciousness quells desire for a thing by diverting attention from the thing's uses (or abuse) to its appearance...

From what is Mies' architecture distracting us? The question is almost meaningless. The abstraction, the silence, the vacancy of the pavilion makes it hard to determine what has been removed. Isn't this the point? If we could easily tell, then the effort of escape would have been worthless.

i would also like to stream about some possibilities; that this critique of 'distractive' can be used as a critique of my notes here, and i'm comfortable with that; that the two giants now destroyed were not beautiful in the conventional sense, but sublime, forces of second nature (urbanization) that always attract attention to themselves; their removal from the skyline a removal of a piece of the sky that had been located in lower manhattan; that their symbolic power as interpreted by the people who knocked them down is completely dwarfed by their power as objects that are at once both abstraction and a perfect material manifestation of that abstraction; that this latter coupling (twins, as in siamese, linked, symmetrical, always in tension) are what i have always called 'beautiful' although i should be more careful in using that word so people will better realize that i'm trying to displace its meaning;

that an attack on them as symbols of american commerce in our consciousness, and the overestimation of the importance of those symbols to us, is the flaw made by the people who conceived of that attack. it's true that american political language still engages in platitudes full of symbolic meanings, despite a consensus by the public of the uselessness of that language (see previous entries regarding language as placeholder). yet beyond these symbolic meanings lies modernity, and in my mind american consciousness has been wrapped around infrastructure as its source of power since the beginning of the twentieth century, if not from the birth of this country and the birth of modernity itself. contemporary western civilization implicity believes in the power of the proper control of those systems to allow free society to happen. an assault on what apparently are symbols of our power, however large and destructive, was also an attack on those not-beautiful objects and systems that will only, ultimately, serve to remind us of that idea of sublime power through creation of sublime abstractions, and allow us to refine, solve, evolve, and continue.

9.13.2001

5:38 PM *
i'm resistant to put down much more than what i did. my hometown newspaper had tried to call me only an hour after the second trade center fell. the words of a close friend, an ardent avoider of most things internet, come back to me: the internet has made us all journalists. a friend is making a documentary film (which i intend to talk about more in subsequent entries) and is stuggling with a pervasive psychology of speaking to the camera in a confessional tone, tropes that are intended to signify but thus repeated do not convey any idea. can i convey one, now? meaning, is it appropriate to write a long essay that was brewing yesterday, spurred by events tuesday? in a parallel but opposite direction, can i simply take notes, make them public, not intend anything?

which may begin by saying i tried to volunteer yesterday; i tried to give blood. L, former marine and constant go-getter, dragged me into action. all i wanted was a hug and a good lunch. but seeing other people, so many other people, so many who had driven from other points in the country, gave me hope. seeing people cheering, lending a heartfelt support to emergency workers on the west side highway, was compelling enough: few streets in manhattan see more of an antagonistic relationship between driver and pedestrian. yesterday, it was the opposite. i also saw that there's a surfeit of good will in this town, accentuated by mild cabin fever, an unusual silence due to no car or air traffic (and no sirens up my way), uneasiness about sporadic bomb threats, bewilderment about whether our president or any of his aides will ever take notes and learn to articulate an original thought.

which has spurred the impulse to sulk yesterday. i had a complete inability to work, due to multiple dead-ends. because my office is off-limits, and my will was gone, and really do archtitects help carry the economy, and them asking for engineers and me saying i'm an architect and them telling me they don't need those, and will any of my deadlines be in place, will my client the trader have any money for my project and my salary when they start up again, is he still alive, and the project that i was preparing for a awards submission is also a tower, and gosh how important is that anyway, when awards are just publicity tools. personal (by which i mean my firm) gain at a time like this? even if my salary may be in jeopardy?

which releases the memory i had when i went to atlanta to see the olympic games in 1996, that because my flight was so late coming in that we were unable to attend a concert that we'd planned on going to, the concert that had been hit by a bomb just about the time that i was getting picked up at the airport. student of the uses of public space that i am, i'd done a competition a few years earlier for the design of atlanta's public spaces for the games, none of which were executed, the public forced to hang out on closed highway interchanges with nowhere to sit. student of uses that i am, i was attentive the next morning when i went to a track and field event at the olympic stadium. the crowd was a record crowd. people from rural areas, suburban areas, people with no urban or public experience at all all said the same thing: no one can scare me from our olympics. united we stand, of course, but that truism began that day, as yesterday, not with the abstraction or some collective determination; rather, coincident decisions by many individuals lead to that abstraction, decisions that say not only are we unafraid, but we are eager to show it.

