Uncertain Waters: Beyond a Metropolitan Sublime

Abstract

The demise of the World Trade Towers grotesquely inflated the sublime! Edmund Burke’s inclusion of fear and awe as elements of aesthetics has come to dominate representational canons, but the extreme effect of the 9/11 attacks rendered the concept intolerable while subsequent architectural work seems to have reacted with the proliferation of extreme and often unsettling contortions, vertiginous cantilevers and unbalanced profiles! Standing for the machinations of the previous millennium, upon their extirpation these minimal monoliths became the most potent auspices for the next. Before falling they were extraordinarily blank formally while provoking sectarian rage toward the institutions they stood for - New York, the U.S. and multinational commerce. An improbable history of the violent demise of his buildings plagued their designer as well! Collapse made them true monuments in the funereal sense of the word and profoundly significant as the globe drifts toward dystopia, advantaging plutocracy and distilling resentment in many cultures.