discussions with friends have brought one of many ideas into being: that my shock, beyond witnessing events, beyond the paralyzing abstraction of inevitability we had constructed before those events had unfolded, beyond that abstraction melding seamlessly into the abstraction of the world trade center towers already inhabited by my mind, that my shock was due to the fact that the tool of the destruction, the commercial passenger jet, derives its symbolic power, or perhaps it's just power, from the same place the towers did. for me, the wtc is a symbol of modernism, jet-age modernism, 60s modernism, democratic utopian modernism, one that includes a probably-mythic reputation that the buildings were designed to withstand a collision from a 707, not because they were a threat, but because the towers were considered to be so tall. (for all i know, all buildings that can be that tall de facto would withstand that kind of impact, just as tilt-up precast concrete panels de facto can support several times the load they need to because lifting them in place puts far greater stresses on them).

their destruction was a reminder, redundant as we've tossed jet-age optimism a long time ago, that the buildings and the jets and the systems that support them do not represent the height of individualist power in a high-tech democracy. instead, a parallel but opposite principle stands true, despite destruction that is both a temporary abherration and the cause of my addlement; these infrastructure/abstractions are our collective power, our might and our togetherness, they are the site and source of our democratic will, even as they lend themselves to great destruction.

9.11.2001

3:19 PM *
watching television after walking 75 blocks home, it feels so distant. i turn from the tv to my computer monitor to not look at it.

i'm scolding myself for being desensitized by an hour of television footage, replaying collapse timelessely. it is not like a movie and i scold myself more than that by saying i saw a plane hit the world trade center today and remembering that i was surprised a second plane came out of the bay and that i had instinctively stepped back from the windows, afraid of a shockwave that would break the windows i was looking through. it only happened once, horribly once. it is not surreal my fellow architects and i knew that without fire suppression systems and help, there was no way the structure was going to survive (structural steel melts after being burned for an hour) and knew exactly how it would fail. you saw several hundred people falling a hundred stories. each of them fell only once.

9.10.2001

11:11 PM *
out of a HEAD you are so tired and the train comes from behind you, exploding into the station, like a film where that started with the train halfway in the station already, zooming by, the chilly september air can make your overworked unwashed face euphoric, deleric, de-dum from the force of atmosphere eddying in front, exploding station's air and fire demolishing the structure around you, never hurting you, the biggest thought you have every night like this twenty hours a day for the last three days and it's monday. coldness like this, pushing on your back, stretching your clothes around you, grasping your arms and legs for a place to hold on, reminds you that there is a lot of fluid on the inside of your skin, moving with a lot of force, the force of will.

forced to stumble off the train in the A.M., taking the shortest path to avoid being run over by overweight middle management that floods the platform, the blue i-beam columns that are liquid with glossy paint deliver your evil twin's second fantasy of walking through the structural member, feeling the iron alloy inside your skin for once, fluid physical approximation of geometric abstraction slicing through your funny shape but the intersection allowed by your mind and only for a second because you outstep those fools and get the hell across the street without getting killed.

9.8.2001

10:58 AM *
my project is going out to bid in nine days. and at the last meeting, 36 hours ago, we changed so many details that much of the drawing set needs to be re-detailed so that a contractor may accurately price it. i called contractors yesterday, many who i have worked with several times before, to see if they were interested in bidding. i'm working overtime this weekend and next, and despite how i usually feel about that, i'm looking forward to it. part of my spring/summer malaise has been induced by the lack of human contact that i associate with construction, that i thrive on, even if it involves conflict.

there are several calculi of value in architectural projects whose variables include the cost of things, what a client considers to be the value of those things in relation to that cost, what the architect considers to be that value, the aesthetic value to both those parties of an object to the character of a project in relation to value and cost (the opinions of the architect and client hardly ever coincide completely. you're lucky if they overlap at all), the character of the market at the time the project goes out to bid (if contractors are busy, they barely look at the bid documents and give you prices that almost always translates into a neat square footage cost, so prices become not what things should cost but what someone will have to pay to get it built), how quickly the client wants to get it done and the effect of that schedule on availability.

we are at the threshold of a project phase known officially as bidding and negotiation, and all of these issues, and countless others (what is the tile in the guest bathroom? can we get a radiant floor in the master bathroom this late in the game? what are the window treatments? how is the stone finished for the kitchen countertop? is the dining table in the contract or not? can someone bend glass like that?) are already visible. many of the issues simply revisit decisions made months ago, to double check that all the parts make sense together. a lot of the project architect's job is to be the embodiment of the project's consistency, to sail through the addling mix of anxiety and uncertainty, to differentiate between questions that are unknown-for-now-but-will-play-out and unknowns-that-can-be-answered-now.

the bid documents to be issued will account for scope of work, that is the size and nature of the project, even though all of the project has not been described in detail. it's a fascinating exercise in approximation, another calculus, and it excites me with its proposition of separating the exact size of the effort from the exact configuration of the material, with the hope that you get close enough to so that the cost of the approximation so nearly approaches the cost of the exact configuration that they are essentially the same.

to just draw everything the way it's going to be before you bid it would simply cause the proejct to extend ad infinitum, with prices continually rising and falling depending on how the building industry is faring, with the client and architect both having new and evolving opinions on colors and assembly details, with the staffing of the project continually plundered by other deadlines in the office. so the deadline puts the project, and the design, up against a limit, in a mathematic sense, one that is an abstraction that is approached but never perfectly reached by the formula's solution.

furthermore, the distance between the abstraction and the approximation allows the searching to continue, if even for only the five weeks we've alloted for bidding and negotiation, and lets me shuffle the lines a little more.

8.31.2001

9:11 PM *
Beer makes you weary
But you need something to get along
As you stare at the flatness
From inside your dark home
Well "not me" you whisper
This isn't where it ends
Your hand holds the bottle
Which has become your last lonely friend

I've lost all hope
But there's hope for you
If not just in the possibility
Of a better next day
If not just in the simple fact
There's no other way

You lie on that couch
And try to dream once more
But your only goal is to sleep
Until the news is over
Outside the leaves are all changing
But you drink to forget
Someone you once met
Stands blocking the bright orange sunset

So open up those curtains
And drink up the daylight
Just by the brightness
Of opening your door wide
'Cause things don't get better
But some people do
There's darkness in this life
But the brighter side we also may view

i used to be so sad. late summer 1993 in saint louis, riding around my honda civic, uncle tupelo on continuous rotation (with a little pharcyde when i was feeling funky), sad and driving all the time. i was in a job i hated but sorely needed, in a small midwestern city that after four years seemed more provincial than the town i left in ohio, and all my dear friends and classmates long graduated and moved away. one of my (still) best friends, sah, i had fought with a while ago and hadn't kept up with for a few years. i had a horrible post-graduation trip to europe with a friend who, after we got back and i dropped her off at her apartment in saint louis, never spoke to me until she came to new york seven years later. one of my (still) best friends tom and i worked on a competition entry, and we fought terribly the entire time, and then he moved away after getting a fullbright. i was alone a lot.

i had no loves save some utterly failed crushes (all previously noted here) that had caused friendships to end and mildly unsuccessful sexual escapades (none previously noted here). i was twenty-two, for the most part a virgin, i had no money; my rent was too high; i had no door or even a third wall to the room i lived in. i hated myself, more than a little, was bewildered in the late-summer stupor that is saint louis august at how i had been left behind, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, wandering a deserted campus on the weekends before the concert would begin. i had no space to draw in, i had no friends to talk about how we were going to reinvent urban live through the reorganization of infrastructure, i had no way to keep my brain from shutting down during what should have been routinely brilliant grant-writing exercises. there were continuous episodes of cigarettes and drunkeness on the delmar loop, usually at cicero's or blueberry hill or the ethiopian place (dazzling reggae on thursdays), and many parties behind the loop at a threesome's house which was like a gay three's company (redundant?), with jack ritter as the homo (already said?) and me seeing one of the gals, and them always trying to get out of me whether i liked boys or girls and me just wanting to finish the damned james bond marathon without getting hit on by gopher (jack) or michelle, who i ended up hurting a lot entirely by accident.

Slicing an onion
bitter milk serration like the warm dreamydrive
of a highway unfolding
and calling me to her hips

i had no idea what love was, except in one sense:
my only love was the road; i was in love with the unfolding highway, darklit by my headlights, always moving in time, always appealing to my senses, always welcoming me by parting both sides around me. i would drive up and down the quiet streets of downtown clayton, explore the plinths and underpasses at 20mph at the darkest hour, unable to sleep, unwilling, done. well not me, you whisper, this isn't where it ends. i can still croon these words as if i had written them: the road kept me going, the act of driving a surrogate continuation of my life at the time.

8.29.2001

9:28 PM *
i'm sorry but the adjustable leg-piece on the decline bench is rusty and i can't gracefuly change it from 5 to 3 while being watched, mister 'black shirt green nylon mesh shorts buzzed salt and pepper and tippie goatee, pushing-50-and-working-it, tan, smooth, and pushing-too-attentive'.

one motion as he stepped into the leg-piece, forcing me for personal space reasons to step back, and saying "i find it easier to face in" and he skillfully clicked the thing into position by pushing with the tops of his knees, and his hips, the motion not obscene but me stunned because it was done with unexpected force, and i had had to step back and straddle the high wide bench, blue vinyl gripping my inner thighs, and me noticing that our crotches were inches apart. he noticed me noticing this, had begged it, and noticed the slight annoyance in my line,

"okaay...".

but as with one who had taken too much from the buffet table, trying to sneak back to his dining table in the rush but instead having his covert action completely exposed, and one who will ignore that he had caused an embarrasing moment but in the process forget the mistake he had just made and make it again, putting another few crudites on top to garnish the overflowing plate, he marshalled ahead while stepping back from the bench.

"that was by way of asking if i could work in with you"

"okay."

i sat back and did my set, slowly, struggling because i was desparately trying not to arch my back (i almost injured myself doing this a couple of weeks ago, so i'm extra careful now) and my annoyance gave way to several thoughts; i had slightly checked him out on the abs mat a few minutes ago, why should i think he would keep his distance; did he transfer his married-man culturally induced (latin) politesse to a smooth and attractive affability during some late-in-life coming out?; was he really pushing 50 or just really gray?; how could he be so hairless?; did daddy need a spot?; is he ever going to spot me?. i was really struggling with the last couple of reps. he just stood off to the side playing with his towel.

he then went to a flat bench across from me and started setting up there. after i'd finished my reps he said "i'm going to work here first; i've got my own toy here to play with."

"O-kay."

8.26.2001

4:02 PM *
if someone told me i'd succumb
if someone said i'd be so dumb
after all the sleepless nights
when i turned on all the lights
i would have hit them

a couple of weeks ago, it clicked, really, in a way that was perfectly part of my emotional state, i didn't have to think about it, really, and i got beyond my emotional attachment to the songs and got to know the person who happened to sing them. mostly through constantly talking about this phenomenon with him. and on the same day i was introduced to the person who wrote this:

no understanding no closure
it is a nemesis
you can't use a bulldozer
to study orchids

where i had more to preoccupy myself with than something i'd projected onto something made. where i should have been starstruck was buried under enthusiasm for the day and my own problems. nice tote, want a drink?

They pass over the really fashionable party, the sort at which the hostess, who could have had all the duchesses in existence, every one of them athirst to be "numbered among the elect," has invited only two or three. And so these hostesses, who do not send a list of their guests to the papers, ignorant or contemptuous of the power that publicity has acquired today, are considered fashionable by the Queen of Spain but are overlooked by the crowd, because the former knows and the latter does not know who they are.

second weekend in a row, in my favorite coffee spot, in the table i always take, where i have always been asked this question: are you reading proust? the guy turned around and chatted with me for a long time. is your architecture becoming a larger strategy, a method, or a sensibility? my astonishment at having been asked such a wonderful question by a stranger was symmetrical to the pleasure i had in answering it. sensibility, of course dear reader, as if i could answer otherwise, my decidedly un-academic response greeted with 'that makes perfect sense'. his dissertation, on the production of the star, the economic structure of theater in the late 19th century, the production of shows in new york for nationwide distribution, was also a precise sythesis. but was currently writing in his journal what a luxury it will be to be sitting here (my seat) in two months after it's submitted and continue reading proust, or anything, for himself, like me. he was writing about me? the disseration only the thesis, the seed of a larger story that is allowed to emerge around it, the real goal, the first book done after you do graduate work. a common inspiration, leading to somewhere else.

The sense of isolation from the workings of a convention which has evolved as a succession of meanings through painting and sculpture in relation to a history of style is characteristic of photo-realism. For there the indexical presence of either the photograph or the body-cast demands that the work be viewed as a deliberate short-circuiting of issues of style. Countermanding the artist's possible formal intervention in creating the work is the overwhelming physical presence of the original object, fixed in this trace of the cast.

rosalind krauss' notes on the indexical nature of 70s art, something also occupying my attention, a perfect extension of several of my own artistic goals. the model is presented, but content is allowed to emerge. or, a way of sidestepping the guilty problem of pleasure of making things, the tiresome need to have it mean something (but different from it having meaning), of using your own voice but not having it be about that, having it be about the city the day the night.

ps all work in this domain is copyright chad the minx.